See what happens when you wait until the last minute?

Somewhere there is a history teacher I’d like to strangle, or at least give her a good shake.

At work today I had a high school kid who brought in the list of books she had to choose from to read over the summer. Of course, they were all checked out. Lesson one: don’t wait until the last minute! The only book that was available was this massive biography of Teddy Roosevelt, and the look on her face when I pulled that one off the shelf was priceless. No, actually it was a pained look: ohmigod, I gotta read that?

I just have to ask that teacher what her goal was with this assignment, because if it was to teach the kids not to procrastinate or else you’ll end up with some godawful chunk of a book, then she gets an A+ from me. But if she ever wants these kids to even remotely appreciate, let alone like history, then that transaction right there was a total failure.

I will say from experience that sometimes the best books are the fattest, and skinny books can be a real bear. But not always. And honestly, if it was me I would probably make the same face this girl did; of course, I wouldn’t have waited until that was the only choice.

To be fair, there was a nice variety of titles on this list. Someone who started earlier in the summer could have his or her pick of a wide variety of historical topics, etc. Especially if you consider the fact that, given enough time, you could actually ILL some of the books that our library doesn’t have at all.

My suggestion would be to put a brief but enticing summary of each book on the list. It wouldn’t take that long and it just might convince the student looking at it that there is an exciting and broad array of history books out there. Show some enthusiasm for your own subject, and maybe the students will pick up on it. And don’t tell me “they should do their own research on the titles to pick one they might be interested in.” This is the real world, and even I’m not that gung ho about typing each of those titles into Amazon to see what they’re about.

And try to pick books that are less than 500 pages.

Yearning for a different ending

It is no great secret among those who know me that I am pro-American Indian. Some call me a bleeding heart liberal. If I got involved in the so-called culture wars, I might even, in the heat of battle, be called anti-American. That would be untrue, of course. Probably no one will ever call me anything because I have added nothing to the print body of American history.

But I am pro-Indian. I have always been fascinated by the history of the Indians in Ohio, and the rest of the US as well. Tecumseh was my hero when I was younger, and I still admire him. Every time I reread his story, I hope for a different ending. I know it’s not possible for a book–especially a history book–to suddenly acquire a different ending, but still I yearn for the day when Tecumseh does not fall at the Battle of the Thames, when his Indian confederacy remains strong and manages to stand up to the US and say “this land, here, is ours. Go away.”

I don’t believe the dispute between America and the Indian nations was an either/or situation; unfortunately that’s how it turned out in Ohio. A series of treaties turned Indian landholdings into a hunk of swiss cheese, and then the settlers gobbled that up too. The Wyandots were the last tribe to leave Ohio, in 1843.

Here’s what I find so frustrating. Before they left, the Wyandots owned a twelve mile square hunk of land in present day Wyandot County. It wasn’t even all of Wyandot County. The Americans had all the rest of Ohio: 87+ counties out of 88. Couldn’t they have left the Wyandots alone on their 12 mile square remainder?

But no, they had to have that too.

Just think, if the Wyandots had kept their Ohio lands, we could have had a casino in Ohio today. (I’m being sarcastic about that, but seriously…it would have been a small price to pay for the US to have maintained some sense of pride for having acted morally.)

I’m not crazy–I like being able to live in Ohio and I’m glad my (white) ancestors were able to settle here. I don’t think we should have turned around and gone back to Europe. I like being American.

We’re coming up on Memorial Day, when we honor those brave people who fought and died for our freedom. I am grateful to them for their sacrifice.

I don’t believe it diminishes that gratitude when I remember another, less often honored, sacrifice that enabled the United States to exist.

The American Indians gave up everything. They had been living here, developing communities, civilizations, economies, cultures, everything that makes humans human, for a long time before Europeans came. And because of some freak circumstances, an unbelievably massive percentage of Indians died, just because of the nature of the germs. Devastating. And then came the wars, and the religious challenges, and the cultural clashes. And still Indian communities tried valiantly to do the most basic thing human beings do:

They tried to live. They tried to stabilize their communities, to maintain family ties, to strengthen their economies. It’s hard to persevere when the ground your everyday life depends upon suddenly becomes as unstable as quicksand. It’s hard to plan for the future when you don’t even know if the land you own today will be yours tomorrow–it’s amazing (and heartbreaking) that the Wyandots built houses and planted orchards–orchards–the ultimate long-term investment!

Before I gallop too far ahead on my favorite hobby horse, let me say this. Indians are still here. I don’t want it to sound as if I’m contributing to the Noble Disappearing Savage myth. There are even Indians in Ohio–and I’m not talking about the team on the lake.

I think I’d better just fade away for now.

I never was a very serious historian

I haven’t read a history book since February. Oh, my goodness!

After I got my master’s, I was so sick of history I didn’t read anything historical for a long time. But after a bit of a break, I got back into it. Not as serious as when I was in school–there is popular history and then there is academic history–but enough to feel like I was still in the loop.

Am I an historian? I have the degree, but I don’t do anything with it. Okay, I don’t make my living off history. But I use the research skills that I learned in grad school every day: I know how to define a query, search the literature, limit or expand the query as necessary, determine which hits might be useful to the job at hand, and locate the information. I just do it for other people.

The practice of history is highly linked to writing…publish or perish. I would love to publish something, but mostly I scribble stuff in my notebook, never to be seen by another person. The lack of feedback contributes to the feeling of lethargy, which leads to nothing.

I lack focus.

I was looking up some stuff on OhioLink and saw that someone checked my thesis out of the library. That scared me. It’s a weird feeling to think that someone is reading my words. Um, what do I think I’m doing here, typing this?