Recent Acquisitions

The books, they do accumulate. Recent additions:

Actual books:
Howe, Daniel Walker (2007) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Oxford University Press. Bought to feed my obsession with the Finger Lakes area in the mid-nineteenth century (by going big picture). The title suggests a generalists approach, but the damn thing is over 900 pages. I've not read it cover-to-cover yet, but it's been super handy for dipping-in for references to obscure things like the establishment of the telegraph and the etymology of snail mail.

Sappol, Michael (2002) A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton University Press. Borrowed it twice from inter-library loan, finally had to get my own copy. Bioethics, revolutions in medicine, identity, anatomy, and popular fiction... all in here. If you're interested in what the living are doing in the nineteenth century, you should check out their relationships with the dead. Looking forward to reading it again (and having it handy when I need to cite it...)

Saitta, Dean (2007) The Archaeology of Collective Action. University Press of Florida. According to the book cover, it includes archaeology of protests, labor strikes, and slave uprisings. Looking forward to reading it.

Voss, Barbara L. and Eleanor Conlin Casella (2012) The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects. Cambridge University Press. This will probably be the first of this batch that I read; I find both Voss' and Casella's work fascinating. Lots of new things to read about in this edited volume that offers exactly what the title describes.

Kindle Accumulations:
The Hunger Games series. I liked it. Haven't seen the movie, but liked the books.

One of Robyn Hobb's Liveship Traders series (can't recall which off the top of my head).

Yep, I read fantasy/sci-fi when not reading archaeology. Don't judge.

Etymology of Snail Mail: Like, way older than 1983...

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives 1983 as the first use of "snail mail" to reference letters written on paper delivered by the post office vs. electronic communication.

They missed the mark by almost 140 years...

The Philadelphia North American [of January 15, 1846] welcomed the telegraph with the pronouncement: "The markets will no longer be dependent upon snail paced mails." (Howe 2007: 695)

Gnarly.


Reference:
Howe, Daniel Walker (2007) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Oxford University Press.

Baby Leasing

I stumbled across this doing research for something else. While I should not be writing blog posts but hauling ass on this last big paper due for this semester's coursework, I couldn't not share this. History is so far from boring that it makes my head want to explode:

The Letter. (Link to Source, Cornell University)

A 1929 letter, from the Superintendent of the Troy Orphan Asylum* (Troy, New York) to the Director of Cornell University (yep, that one) agreeing to lease infants to Cornell's home economics "practice houses." And asking please for 24 hours notice before Cornell comes to pick them up. Holy shit, people... when I was in school, it was dolls, or eggs, or, you know, seedlings. Real babies? Hard core. And very, very disturbing. There's something rotten at the core of domesticity...

* The masthead on the letter for the Troy Asylum reads both: "For children under sixteen years of age, except juvenile delinquents, truants, and mental defectives, as required by law" and "The race marches forward on the feet of little children." I'm not even going to touch these, except to copy them down.

For Your Viewing Pleasure

I'm working, I swear. Besides, these are both relevant-ish to my research. Yep, that's the story.

1. Gaga's Bad Romance a la 1919/1920 and women's suffrage. Much fun, appropriately white. (Things I Learned This Year include the effects of Jim Crow, including on voting access for non-whites. As much as I celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment, I've had to adjust my thinking, a lot. This is important stuff; why is it not part of the dominant women's rights narrative? Not entirely a rhetorical question.)





2. Angela Davis addressing students at the University of Maryland. Why we need to stop thinking exceptionalism and start thinking systemic. She speaks largely about race, but her points are equally valid for domestic violence, gun violence, hate crimes. These are not random acts.

End of Semester

I am officially out of Grading Jail for this semester (hallelujah). I may have some probation (straggling assignments), but my main sentence is over. It was a lab course; there was a shit-ton of grading.

The semester has a ways to go yet, but now it's Assignment Jail. For school: one presentation, one final exam, one short summary paper/bibliography, one substantial term paper, and a 5-day take-home preliminary exam. For not-school: one paper draft (overdue!) for pre-peer-review-review, one conference paper draft, some conference session wrangling. All with various due dates, from immediately to later, but all needs to be done by May 26.