Archive for the ‘History’ Category
A Drama of Medicine & Man
In another life, I could have been a doctor, a medical researcher, someone spending a lifetime in the lab finding ways, meanings, solutions to diseases and maladies. I say this because I find medical history, the progression and discovery and trials and missteps, to be wildly fascinating (but honestly, fascination doesn’t equal brilliance in that field, let [...]
January 11th, 20122011 [a year like no other] and its place in history
I have read two articles in the last week whose arguments have begun with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History, which argued that as we reached the final demise of the U.S.S.R., “liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over [...]
December 27th, 2011“In Small Things Forgotten”
The "aesthetic of the ugly" has persisted with the folk culture of making ugly-face pottery. Man, archeologists love them some old pottery, too. “Some things in our lives are so pervasive, that we give them little thought. A ballpoint pen, for example, or a rubberband. The coffee filter gets little consideration too.” It is a [...]
December 22nd, 2011On Christmas and material memory
1950s holiday cheer, and kitsch old & new 1954 sampling of Christmas decorations, which were one way that people made use of electricity in the Tennessee Valley, and the reason someone was paid by the TVA to document and photograph these things. One day last week, I spent the morning compiling and digitizing documents to [...]
December 11th, 2011On people, or: “I didn’t want to start with an issue”
Peter Hessler, former English teacher in China and author of several books on Chinese life and people, both historical and modern, is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and long-form journalist. In his interview in reception of his prize, he spoke on what it is to write about China and Chinese life, to him: “There’s always been [...]
November 26th, 2011“Art was not separate from everyday experience.”
The face jug is a staple motif in southern folk pottery, portraying the humorous "aesthetic of the ugly." I spent over two hours of pure joy and pleasure this weekend drinking in an exhibit that told its story with folk art: hand crafted chairs, cotton-picking plows and tools, buttons made of sea mussels, the most [...]
September 3rd, 2011Telling stories without paper: human voices and created objects
Incidentally, the third class I’m taking this semester is Exhibit Planning and Production, and we are designing an exhibit to go in cases like this one, in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, in their E Terminal. Without realizing it earlier, this semester I am in two courses that I have been extremely excited to take, and that [...]
August 31st, 2011“I want to say, this machine isn’t just history.” The garment industry in history, and in our lives today
A denim factory in Kaiping, in southern China, where whole days are spent doing what I could barely do for two hours. Photo by Bert van Dijk. If you ever complain about the price of your jeans, I want you to find a sewing machine and try to hem a pair. Granted, the industrial size [...]
April 11th, 2011Presenting my own research, and finding place in world history
Started off my spring break last weekend with a visit to Savannah, to attend my first history conference. It was a fairly small assembly, the Georgia Association of Historians annual conference, but I was fairly nervous because I was presenting my paper on Young J. Allen and his mission and education work in China. This [...]
March 3rd, 2011A city, not a blank slate. More like “an empty and brightly lit stage with lots of directors, scripts, auditions, designers, audiences, and reviewers.”
I haven’t written recently, but it has not been for lack of compelling ideas and discussion in my classes and reading. It has been in fact because of too much of it, alongside a new, second job that I have taken on, and the regularly hefty amount of school work. But I just finished another book for class, that [...]
February 19th, 2011