The Atlantic headline and subtitle pretty much explain it:

“How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit”

[I just really like this picture.] The Whitfield County, Georgia, post office, 1896. Vanishing Georgia series, Georgia Archives Virtual Vault.

Yes, truth. And the Internet. As the article points out, trust is often built in (or is lacking) in the types of communities depending on it to get the hard facts, the real truth, about things like, oh, history. And with the fractured and anonymous nature of communities and identities online, the entire process of garnering truth and facts from the Internet poses problems; there is a lack of distinct trust.

This is what Reddit, the social news website, does have compared to a website like Wikipedia. Reddit users, with their internal community and forum-based responses and discourse, were able to see the clues and suspicious bits surrounding T. Miles Kelly’s students’ fabricated experiment in Internet deceivery–an intentional task aimed at exactly this point: who and what is the source of the information you find online?

The Georgia Mason University professor spends a whole semester on this point, in a course he teaches called Lying About the Past. And even though, this time around, Reddit broke open the whole faked case in a matter of hours, the lesson was still there:

The students may have failed to pull off a spectacular hoax, but they surely learned a tremendous amount in the process. “Why would I design a course,” Kelly asks on his syllabus, “that is both a study of historical hoaxes and then has the specific aim of promoting a lie (or two) about the past?” Kelly explains that he hopes to mold his students into “much better consumers of historical information,” and at the same time, “to lighten up a little” in contrast to “overly stuffy” approaches to the subject. He defends his creative approach to teaching the mechanics of the historian’s craft, and plans to convert the class from an experimental course into a regular offering.

There were certainly people, like the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, who are enraged by this kind of flagrant misuse of a website like Wikipedia–where the point is to fabricate on purpose, adding plausible, if slightly far-fetched, tidbits to historical Wikipedia entries and seeing how much they can get away with.

But the whole point is to think more carefully, more deeply, about the source of information. His approach is stunning to me, who until very recently had been a constant student of history courses over the span of two degrees. It is essential to make sure young historians understand these lessons. So I am all for his unorthodox methods. After all, with an online encyclopedia that is built on trust, and especially, on goodwill and a common interest, one can spend a bit of time ruminating on what might occur if someone sought to sabotage such an effort, with tiny and insidious bits of fabricated “history.” It is an extreme example of what we know to be existent in many other kinds of sources too, including the heralded Ink-and-Paper-Book.

Zhou Youguang, creator of modern pinyin, Romanized Chinese as we know it. Photo by Shiho Fukada.

When we think of languages, there is a tendency to see them as always having been there, as changing maybe slightly over time, but being unending mostly. English speakers tend to have an overly bold attitude about their language, even without consciously being aware of it. English dominates the modern, global world–on the internet, airports, business, telephones (where would texting be without Roman characters?).

But longstanding languages incur major changes over time, and they’re the lucky ones; a majority of the world’s languages are perishing, or are moribund, a fancy tern for dying. Those that are able to stick around are subjected to the whims and influences of cultures, and Chinese was subjected to a major shift in the mid-twentieth century. Just after the revolution of 1949, the Communist party decided they needed to simplify the characters is their language in order to improve their dismal literacy rates. So, that’s what they did.

The Mandarin Chinese that I learned in college and while studying in China would not help me to read documents created in the traditional characters, as many of them are so pared down, they are not mutually intelligible. It is so odd to imagine that a person doing historical research in China would not be able to read the texts of even one hundred years ago unless he knew how to read traditional characters. It will certainly be interesting to see what this chasm in written script means for Chinese history and culture and language itself over the next century and beyond.

But there was a second, equally crucial part to the changes in Chinese language that took place in the 1950s, one that even they could not have realized was about to become highly significant in a world of computers, text messaging, cell phones, and keyboards with Roman letters on them: pinyin.

A recent New York Times article profiled the man whose job, starting in 1955, was to develop “a new phonetic alphabet.” Western visitors, traders, and public figures had been using several versions of Romanized Chinese words that had been developed in the 19th century, but it was time for a standard version, and especially, one approved of by the government.

Incidentally for Mr. Zhou Youguang, this new job came at just the right time to save him from most of the cruelty and death that his fellow western-educated scholars and professionals would face in the coming Cultural Revolution. Colleagues and students of his were not so lucky.

The most compelling idea in this article is that pinyin, the words we use all the time to phonetically spell out Chinese words in the non-Chinese-speaking world, might have looked quite different. It was not an assumed fact that pinyin would have taken form in the Roman alphabet.

In his new job, Mr. Zhou found tremendous confusion, but also a foundation for his work. In the late 1500s, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci had formulated a system to Romanize Chinese characters. Many English speakers were already using the British Wade-Giles system, developed in the 19th century. Chinese linguists had devised other alternatives.

Mr. Zhou’s team wrangled endlessly: how to cope with the homonyms that are rife in Chinese; how to indicate the four tones of Mandarin; whether to use a Cyrillic, Japanese or Roman alphabet, or to invent a new Chinese alphabet based on the shapes of characters.

Mr. Zhou argued for the Roman alphabet, to better connect China with the outside world. In 1958, after three years of work, Pinyin — literally “to piece together sounds” — was finished and quickly adopted.

Imagine the role China plays today, and the importance of English in the globalized world, and a Cyrillic pinyin system for China? Also, the pronunciations and tone marks in the current system, while helpful, are certainly not highly intuitive–some of them take a lot of practice. The “c” sound at the beginning of a word like cai, for instance, is pronounced like the “ds” in kids. That one might have taken me the longest to master, moisture of your tongue and the roof of your mouth working to make it come out right, but it is one of my favorite sounds now. (Though I am certain I am still not saying it quite right.)

Literacy in China was enormously improved, and the changes in language are considered highly successful as a component of this goal. As of 2008, 92 percent of Chinese adults are literate.

The other part of my time is split between several tasks. One, which has pretty much been on the back burner since December, is a holdings maintenance project, as everyone who works here is assigned at least one of these, so that downtime that might crop up can be used for maintenance, organization, description, and database creation for and about the many, many collections and materials we have here. Over time, we are entering information about the items in collections and folders into a finding aid, as well as creating a database that helps archivists and researchers alike to navigate each particular collection. There are so many records here at the National Archives that I know we could all do this for the rest of our lives and not complete the task.

I often walk in the bays—which is what you call the giant warehouse-style caverns that hold the endless shelves stacked with FRC boxes, Hollinger boxes, abnormal-sized boxes, cylinders, map cabinets, and marvel at the sheer amount of material they hold. There are four bays total at the Atlanta facility. I cannot even estimate any remotely meaningful number of cubic feet or number of boxes—let alone estimate a number of documents within those. Billions. Kajillions. I laughed at a recent series of online articles and commentaries that were addressing the recent Civil Case Screening Project that NARA has undertaken in the last year (I’ll explain soon), in which people objected to the National Archives deciding which records in the enormous backlog of civil cases would be kept, and which would be destroyed. People have been upset for a number of reasons, some founded, most unfounded or unrealistic. My favorite innocent comment came from a woman who perkily suggested these records all be digitized instead, since one of the arguments for destroying a portion of them was due to space constraints within NARA facilities. She proposed digitization as if that was the simpler, easier answer. Clearly this woman has neither spent much time digitizing anything (it is ENORMOUSLY time-consuming and painfully monotonous) nor, obviously, has she ever taken a peek at the cavernous bays I walk through every day I am at work. I think it would be a healthy dose of medicine for each patron, every American citizen who gets angry at the federal government for not being able to locate a record they are seeking by searching for someone’s name, to take a look inside the bays of the Archives for a glimpse at how many things we keep here. Records are not organized by a handy name reference, no. And they never will be if you understand anything about federal records. Nor, also, will they all be digitized. Not ever.

YOU want to digitize all those records?

Last January, I was struck with an idea for a project. I had read a book about a generation of Chinese girls who had been adopted into families worldwide, with a huge number of them becoming part of American families. (I wrote about it too.) Tens of thousands of these girls are growing up Chinese-American, in predominantly upper-middle class families, and they have a distinct perspective on the world, and their spot in it.

That Americans have been adopting from Asia is not new information to most people; American families with an adopted Chinese (or more generally Asian–Korean, Vietnamese) child is more and more common in the general public. On the sitcom Modern Family, Cam and Mitchell adopted their daughter Lily from Vietnam, and that diversity is one of the mainstays of the “modern” aspect of the family composition on the show. In your own community, at the grocery store or Target, multicultural families are an ever more common site within the larger populace.

Girls practice Chinese dance on rainy Saturday afternoon in February.

What I realized–in one of those sudden ideas that come to mind only when a combination of other triggers intersect perfectly–is that there is an important historical story here, and that I could help to tell it, begin to collect it, with the tools I have. I had been thinking a lot about identity, and the concept of “roots,” genealogy, and biology, and thinking about how much, how deeply, it doesn’t matter in the end. I had been thinking a lot about how much I want to adopt in my own life. And I had been thinking about the group of people–oftentimes members of Families with Children from China (FCC)–who is here, connected, who live this story every day: the families. Also being a public radio addict, I love podcasts and the new media we have to share stories and collect and share history, and decided the internet combined with an audio format would be the perfect way to tell this story.

Over the course of a few months in early 2011, I wielded in and narrowed my enormous original scope, and decided on what would become the final capstone project for my master’s in public history.

I would collect oral histories of families who had adopted children from China (mostly girls, but a few boys as well), who live in the Metro Atlanta area. They will be delivered in an online format, much like a podcast, and often in small series that connect the stories of various families to each other.

I wrote a paper to end the semester, with grand ideas, plans, and notions of this project.
Then in the fall, I had to begin to deliver on my many (many) promises. An important thing to point out is that I knew not one singular person in the Atlanta community who had adopted a child from China. I am not in the age demographic of adoptive parents, and I am not even married. Nor do I have kids. I spend a lot of my time at work and at school. So I started cold-calling people, with a very strange request, indeed, when they did call me back or answer my unknown number: “Yes, hi, I am a graduate student at Georgia State, and I am working on a project about families who have adopted children from China. If you are interested, could I explain a little bit about what I am doing?”

Strangely, I only felt really nervous the very first time I did a dialing session. That first, painful, jump into the icy water. Turns out, the water was not cold at all. A few returned my calls or answered, and connected me with people who were either more directly involved, or spoke to me themselves. In each case that I have spoken with a mom, dad, or family as a group, I have been allowed a little more access into their lives, and they have shared my project with their friends, people also connected through FCC–the Atlanta chapter and beyond. It has been extraordinary.

What began as a few contacts in the fall has snowballed in 2012. I have been graciously welcomed into homes, invited to hear personal tales of how these families became what they are–decisions about family, ethnicity, fertility, biological children, and all other manner of real, complex lives.

I ate Chinese food to celebrate Chinese New Year with one very active playgroup, the kids averaging about six to ten years old, and it was a rowdy, wonderful evening, meeting parents and further discussing and explaining this project and my goals.

I watched a rehearsal performance of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, which has become a haven and passion for a number of adopted Chinese girls over the years, many of whom continue to dance into high school and college.

I was invited to a monthly book club begun by mothers of adopted Chinese girls and boys, who found there was a need to read the literature (spanning many topics) on kids, adoption, China, parenting, and a number of issues within these topics, and that reading them together was more meaningful. I have begun attending them, and the most striking note I took away from my first session was that there are issues of confidence, perception from outsiders, and even simple semantics that arise in every adoptive mothers’ mind, and that the support from small groups like this one is indispensable for these women. It was so lovely to sit and discuss their most recent selection, Lucky Girl, with them–quite frankly, most I did was listen.

I listened to one mother console another on the fear that she, who had never had children biologically, somehow loved her daughter in a less, or different, way than the mother who had two biological boys before adopting her Chinese daughter. This second mother listened earnestly, and then vehemently countered that, having both, she promises there is not one thing different in the love for each of her three children, biological or adopted. She repeats this for emphasis, staring her friend straight in the eye. She is brought to tears when talking about it further.

It is moving. There are many times I am near tears in working on this project. The stories, the love, the shared experiences are so moving. I am up to my ears in adoption stories, and pictures of young, growing, and grown-up families; it only makes my conviction and desire to adopt stronger, if that was possible.

I was invited by two girls, ages 8 and 9, to watch the videos their older sister (film-producer earning her master’s at Columbia, might I add) made of their respective adoptions, after I had finished interviewing their parents. It was the first time in the course of this work that I watched, in moving picture, the moment when a little two-year-old met her parents and sisters. It was remarkable, joyous, and scary, and sad all at once–many in that room captured on film feeling so many varieties of emotions all at once. It is a moment not everyone would perhaps want to share with me; I was honored, yet again, by their gracious invitation into the lives of others.

Is it that adoptive families tend to be willing to share, because they are used to being the ones in the room who created their family in a manner somewhat different from “normal”? I don’t know the reasons, but I am grateful for their positive responses to this project, the excitement some have expressed, and the thanks others have shared. We all recognize that these are stories worth telling, collecting, connecting, sharing. I think they are especially rich in the aural format, voices captured in this moment in the lives of these families. The little girls, little boys, teenagers I have spoken to–those voices are being saved, and their notions of themselves are now recorded, as documentation that this is how they felt in 2012, about their spot in this wide world. I giggle, I cry, I am in awe as I listen back to the words and thoughts that I have collected. How far I have brought this, into fruition, into something quite extraordinary–something I wanted but that, if I’m being honest, seemed impossibly large to attempt.

I have been invited into homes, back into homes, met kids, siblings, parents, friends, interviewed many of them. I’ve met with people without the voice recorder on as many occasions, listening and talking and proving that I can be trusted with their family’s history.

I was most recently offered two beautiful, hardcover books that have been compiled from families’ personal photographs ad writings, on the China adoption experience. The collection is from photo collections and families across the United States, who all have this same experience in common. The first of the books was compiled and designed in the basement of the family I most recently interviewed, and they insisted they had “too many copies” lying around, so gave me one of each of these two books. They are cherished additions to the resources I have already compiled as I entered this world to begin work on this project. From one, I found the inspiration to finally settle on a title:

A Thousand Ways Richer:

The China adoption experience in Atlanta, An Oral History

I have been shown unbelievable support, consideration, and openness as I have thus far explored the China adoption community in Atlanta. The most striking discovery has been confirmed and reaffirmed by nearly every mother or father I speak to: the adoption of their daughter, son, or multiple children has brought them more than just a child–their lives have been enriched in a thousand ways they could not have imagined before. A child, yes. Also, culture, dance, food, language, history. Also, activity, sports, small businesses, and an entire community of support, best friends, love, play groups. Some who share this initial experience go on to become lifelong friends. One man’s Chinese daughter has already made him reconsider his perception on race, and interracial marriage–and she’s only eight.

I will explore many of these facets in the forthcoming website, where I post the stories and some of the audio. But the quick thesis to this thing, what has inspired the title, is a combination of the thousands of ways life is changed by adoption, and the countless ways I am also richer for knowing these incredible women, men, daughters, and sons. The ways my life has been enriched are too numerous to count, and I would have missed every single one of them if I had shied away from doing this, in favor of something easier, smaller, with people I already knew. It has been exhilarating to know what I am capable of, if I just pick up the phone and ask.

In 1988, the NAMES Project staff and an enormous group of volunteers brought the Quilt to the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. for the second time (a year after its first memorial display), and he gave a speak that can be found on YouTube–filled with emotion and setting much of responsibility for where we stood in 1988 on inaction from the government of the United States, the one country in the world with the most resources to act. The story behind the Quilt, its legacy, meaning, and growth–not to mention the hundreds of thousands of stories contained within its squares–are incredible. I thoroughly enjoyed reading of its provenance and meaning through Cleve’s eyes.

But I will not share all of this here. I will share an excerpt from that 1988 speech.

We stand here tonight in the shadow of monuments, great structures of stone and metal created by the American people to honor our nation’s dead to proclaim the principles of our democracy. Here we remember the soldiers of wars won and lost. Here we trace with our fingers the promises of justice and liberty etched deep by our ancestors in marble and bronze.

Today we have borne in our arms and on our shoulders a new monument to our nation’s capital. It is not made of stone or metal and was not raised by engineers. Our monument was sewn of soft fabric and thread and was created in homes across America wherever friends and families gathered together to remember their loved ones lost to AIDS.

We bring a quilt. We bring it here today with shocked sorrow at its vastness and the speed by with its acreage redoubles. We bring it to this place, at this time, accompanied by our deepest hope: that the leaders of our nation will see the evidence of our labor and our love and that they will be moved.

We bring a quilt. We’ve carried this quilt to every part of our country, and we have seen that the American people know how to defeat AIDS. We have seen that the answers exist and that tens of thousands of Americans have already stepped forward to accept their share and more of this painful struggle. We have seen the compassion and skill with which the American people fight AIDS and care for people with AIDS. We have witnessed the loving dedication of volunteers, families, and friends and the extraordinary bravery of people with AIDS, themselves working beyond exhaustion. And everywhere in this land of ours we have seen death.

In the past fifteen months over twenty thousand Americans have been killed by AIDS. Fifteen months from now our new president will deliver his first state of the union address. And on that day, America will have lost more sons and daughters to AIDS than we lost fighting in Southeast Asia–those whose names we can read today from a polished black stone wall.

We bring a quilt. It grows day by day and night by night and yet its expanse does not begin to cover our grief, nor does its weight outweigh the heaviness within our hearts.

For we carry with us tonight a burdensome truth that must be simply spoken: History will record that in the last quarter of the twentieth century a new and deadly virus emerged and that the one nation on earth with the resources, knowledge, and institutions to respond to the new epidemic failed to do so. History will further record that our nation’s failure was the result of ignorance, prejudice, greed, and fear. Not in the heartlands of America, but in the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.

The American people are ready and able to defeat AIDS. We know how it can be done and the people who will do it. It will take a lot of money, hard work, and national leadership. It will require us to understand there is no conflict between the scientific response and the compassionate response. No conflict between love and logic. Some will question us, asking how could that be. We will answer, How could it not?

We bring a quilt. We hope it will help people remember. We hope it will teach our leaders to act.

There are many, many things more I could share. There is so much meaning, lore, love, and anger contained in the Quilt. Over time, I will share more.

I have also learned so much more about Parnell Peterson and Craig Koller, the two men whose squares I visited, since writing about what I wish I knew and then about visiting their panels. In some way, over time, I would like to share that here, too. I must figure out how best I want to express it, share stories. For now, they are mine, held close, and written in the notebook I’ve dedicated to the stories I collect of their lives.

Henrietta Lacks. Her cells were massively important in the development of twentieth century medicine. You should read Skloot's book about her.

Almost without conscious thought, I have read three books in the last six months on medical history, all three enthralling, and with stunning casts of characters–doctors, researchers, patients, government and elected officials, journalists, insurance companies. We sit on the other end of the story, knowing what “happens” at the end of the sagas and what has evolved in the field of medicine and disease control, and this gives us an advantage on the people whose lives, discoveries, and decisions play out for us on the pages of history. We know which procedures will end badly, or which will prove miraculous cures, or which doctors and politicians will later be discredited or heralded as heroes.

It is almost the same way we look at medical practices now, imagining ourselves on the very cusp, the cutting edge of innovation, or medical breakthroughs, of cures and solutions without error. But we are humans, created procedures on solid research data, but apt to err all the same.  Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, gets to just that point in how we view the medical field, some impenetrable, foolproof tower, and tribute to human medical achievement:

… We live in the age of science, after all. We think the difference between experimental and standard care is well-defined; that doctors adopt new medical advances on the basis of valid evidence; that new treatments represent improvement over the old. We look back at the history of medicine and its litter of discarded treatments with a sense of superiority, smug in our belief that superstition and ignorance have been banished from medicine. Until only a few generations ago, disease was thought to arise out of either an imbalance among the four humors or a contagion in the blood. Treatments were based on this faulty paradigm, and thus it seemed to follow, for example, that cutting a vein and letting the blood run out would rid the body of what ailed it and restore balance. Patients often did feel better after a bloodletting, or at least different, while the doctor could feel the satisfaction of having done what was right according to the prevailing conceptions of disease. We now know that bloodletting at best did nothing and at worst hastened death.

It is important, essential, to remember that we also lie within the timeline of medical history, as it unfolds and we learn more about disease, viruses, and the human body, and seek new methods of treating all three. The stories behind how we’ve gotten where we are now humble me, remind me of our fragility, our hubris, our good intentions–and not in an all-bad or all-good way. Modern medicine has improved our lives, given us the tools we need to protect ourselves from the things we can, saved the life of at least one person you know, and probably more than one.

Alleged "Patient Zero" Canada Air flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, who is a complex and defiant character in Shilts's book.

Our medical past certainly belies the mistakes and hardships that can occur no matter how “developed” and wealthy a society may be. And it is good to be aware of our humanity, and our mistakes, so that we don’t go thinking too much of ourselves. We’re far from the end of the tale of human medical science and discovery.

Reading list:

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer

Also, read a blog post about so-called “Patient Zero” of AIDS, Gaetan Dugas: “We all know the plague is coming”

In this first piece, “You Say You Want a Devolution,” the main crux is that in the last twenty years, we have remained in a stagnant state of cultural development. “In the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so feels like an end of cultural history.” Kurt Andersen points to our nostalgic gaze towards the past, and the way our architecture and automobiles have remained looking mostly the same since 1991. We also dress nearly the same. Hip-hop, the last genuinely new form of music, makes an unapologetic use of old music through sampling. Fine art, which recognizably depicted people for every century before the 20th, is back to respectably representing human forms again. “It’s the rare ‘new’ cultural artifact that dosen’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes,” he writes. “In our Ben There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good.” There are two major reasons, he argues, for this stagnated cultural state:

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out.

…The other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. It blue jeans become unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

He goes on to ponder what this cultural moment–frozen mostly for the last 20 years–means for western civilizations as a whole, for their existence and sustainability in the future. I am not convinced it spells anything like the end for the West. But, he has a compelling overall theory, and when you consider the photographs and comparisons through the years of our cultural changes–buildings, clothing, cars–you see he is absolutely spot-on.

Illustration by James Taylor, accompanying the piece in Vanity Fair

I ear-marked the article and set the magazine in my current pile, and excitedly picked up Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue, which features, for 2011, The Protestor as the Person of the Year. Absolutely the right call–that’s the only “Person” we could choose to represent this amazing, tumultuous year.

And wouldn’t you know, the lead article begins its discussion, its explanation of this 2011, with the exact same Fukuyama theory, explained in The End of History, this “end” theoretically beginning around 1990. Then, only as I went to write about both of these articles and t he impact they’ve had on me as I reflect back over this year and its events, did I realize both are written by the same man, Kurt Andersen. Of course, that explains the similar thought process, and the similar sources of influence as Andersen himself was reflecting back over the year 2011.

The Time article has a more optimistic overture, even while explaining that there is no saying where the future will lead, after this year of tumult and protesting, and voices exploding over the things wrong with the world, all over the world. He points out several things that never occurred to me, things that make 2011 distinct from any other year in the last twenty, since the theoretical “end of history,” and that make it distinct from any other year since 1968, and–he argues–even farther back in history.

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strcitly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protestors were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news.–vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America, they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ’70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ’80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

Then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay… The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows–obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of calvary to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

It is stunning that I had never thought of this before, because in my history classes and even in simple living in this world, I have often thought of the protests of old as exactly that, as relics of eras gone past, a people, a group, a generation more connected, more concerned, and more committed to bringing change and making a difference than anything my generation could or would ever see. It seemed complacency had replaced this spirit of fighting, caring, standing up against The Man.

And then 2011 came out of nowhere. Spontaneous protests, beginning with a fruit vendor in Tunisia last December, and his death on January 4, 2011, snowballed around the globe, North Africa and the Middle East, in Europe, Asia, North America. But, historically, it was right on time:

In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989–but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in ’89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968–but more consequential because more protestors have more skin in the game. Their protests weren’t part of a counterculture pageant, as in ’68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then–within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses)–inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice, and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as huge peaceful demonstrations of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in the unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.

That’s an extraordinary paragraph to consider. How 2011 is unlike anything we’ve seen in many, many dozens of years–arguably since 1848! Also, I finally had to look up the root of the word zeitgeist, as too many intellectuals and writers have been brandishing that thing around, and it means, “the spirit of the day.” In fact, 2011 has a very distinct spirit, changing the course of what all the years to follow might hold.

Mannoubia Bouazizi, the mother of Mohamed, the street vendor who set fire to himself after being fed up with corruption among city officials, last December, in Tunisia

I think what Andersen has done best, with both of these pieces in separate magazines, has been to show how we are simultaneously experiencing everything the same and nothing the same. And for some reason, this contradiction makes perfect sense. Reading these two articles almost back-to-back (absolutely unintentionally), one reads as a cautionary tale of a western culture gone a bit stale, the other as a means by which to rediscover ourselves, our values, and what is important in this life. And this year has been the perfect one in which to discover both these truths about ourselves, and to seek to bring them together harmoniously, using them for renewal, reaction, redemption, reward in years to come.

It is a marvelous fact about human history that, in fact, most of what we leave behind for others to study us by are the things we don’t think much about–the simplest, everyday items. It’s no haphazard thing that much of pre-history is studied through those ubiquitous pottery shards archeologists seem always to be brandishing around (figuratively, and in their arguments; they would never actually brandish them around, old and historically valuable as they surely are). I find archeology to be exceedingly not interesting. However, I can appreciate–and I do–the value of tracing the lifestyles, customs, patterns, and culture through what little remains of earlier humankind, and give great credit to the patient practitioner who can see small and sweeping patterns in the study of layers of dirt, types of pottery, locations of the trash receptacles on the sites of previous civilizations.

Those are valuable patterns to see. It’s like in high school when the teacher asks you to analyze this piece of a Shakespeare play for homework, and you go home and toil and come in the next day to find not only did you not get out of it what the teacher did, but all your classmates seem to be the same page as well (and not your same page). This is how I felt throughout the whole year of British lit, which meant so many Shakespearean plays to analyze, and this is how I felt when reading James Deetz and Henry Glassie, scholars of early material culture, in my own material culture class this year. The professor had us drawing conclusions, and there were patterns I simply did not see, while others in the class were far better at drawing them out of the readings.

(I am OK with being unable to do these types of analyses. I have always felt that I work hard, which makes up for a natural lack of inherent understanding of things, or a natural skill for learning. I don’t hear something once and always remember it [in fact I rarely do remember it]. I am particularly bad at naturally knowing how words are pronounced. I can use them in writing, understand perfectly what they mean, and God help me, hope that I don’t have to say them out loud. But, I digress.)

Illustrations of headstones by James Deetz, from his book

The thing about reading Deetz’s book, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archeology of Early American Life, is that you come to realize that the strongest arguments for drawing historical conclusions, and for seeing patterns, lies in the very things we do not think matter in this life. Including, yes, the very things we deem the least important: the things we throw away. Early Americans are largely judged–centuries later–on those things they hoped would go away, the very things they chose not to keep. Writes Deetz:

The disposal of refuse is one of our most unconscious acts: while we might expect some hidden motive in the way a court clerk recorded the disposition of a case or a diarist described his neighbors, it is most unlikely that in removing food remains, broken dishes, and other debris from a household, people were making any conscious statement about themselves or others. Yet, in the changing nature of trash disposal since the seventeenth century, our ancestors have once again informed us of the way in which their view of the world was changing. (171-172)

He goes on to explain that from the seventeenth century until around 1750, refuse appears in irregular, shallow pits sprinkled in a circle around the basic structure that would have been the homestead itself. After 1750, in place of these shallow pits, would appear one deep pit. Two things can be concluded from this change; one, that this shift correlates with changing population increase and concentration–meaning trash all around would be more of a nuisance. And two, that “such precise and neat handling of one of life’s less useful and valuable things suggests almost a compulsion to order.” After all, the eighteenth was the era of order and reform in many areas of life.

I love these mussel "drags," in the Shaping Traditions folk culture exhibit at the Atlanta History Center, that show how those tiny little buttons, important pieces of our lives that float around often without our notice, are made.

This exhibit is so exciting, because those items are being featured exactly where they belong, among innovations that hav made our lives easier, given us vast improvements and allowed for the conveniences we live with each day. This would have been an incredible exhibit to help curate, and I wonder how each thing made the final list over other things. Each object appears alongside original sketches and drawings by their inventors, patent specifications, and original advertisements for the items. The full list of items in the exhibit is worth pondering. Think about how each of these things affects your life, some more than others:

I love picturing each of these things, one at a time, and their places in my life. The little things have a far greater impact on the study of material culture, on the makeup of civilizations, than the big-ticket items we covet, keep, and cherish.

The full story–audio and transcript–including some background of the items chosen, is on NPR/PRI’s The World site. Also check out a video and more information on the Hidden Heroes exhibit from the London Science Museum.

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 go in an exhibit case we have in the lobby of the Archives, and the goal was to fill it with Christmas-y documents that we have there at the Archives. Hard when you’re a non-religious institution that does not keep records of… I don’t know, religious events? So I found some WWI draft cards with names like “Dasher” and “Reindeer” and “Santy Claus” (A REAL PERSON!) and the rest of the reindeer. I also pulled a man named Partridge and a man named Peartree, my favorite pairing.

Another view of those wise men creeping towards that branch thing.

But we used some TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) photos from the 1950s, where someone had gone around and documented what people did with electricity. (It is wonderfully fantastic that someone has this job. I imagine an amateur photographer trying to expand his novice abilities.) One of those uses for electricity was Christmas decoration, in the home and outside the home. It is a fantastic collections of photos, and I was ogling over them, studying every bit of each photo–having just ended an entire semester in material culture class where we studied kitsch, consumerism, and what people buy, make, and keep in their lives. So this set of photos was an absolute treat to pour over, one at a time. I want to digitize some for myself, they are so special. So far I have digitized three of them, the one above, and two that I will be printing and framing for my mom.

They are accidentally artistic. I think whoever was taking the photos was trying to make them look classy and professional, setting up backdrops, and placing each item in a vignette. But the background walls, floors, electricity outlets, and other elements belie all that, making them ironic, stark and cold, and all the more fascinating. The photographer obviously had the rights kinds of professional equipment. Someday, I would love to write some sort of scholarly piece on the kitsch of Christmas decor in the 1950s, using this goldmine of photos.

Snowman couple, with illuminated "snow" behind them

Each one was more mistakenly charming than the last. I was examining the light fixtures, the wall colors, the window blinds, the chairs, the floor tiles, the table designs, and the use of shadows–all elements surrounding the actual focal points. I also found each item to grandly reflect the same kind of kitschy things we have continued to use over the years, and that take on more memory and sentimental meaning for us as the years go by. We realize over time the things we loved as children or adults may have been a bit tacky, or cheap, or downright weird, but this often endears holiday decorations to us more. We keep plenty of things we’ve collected for the holidays that we might not otherwise keep, because of the way we feel around this season, the memories we keep of family members being around us, or of the effort they may have put into making an item. Also, since we don’t have to look at them all year, and they are packed away all that time, they are welcomed back into our vistas each year more cheerfully than if we had had to look at the holly creation atop a dresser all year round.

We didn’t talk extensively about holiday fare in my class, but we talked about style, kitsch, memory items, family heirlooms, items associated with loss, love, memorial, and all of these things influence our relationship to and meaning applied to the holiday season, and Christmas.

A tad scary-looking tree taking over this door

I know there are particular things I will never forget in homes that have been the backdrop to Christmas memories: I have vey specific memories of my Auntie Nessa’s house from the early and mid ’90s, plush carpets, low lights, Amy Grant playing, a very tall Christmas tree, and villages set up with snow and a pathway across one of her long tables. (This is a strange memory to keep, since we have not been to that house since this era, she no longer owns it, nor hosts Christmas events.) My grandma and grandpa’s houses, both the Maple Street and Birch Street locations, in Kingsford, harbor Christmas Eve memories too, warm lighting and protection from the outside cold, so many cookies–the best gingerbread–I could never begin to eat them all, or fathom recreating the amount. Loving family around me, socked feet, Christmas clothing, taking pictures. Grandma’s tree with the ornaments we’d all made for her decades ago by now. And my parents’ homes through the years, always filled with happy decorations, numerous themed trees gracing corners and cozy spots throughout. My mom often did up a few together, a little Christmas tree forest, including the Happy Meal toy tree that took us upwards of 15 years to collect toys for, and took a few years in construction itself as well–this tree continues to make children happy and joyful, even as my Mom’s own children have grown and moved out of the house. I always loved how very tall and thin it is, taking on a caricature nature that reflects all the playful toys that grace its branches; some of those ditties are from the late 1980s, my earliest days of youth. Vintage!

I have wonderful memories of Christmas holidays across many homes, northern and southern locales. Some have been frozen and snowy, others bright and downright sunny, and they all mean something to me, combining to create my own meaning of the season, and adding to how I create my own space in my adult homes each year.

Anyway, these historical images got my rejoicing about Christmas decorating of days gone by, when my Dad was a small boy and my Mom was not yet born. I don’t know how prevalent these pieces were back then, in 1954, but it’s worth investigating, in a future project, and definitely worth having kept, for the moment.

Super-shine reflects back in this first in a series of table-toppers on a bookcase/side table combo piece.

The shadows, the plug, fantastic unintentional artistry.

Another tabletopper

At some point I'm not even sure these use electricity. Or if they do, it's less clear how. TVA documentation getting a bit arty?

A cozy corner, with illuminated tabletop branches and vintage home decor magazine.

Candle pieces, wreath, framing '50s long table and blinds and curtains

The back-end of a reindeer hangs in the middle of the door's wreath...

And the front-end of the same reindeer, on the other side of the door.

I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season, spending time with family and good friends, recalling years past, and making new memories. This includes creating your own craft, art, and yes, kitsch, to add cheer and spirit to this lovely time of year.

The photographer took several shots of this quirky, mod-style Mary and Baby Jesus scene. Rightly so, it's quite fantastic.

“There’s always been a tendency to see a place like China in very political terms. I think this is partly because it’s a communist country, it’s run by the Communist Party. And from my perspective, living in China, starting especially the way that I started, as a Peace Corps volunteer, in a small community, teaching in a small college, it gave me a very different starting point. And I really wanted to write about ordinary people in China. I didn’t want to start with an issue, or start with a political idea, I wanted to start with an individual, start with a community.”

Peter Hessler on the job as a journalist in China

Hessler is a journalist, that is an important distinction; but he writes based in a historical context, referencing the past at each step, and this is also valuable. (I will fight with people who dismiss great books written by journalists.)

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the titular "last emperor," in a complicated era in Indian and British history

I am always reminded of British writer and historian William Dalrymple’s  fantastic skill for emphasizing the individual’s experience of history, as he does in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857,  which keeps the reader vividly engaged by showing us the Indian Rebellion of 1857 through the eyes of several key player on the ground. I have never read a book of history in which I felt so deeply connected to the characters of the era, and when they all begin falling at the hands of their enemies, I had a true emotional reaction to the destruction of this city and these lives. I’ve heard he does the same thing in one of his other works, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India.  An inspiring example–though not without his critiques–of this kind of engaging historical writing.