At the end of that May we packed everything up into storage and travelled to Europe for six months, spending most of our time in a small apartment in the area [in Rome] between Monteverde and Trastevere. In January 2012 we arrived in Blacksburg, subletting a student-oriented sprawl apartment only a mile-and-a-half from campus. That was troubling — that an apartment so close to campus was already in the sprawl belt. In March we moved back to a wonderful, sunny, vintage apartment in Evanston so Kate could resume teaching at Northwestern. In January of 2013 we moved back to an apartment right in downtown Blacksburg so I could teach. In March of 2013 my son and I moved back to Chicago temporarily to deal with Kate’s death. Our apartment has many windows, is high up with great views, and is very light.

I am ready to stop moving and settle down for a few years, something Kate and I wanted for a while. I’m now having difficulty finding the kind of apartment I want in Blacksburg for the fall, and this has reinforced for me the value of home ownership. Ronald Ellers, in Uneven Ground, argued that the Appalachian region refused to adopt the urban and metropolitan values of much of the rest of the country. It may be more accurate in Blacksburg’s case to say that the late date of development (post WWII) reflected the sprawling, auto dependent nature of the rest of the country in that period. (I use the heuristic of a city’s population in 1940 to quickly evaluate how much of an urban core there is. Blacksburg: 2100). I see this in microcosm in Blacksburg, where urban residential opportunities are vanishingly small. Ironically, they are in high demand from a robust, urbane segment of the population — university and faculty administrators. Students seem to be very satisfied with the sprawling pattern of development, in contrast to the situation in Ann Arbor Hal Varian described in his macroeconomics textbook. Faculty have bid up the price of centrally-located housing, and for some reason capitalism has not responded by creating more. The alternative seems to be semi-urban housing in subdivisions at the periphery. I don’t entertain these as a serious option.

Location is not negotiable, but a building can be changed. Thus, I’m strongly considering the purchase of what was once small, working class housing, in a central area and altering it to suit. This gives rise to the question, what would I really like to see in a house altered to suit me? Having studied urban systems, housing, planning and architecture historically, I now have to be active rather than reactive; be creative instead of critical. And that will take some time.

A starting list to get me thinking:

1. Walkable and bikeable location to the center of town — not just possible, but relatively enjoyable. This means both location and a relatively dense neighborhood with sidewalks and surrounding buildings with short setbacks. Urban history research has illustrated the problems with segregating at the periphery; my own experience has shown I just don’t want to live that kind of life. I want to be in a city or town and to have it feel like I’m in it — accessible urban amenities increase the use value of the residence and of quality of life.

2. A front porch or some kind of balcony providing a view and a place to lounge and congregate. There’s no point in my mind to a house that is too inward looking — one could just as easily get an apartment if you didn’t want to engage with the world outside.

3. High ceilings to give a lighter, airy feeling, and to make any interior square footage feel larger. Particularly in a smaller, denser area, it’s costly and wasteful to spread out. Having less square footage, you can make that floor area feel larger and rooms feel more spacious with a higher ceiling. With a higher ceiling you can have larger windows, allowing more interior light.

To be continued…

4. Large windows (enabled by higher ceilings) will let in more light to create a brighter, more pleasant interior environment. In addition, taller windows will let light farther into interior space (because it light comes from an upper source and travels downwards [this is why it's kind of idiotic to use roll shades]).

My wife took her last breath on Saturday night, March 23rd, and her remains were cremated after her funeral this past Friday night.  Her ashes (and mine, eventually) will be buried in her maternal grandmother's family plot in rural Ontario.

After the unimaginable diagnosis last fall, Kate seemed to be improving in November and December.  After a summer and fall of not being able to lie down in our bed, she was able to fall asleep in my arms and recover from the chemotherapy for 4 or 6 or 8 hours.  I believed that my amazing wife was going to be able to add cancer survivor to the long list of plaudits and achievements.  To me, it seemed no less possible than becoming a national class athlete or a world class scholar or an unbelievably great mother.  She could do it.  She was the most capable person I've ever met — because of the force of her will.  She attacked every major challenge in the same way, immersing herself in it and giving her all, whether rowing or teaching or research or child rearing or fighting cancer.

But she couldn't.  She didn't get better.  Nothing really helped the cancer that had spread to her bones — the only thing that had any effect was the radiation she hated so much, and that was only temporary relief.  Even by the time we moved to Virginia she was starting to experience anemia from the cancer and the return of pain in her neck and back.  When we got back from her 2-week stay in the hospital, she was so thin she looked like the old films of concentration camp survivors.

At every stage I thought we would have more time.  In December I thought we would have years.  A month ago I thought we would have months.  The last week I thought we would have weeks.  The last day I thought we would have days.  It just does not seem possible — even now, the woman who was so vital, so forceful, so firm, so tender cannot possibly be gone.  As I look at the photo I took of her at 32 from the summer we moved from Ann Arbor to Evanston, part of me thinks I must be able to find her back in the yard beside her house at 214 West Ann Street, smiling at me and our future.

This woman was amazing and I still can't believe she fell for me.  I had a sense early on that she could open up the world for me and she was certainly part of the class movement I was feeling a few years back.  So what are some of those amazing experiences she made possible?

1. The sun setting on Marrakech, Morocco after a day of bargaining in the market.
2. The Paris cafe.
3. Fatherhood.
4. Everything in Italy.
5. My career, now based in Virginia, enabled by her total support.

She was the one with the ideas and who provided the direction in our relationship.  Now I've got to figure out who I am without her.  After every decision and every action for the last 8 years was made with Kate and our partnership in mind, I've got to face each decision and each day with only my own feeble mind as a resource.  And I've got to figure out how all the old relationships will work without her.  And it's pretty terrifying — I need her now more than ever.  Thank God Ernest is too young to understand.  

As a 20th century historian, and an urban historian in particular, I have run up against its limitations several times, which are really the limitations of the U.S. Census. The Census Bureau created the Census Tract framework and began implementing it in New York City with the 1900 census (augmenting and really replacing the Enumeration District). In 1910 it expanded to several other, slightly smaller cities and kept expanding to new cities every ten years. During the course of my masters thesis research on Ann Arbor, I was frustrated by the lack of Census Tract data before 1960 — the same goes for Berkeley in my book project.

In the course of my research on Austin, Texas, in the 1930s and 1940s, I realized that new digital methods and Census privacy law would allow me to break out of those limitations. Austin was tracted by the Census in 1940, but not in 1930. I realized that, because the 1930 manuscript Census — the individual-level records — are publicly available, I could plug them into 1940 Census Tracts and push the boundaries of the Census back in time. Here is how:

This spurred me to action. I have always been very happy to find an easily accessible text/HTML version of the Port Huron Statement right here for the last 10 years or so, and I figured the historians of the world could use the same for the underwriting manual. As an assignment in my undergrad Digital History course I had students clean up the OCR’ed pdfs of the manual, then use an HTML editor to make the Web version look more or less like the book, but without the artifacts of the printed book, like page headers or forced text wrap.

Feel free to read or link or download the April 1936 version of the underwriting manual here.

An increasing number of historians are creating or accumulating digital archives and sources as part of their research. I think it’s incumbent on us to put all the stuff we can out on the web — the public domain stuff is a no-brainer and I think a good bit can be shared under fair use (e.g. with some interpretation). You don’t have to make a wiz-bang site to make materials available (though I recommend just about everyone develop their own professional/personal site). Maybe just a simple Omeka installation can do the trick.

Several historians chimed in with their opinions and evaluations at film’s release. Kate Masur, a historian of slavery race and Washington, D.C., critiqued the film’s portrayal of African Americans as passive and bland characters waiting for emancipation to be handed to them — even when the actual figures portrayed worked to support escaped slaves and were leaders of the District’s black community. Notably, she emphasizes,

It is a well-known pastime of historians to quibble with Hollywood over details. Here, however, the issue is not factual accuracy but interpretive choice. A stronger African-American presence, even at the margins of Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” would have suggested that another dynamic of emancipation was occurring just outside the frame — a world of black political debate, of civic engagement and of monumental effort for the liberation of body and spirit.

This is true — “fact-checking” films is a cottage industry for historians great and small. But Masur makes another important point — that the way stories are told is important to how we respond to them. Whether White House servant Keckley had a poignant exchange with Lincoln (or whether her costume in the film was accurate) is really less important than her overall portrayal — whether the spirit of her character was right and represented her (and other African Americans’) own efforts to oppose slavery.

Historian Eric Foner basically validates DDL’s version of Lincoln but makes a similar point about interpretation — the audience is left with the impression that Lincoln was the sole force for passage of the 13th Amendment, rather than working within a broad set of movements and forces set against slavery (and, at times, stalling them). In essence, we see too much of the Washington inside game.

Timothy Burke responds to Foner’s critique and puts the issue as really a tension between accuracy and narrative. In service of narrative, screenwriter Tony Kushner made some interpretive choices that ring hollow for historians, but work to make a more watchable film.

If we’re going to have that argument through and around cinema, we would be wise to always avoid scolding a film for inaccuracy. Finger-wagging is a death trap for public intellectuals: it keeps us from appreciating the complexity of how a film or other cultural work can have meaning for its audiences, and it casts us outside and above the world of ordinary spectatorship. More importantly, most historians know better than to claim there’s a linear relationship between “accuracy” and “critical thought”, the latter being what most historians would like to see as the outcome of reading or learning about the past from a trustworthy source.

This is a useful point, but a bit irrelevant to Masur and Foner’s kinds of points, that the content of historical films is worth debating and evaluating. Burke’s point is really more about the meaning of films, regardless of the accuracy of its historical content — the cultural historian’s assertion of the film as a historical fact or object, or machine for creating historical memory in its own right. There is a similar kind of debate over perspectives in public history (or reception, in classics, for example).

But my critique of the film, and de facto response to Burke, is that even taking the film on its own terms, it exhibits key failings. [Let's just stipulate that the anecdoting and speechifying was out of control and it seemed like Kushner was trying to outdo Aaron Sorkin's Jed Bartlett for erudite but down home wit. I mean, Jesus, did his dictation of a telegram have to be a grand speech? And his joke of a one-paragraph speech at the flag-raising to seem totally clever?] Lincoln was criticized by Radical Republicans (and others) for moving too slowly on emancipation, but Kushner ultimately redeems Lincoln’s caution. The president was wrestling with the moral and legal issues and, even when he made up his own mind, he had a keen sense of the politics — he was not about to move before the issue was ready to pass. So he waited for the lame duck session, faced down criticism from left and right, cajoled and log rolled Congressmen, and ultimately won the day. This is the essence of Lincoln’s heroic actions — caution, prudence, and conviction, but agency bounded by the limits of the political system of his time.

Congressmen are given no such consideration or charitable interpretation, though Lincoln himself had served in the lower House. Nearly every Congressman is presented as a racial reactionary or supremely self-interested — each choice is made simply on personal grounds revealing either nobility or lack of character. The lens of political history, I think, helps us understand that each of those Congressmen were going through their own deliberations and were pulled by a multiplicity of changing forces, personally, and within their district, just as Lincoln was facing. Sure, the 20 Democrats may have been lame ducks not running for re-election, but were they really free of political concerns? What if they were to face off in an election rematch 2 years later? Or were hoping for a non-patronage position in their district from a business leader? Or what if they had a law firm or some other professional enterprise that required staying within the Democratic mainstream in their district? We know none of this, though it must be true for several of the men, and the point is belabored when the audience considers Lincoln’s process (to his ultimate benefit). Fernando Wood, one of the nastiest opponents of the amendment in the film, fit this very description. A New York City machine Democrat, he lost in 1864, but ran again in 1866 and won — we might just as well blame the machine Democrats of New York City for his opposition, but again, we would have no idea that they might be a consideration in this personal, moral question.

Thus, the film uses two different lenses for different politicians, one sensitive for examining Lincoln, the other uncharitable and warped for examining the Congressmen. Though Kushner put words in their mouths and gave the politicians some agency, he did it so sloppily and lazily that I think he did violence to them. In that sense, I echo Kate Masur’s point rather than Eric Foner’s — it’s not that Kushner and Spielberg chose to foreground one perspective at the expense of another, it’s that they actually misrepresented a set of characters by violating their own logic of representation within the film. And this is the key issue historians should have with the film.

Rank of VA Senators based on DW-NOMINATE data. 1=most liberal/Democratic, 100=most conservative/Republican

While Virginia had very Democratic Senators in the first part of the century, from the election of Harry Byrd, the state’s Senate Delegation became much more conservative, though for most of the 20th century the seats remained Democratic. Only recently, with the election of Chuck Robb (electorally) and the shift of the Northern Virginia suburbs (demographically), did the Senate seat holders occupy less partisan positions.

Based on DW-NOMINATE Scores (voteview.com). 1=most liberal/Democratic; 435=most conservative/Republican.

Working with some DW-NOMINATE data, I plotted the ideological rank of the Congressional Representative for VA-9, where Blacksburg and Virginia Tech are. We can see that the current representative, Morgan Griffith, is the most conservative representative of the district since before World War I. This is an illustration of the DW-NOMINATE data and one of the first steps in my Mapping Congress digital history project. Based on roll call votes, they assess a partisan polarization rating from -1 to 1 along two dimensions/axes. That rating is for a politician’s whole career. So this rank might change because the Congress around him changes (these are all men in VA-9), however, it is a good indication of how the election of an individual can make a dramatic change in the district’s representation in Congress — candidates are not fighting over the middle ground in VA-9 even though it is one that has swung between parties several times over the last century.

The election of Morgan Griffith in 2010 shifted the seat 150 seats to the right, the second largest shift of the last century (the single term of Joseph Shaffer in the 1928 election was a greater shift and immediately swung back).

See also this great xkcd info graphic based on DW-NOMINATE data.

On these pages I supply the files you’ll need and they are oriented towards historians, which is a key distinction from most ArcGIS tutorials aimed at geographers and environmental science users.

The last few years that point has been broadly made several times and in several different ways, much more than it had when I started researching the University of California and the Master Plan during my graduate work. But one thing that I think is still under appreciated is the state’s use of violence and force against students. I have read numerous accounts of students and faculty getting teargassed whether they were involved in protests or not, and it was quite striking to me — and I emphasize this when the topic comes up in classes — when I realized that in the most heated days, the most straitlaced students, those going to classes and keeping with the most conservative traditions of education, were getting gassed even in the classrooms because the gas attacks was so widespread and severe.

Frank Newman, the dean of the law school (later state Supreme Court justice) includes an account in his oral history for Berkeley here.

N:[...]Well, Vasak was fascinated by all this, and we were concerned with the human rights implications, specifically those affecting civil liberties. So he and I did a lot of poking around. He taught me how to use a wet handkerchief for tear gas. On one occasion he and I, after running with one of the mobs, found ourselves all alone, in one comer of the big lower plaza of the student center; and a cop came up and fired tear gas at us.
H: At you?
N: Yes. And we were dressed nicely; we were always careful to do that so we would be segregated; and I learned to handle tear gas.¹