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For my last blog post I figured I would save it for the end of the semester to comment on things that I felt either stuck with me or opened my eyes to different approaches on history. I think Cronon was a perfect piece for the end of the semester as Professor Shrout explained to Wells that Cronon gave us an authoritative perspective on historical writing and narrative just as we were filled with months of thoughts and opinions. I’m not sure I’m going to have the same takeaway as Wells did, coming to have a greater appreciation for historical narrative and storytelling, but I did takeaway something I think will give me a different perspective on the last year of my journey as a history major as well as my major thesis coming up next semester.
Cronon’s work and our subsequent class discussion today made me realize that regardless of the sources I use, the historical facts in play, or previous scholarship on the topic, I alone can create my story. In essence, we have all the tools in front of us to shape history in whatever manner to provide us with the message we want to send to our audience. Whether that means picking the starting and stopping points, the type of primary sources, the certain perspective of the subject, the different kinds of voices, or even the moral questions you want to ask or answer; the story you create is entirely up to you. Many of us, I would assume, feel the need that we have to take stories of the past and comment on them now to make our point, however; I think we need to expand our commentary as young historians and realize that we can create new stories that explain the history we want told and ask the questions we want to be answered. I just hope this epiphany is in time to make my mark on history. Also, CT tremendous closure to the course. Swanson, out.
Surprisingly unexpected, this narrative by Cronin does not fit his own definition of a narrative. I don’t care about the Dust Bowl now more than prior to reading his essay. Cronin did, however, provide a compelling account of the scholarship attributed to the Dust Bowl. Within this account, Cronin formulates and sheds light on arguments made regarding this period as well as history as a whole. He uses these varying accounts about the same traumatic event ask an age-old historical question, “how [do] two competent authors looking at identical materials drawn from the same past reach such divergent conclusions?” He further emphasizes that their conclusions are different because the stories they tell are different. I disagree with Cronin’s assertion that this is difficult to comprehend. Everyone obtains different biases from their varying experiences. As Cronin later explains, historians pick and choose the information they use to prove their point. In Cronin’s words, narratives “inevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others.” He eventually comes to these conclusions, but it takes him too long to arrive there in my humble opinion.
Cronin does convince me that the Dust Bowl can be categorized as a Gilded Age Disaster. Previously I thought the Gilded Age ended when the progressive era began prior to World War 1. The Dust Bowl showed that humans need to recognize and accept the limits of nature rather than strive to overcome them. The failure of this struggle epitomizes the Gilded Age. Consistently humans try to “cheat the system” by over-producing, over-working, and over-consuming all while negating common sense for safety and proper production methods.
I enjoyed Cronin’s tie in with the political culture of the period. The propaganda film that we watched by Pare Lorentz emphasized the “naturalness” of the Dust Bowl and the benefit of the government. Characterizing the environmental conditions as “inevitable” truly takes blame away from the farmers and the government. Lorentz’s film, in Cronin’s words, conveys how government interfusion of “technology, education, cooperation, and state power would…avert tragedy.” Cronin pits Lorentz’s work against the more recent scholarship of Paul Bonnifield that views the government intervention as detrimental to the recovery process. Bonnifield claims that it was “the people who lived there not government scientists, who invented new land-use practices that solved earlier problems.” I think there’s a happy medium between these two conclusions. The government scientists had many more resources at their disposal and were able to work in a less eminent environment while the farmers obtained the hands on experience.
I’m going to agree with Wells here, sorry Dan. I think the emotionless, strictly factual based history does very little to advance our society. Often we write history and remember history to effect (or affect? I’ll never know) our future. Without the emotional pull, history is dry and almost meaningless. It’s the individual stories and the sympathetic nature humans crave that brings history alive and establishes its meaning. There’s a huge difference in reading how the Nazis in WWII used killing squads to eradicate Jews from Poland killing thousands of men, women, and children; and reading a specific story of one of these families where one member survived (boy, that escalated quickly). I think we read facts or figures and say, “wow, that’s a lot of people. That’s terrible.” But when we can associate the facts with much more intricate detail that we can sympathize with (a family’s struggles, for example), then history becomes much more meaningful.
And I leave you all with this:
After reading William Cronon’s “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” from 1992, I found it to be one of the best pieces of work we have read all semester regardless of topic or interest in subject. Even though it is 22 years old now, Cronon’s work is brilliant and a must read for all historians, whether studying environmental history or not. Some of the insight and struggles Cronon alerts to in his narrative to answer the overarching question of “where did these stories come from,” are vital to historical scholarship work in general and certainly hit home with our projects and the stage we are in currently. When I first began to read it I thought it was going to be very dense and theoretical, however; once I really got into it, Cronon, in my opinion, came off as brilliant and well-crafted in his analysis.
Cronon essentially simplifies the argument to explain how our construction of narrative deeply matters. He describes how we take a group of events or facts and then construct them in different ways to make new meanings of the past, yet in doing so we choose our own narrative by deciding what events or facts we use and also the ones we leave out. Interestingly, it ends up creating a sort of narrative arc where the story has its ups and downs but usually ends up in two categories; either a progressive story or a declensionist one. In my brief two years as a history major, I haven’t necessarily thought of historical narrative this way but it makes sense and Cronon does a very good job and detailing how it happens. To expand on his thesis explaining these two end results, Cronon uses the comparison between Paul Bonnifield’s and Donald Worster’s works on the Dust Bowl. Both studied essentially the same works, used the same sources, had the same framework but concluded to completely different things: natural vs. human disaster in the Dust Bowl; human triumph vs. human failure. That’s the cool thing about history; you can view the exact same thing as someone else but come up with a totally different analysis. In this case, Cronon advocates the progressive route or the declensionist one. The two authors ended up with completely different stories of the Great Plains where one described human triumph and courage while the other described human failure and the faults of capitalism. This simply point by Cronon was pieced together brightly and made for a thesis that really stuck.
Along with that, Cronon made another point that I thought was important; the narrative trajectory matters. He talks about the influence of the beginning, middle and end of a narrative and how the stop and start points completely shape the narrative and the meaning it creates. For example, if you stop a story in 1950 rather than 2000, the story takes on a different narrative and tells a different story. It was interesting how he clarified that with the trajectory of your story, you ultimately shape the narrative and the result of your work. Similarly, Sherwood mentions that the diversity of this narrative is what makes it history and what leads it into the future. Like Cronon, he explains that limiting the narrative instead of diversifying it hurts history and storytelling. Overall, a must read scholarship for historians.
So an interesting The Plow That Broke the Plains is, a rather boring short documentary film but some interesting takeaways and phrases. Shot in 1936, this film documents what happened in the Great Plains region of the Midwest when new agricultural farming eventually led to the Dust Bowl. It was written and directed by Pare Lorentz with some interesting music selections from Virgil Thomson. I will come back in a little to the music subject but first some commentary on the effectiveness and overall message of the film. Overall, it seems to succeed in delivering the message of the seriousness of the problem caused in the Great Plains by the misuse of land. Using pictures and film of the Plains, the classic documentary explains the over-cultivation and how mixed with the drought brought about the Dust Bowl throughout the Midwest. To understand a little better you can read Price’s blog post on the readings for class. He explains what the film shows through images in which profit maximization, Plains capitalism and Gilded Age failures mixed with the Midwest drought directly led to the Dust Bowl. But, do not think so fast; don’t worry folks- the US government is on the scene to help! Much criticism seems to mention the poetic manner in which Lorentz’s documentary style uniquely captures the essence of the New Deal 30’s.
There were some cool phrases and scenes I thought deserved just to be thrown out there as sort of funny and interesting: “Pioneer came to the Plains,” “Make way for the plowman,” The great day was coming… day of profits,” and the scene where there is a back and forth comparison between the US battle tanks in combat and the new plow machines rolling over the lands of the Midwest.
However, in my opinion the most influential subject to mention was the music. In my mind, the music was rather amusing and clichéd. Supposedly, a famous film score, Virgil Thomson seems to constantly have upbeat, popular cliché songs playing in the background with scenes of the problems depleting the Great Plains are playing in the background. I’m assuming that at that time getting a sound crew to travel all across the plains to shoot people talking and sounds of the lands was rather expensive or impossible so Thomson made the score himself. It is pretty funny to listen to the numerous folk songs and religious sounds playing to the pictures of dry lands.
Back in February, we analyzed how Frederick J. Turner and William Cronon viewed the expansion of the American West as an effort of manifest capitalism, as well as destiny. As Emily noted, they presented the idea that the development of nature was inexorably a consequence of commerce and economics. To Clayton Koppes, the Dust Bowl provides no exception. In Dusty Volumes, his review of works by Donald Worster and Paul Bonnifield, Koppes strongly identifies with the argument that the Dust Bowl was an ecological consequence to an economic trend: Gilded Age speculation and profit maximization. While dismissing Bonnifield’s defense of agrarian capitalism as “xenophobic boosterism”, Koppes praises Worster’s indictment of the capitalist agricultural mindset as explaining the environmental origins of the Dust Bowl. (539)
Dusty Volumes is a short review of two detailed books concerning the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as well as the possible economic causes of the great drought. Therefore, one would be very rushed to use it as a substantial source of disaster analysis. Nonetheless, Koppes seems to use the book review as a platform to voice his own conclusion on the subject. He strongly defends Worster’s “three maxims” of agricultural capitalism, which argue that the pursuit of profits and prosperity led inevitably to acceptance of environmental consequences in the West. (536) Worster and Koppes agree that the New Deal programs of subsidies and conservation provided some relief to troubled farmers, but little or no reform to the destructive capitalist system that incentivized the endless cultivation of farmland. Koppes also utilized the opportunity to bash the ideologically opposite position to Worster presented by Paul Bonnifield. Unlike Worster, Bonnifield argues that farmers’ limited access to technology and economies of scale led to unsustainable farming techniques and the onset of the Dust Bowl by the 1930s. Of course, Koppes dismisses the idea of ‘bigger capitalism’ as the proposal for more tenable farming practices.
While Koppes’ review succinctly outlines his views on Plains capitalism, his evidential base is sorely lacking. His indictment of boosterism and expansionary economics fails to connect policy with environmental consequences. Overirrigation of water sources and overuse of soil (as my research also investigates) certainly can have dangerous environmental impacts, but Koppes fails to identify any specific policy of wrongdoing. Was it the fault of the Reclamation Bureau or the Department of the Interior? Or was it the Gilded Age industrialists who manipulated agricultural prices with their control of the railroads? Koppes fails to go beyond blaming the farmers themselves for the overproduction of crops and misuse of the farmland. After all, the farmers themselves did not choose to be capitalists- they had to respond to market forces in order to survive on the Plains. As a result, Koppes’ assignment of blame to farmers and their practices for the Dust Bowl disaster is an unjustifiable, if not dangerous, conclusion to make.
So, in the introduction of Judith Walzer Leavitt’s work on Mary Mallon and the public’s perception of her legacy and the impact her story continues to have on public health, she explores the meanings of Mary Mallon’s experiences early in the twentieth century and examines how American society, as a nation and as individuals, has approached taking away the liberty of someone who is sick or a carrier of sickness in the name of protecting the public’s health. (Typhoid Mary, 3) By examining the life of Mary Mallon, the situation she was put in, how officials handled it and the resulting influence her case had on the American public, Judith Leavitt ends up poses a very interesting question that I myself haven’t really considered and don’t necessarily have an answer to. She asks how we have weighted the two values of health and liberty when they come into conflict and address what might be at risk in the balancing. (4)
The issue at hand is the value Americans place on individual liberty and the public health of its citizens. We can all understand the extremely high priority Americans put on our individual freedom from our constitution and the laws that reflect it, however, how high is the value we put on public health? We certainly do not agree with most situations that deprive us of our liberty but this issue is immediately confronted in situations that involve public health and safety. Our society demands the government to always protect our liberty but does it come before our public health? Mary Mallon’s situation is a great case study and should start some serious class discussion with this question. Which one is valued more? Can they be interchangeable? Do we sacrifice the liberty of one to save the whole or does that ruin the constitutional system we created? Does the difference in how people value the human life matter? Leavitt opens the door to a whole bunch of debate without answering the question because she doesn’t even know when the line should be crossed or where. The answer is not black and white. This question deems a very blurry grey line which is perfect for our class discussion. Is the health of our citizens overshadowing the beliefs we built our country on? John Marsh in his blog post also brings up a good point to consider, he wrote, “It informs an understanding of Gilded Age culture’s conduciveness to disaster. More specifically, the isolation of Mary Mallon, if considered a disaster, demonstrates the pitfalls of the Gilded Age belief in the infallibility of science, or scientific method, to solve any problem.” This must all be put in the discussion. Does our unwavering belief in science effect how we decipher the value of human life?
In the past few weeks, I have worked to centralize the central topic of my proposal. My original idea was to analyze the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in the Santa Clarita Valley in Southern California within the context of the California Water Wars of the early twentieth century. However, as my research advanced, I decided to focus my topic on the Water Wars themselves as a disaster, analyzing how urbanization and city politics affected the irrigation of water sources in the Los Angeles area. The Water Wars, which began over a hundred years ago, continue to influence water politics in Southern California, creating animosity between urban and rural interests. I hope to focus my proposal on how farmers and ranchers, who had been largely starved of water for their agriculture and animals, responded (both legally and illegally) to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s continued attempts to syphon water from the Owens Valley, particularly in the 1920s. I have found great secondary sources that researched how rural communities mobilized to combat the LADWP officials, both in the courts and in the countryside. I continue to look for primary sources that can both detail how the urbanization of Los Angeles affected the distribution of water to farms and ranches, as well as how LADWP officials justified their expanded allocation of resources. On the whole, I hope to use Los Angeles as a case study of how unsustainable urban development can lead to cities being drains on resources and malignant forces on the environment as well as surrounding communities.
Here’s a link to the full piece, which more fully explores earthquake preparedness.
After class I began to do a little digging into our comments on why people reenact the Titanic, why people buy some of the items recovered from the ship wreck, and reversely the reactions towards these reenactments and purchases of those who have been truly affected by the Titanic. Most of us in class talked about the reenactments and all the hype still surrounding the Titanic at people marveling over its pop culture significance or the lure of tragedy or even the need to remember a historical event that changed the world; all these points are valid as well as the argument that people with money just love to buy things that represent status, wealth and history. So from there I figured I would check into the latest auctions that have been held to sell items found from the lost ship and see what answers that may bring. After looking into a 100 year anniversary auction from 2012 and the big auction coming up this month, I found a few things that I felt deserved to be posted about.
Before I go on, I have to comment on the post professor Shrout put up of Jack Dawson because the Halifax gravesite where many who died at sea are buried is still a sore subject for many whom live in the maritime city on Canada’s eastern coast; the closest major port to the wreck. In the CBS News article in 2012 by Ben Tracey, he speaks to this sadness and explains that the connection to the Titanic for Halifax is much more personal. It reads, “209 bodies of the victims were recovered and brought back to the city. 150 were buried in cemeteries around town. Each headstone shares the same infamous date.” He talks to a woman named Blair Beed whose grandfather worked the funeral home where the bodies of the Titanic where identified and she claims, “When you walk among the graves and stand in front of the grave of a housewife and listing the four children who were lost in the sinking with her, I think that’s the real story.” (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/upcoming-auction-of-titanic-items-sparks-debate/) We may tend to forget as a society, when the popular culture aspect surrounds the Titanic story as it did when the film came out, that the real stories are the ones that will never be told. As CT mentioned in class, these stories will likely never be uncovered and that is the true tragedy behind the sinking of the ship.
The other thing I came across that I thought should be shared appeared 4 days ago in an article from the Mail Online by Matt Blake and Sophie Jane Evans called “’Unthinkable’: The chilling hand-drawn building plan used to explain how Titanic met its fate one of hundreds of artifacts to go under the hammer.” Now read that title again. A hand-drawn building plan of how and why the ship sunk? This is an incredible piece of history and vital to piecing the story of the Titanic together that will be put up for auction along with 239 others items from the ship in this month’s RR Auction in Boston. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2597005/Will-write-later-sail-Hundreds-Titanic-artifacts-auction-including-final-postcard-sent-heroic-radio-officer-worked-tirelessly-send-wireless-distress-messages-ship-sank.html) This particular item I thought would be interested to put up on the blog as it is a hand-drawn building plan prepared exclusively for official British enquiry with illustrations showing why the Titanic sank after hitting the iceberg. Something pretty cool, maybe we should bid!