Archive for the ‘History’ Category
“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“History is a giant stone that lies on top of us”
What can films like Apocalypse Now tell us about our past? And if it’s all we’re getting, how can we think intently about where the Vietnam war fits in our historic and present day lives? Americans don’t tend to see the past in their everyday lives. If they do, it might be because of a [...]
February 1st, 2011The city and the country
My city, covered in snow recently The semester has shifted into full swing, even though I have yet to attend a class. I’ve been doing so much reading though, and already have so many dog-eared pages and underlined sentences and bracketed paragraphs, I can tell it’s going to be a theme here for awhile: the [...]
January 19th, 2011Why I love what I do:
"American Progress," by George Crogutt, 1873. Finishing up the semester next week, and I’ve got one major paper left. The class is Issues and Interpretations in American History, and without being to prosaic, the professor has decreed that our final assignment is to consider and reflect on the twelve books and three articles we’ve read [...]
December 2nd, 2010Turks in Germany, calling nationalilty into question again
It is a complicates issue, as I wrote recently, identifying oneself in the hyphenation-happy categorization rampant in within the notion of modern American nationality. But as has long been touted, this is not an all bad phenomenon. Yes, it puts people in oftentimes artificial categories, Chinese-Americans born here still caught awkwardly between a culture they [...]
November 24th, 2010America and nationality, a troubled love story
For a long time, leaders (and many citizens) saw the United States as a country of, and for, white people. This is clear in our treatment of Native Americans and our trampling of many of the contracts we drew with them, and obviously, in our treatment of African slaves who then developed an African-American identity [...]
November 2nd, 2010