March 21, 2018, 7:19 PM
A young man, crouched like Mathew Brady behind his curtain, at the corner of the patio area outside of the bar, carefully framing an
instagram photo of crimson and white Edison bulbs against the shadowed underside of a palm tree at the darkening earth-margin of the evening sky. Poetry in the damnedest places.
March 21, 2018, 8:35 PM
Three cops, straddling bicycles in the street, faces hidden by sharp white headlamps, bathed in the amber-red glow of taillights and street lights, talking to the drivers of neon donks on 22s and 24s parked in front of the hand-painted faux red brick garage. All is draped in the sodium glow of night. So am I.
Think about “Western civilization.” Think about rockets loaded down with cars named after inventors hurtling through the cold silence of space. Think about the apple striking Newton’s thick skull. The water wheel giving way to the steam whistle. Mushroom clouds. Think about hubris. About the terrors of slavery supposedly balanced by the gifts of education. Hushed reverence for the rule of law. Container ships full of flip-flops and remote controls and dog toys belching diesel exhaust as they plow through the Pacific gyre. All of that stuff.
A few years ago a history professor and I were trying to figure out why the administration at a large public university might argue that the history of Native Americans, indigenous Mexico and Latin America, or First Nations in Canada wouldn’t qualify as “Western” history. We both thought we knew the answer, so we didn’t bother to articulate one beyond: well, the administration is racist, of course, and “Western” history is a flawed racist project. I can’t speak for the professor, but I haven’t thought much more about it.
Thankfully, there are people who think more carefully about these things than I do, and people who can express their thoughts so much better than I can. Louise Erdrich is one of those people. This morning I was blown away by a casual phrase in her 2016 essay about the Dakota Access Pipeline, “How to Stop a Black Snake.” “Each tribal nation has its own rituals and observances,” she wrote, “but we hold in common the conviction that our earth is a living mystery upon whose tolerance we depend.”
Of course. “Western” history is the history of “progress.” In this view, the earth is a puzzle. It yields its secrets to the heroic inquiries of explorers. The heroes were once seafarers, conquerors—hidalgos. Now they are scientists and inventors. There are indigenous scientists and inventors, even indigenous conquerors. But indigeneity is something different entirely, and Louise Erdrich sums up one small part of it beautifully: for many Native peoples, the earth is a mystery, not a puzzle.
This is a critique of Western history, not a part of it.
I used to have another blog called Immortal Palms, where I posted pop culture reviews and blurbs and stuff. Immortal Palms will stay where it is, but I’d like to start posting that kind of stuff here.
So here’s an awesome new video from Prawn. If you like no-bullshit, OG-style emo, you probably already know about Prawn. If you don’t, you should definitely check them out anyway.
I want to reblog Lisa Hoover’s wonderful post from the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Blog without too much ado. Hoover’s post, “Librarians as Cultural Warriors & Protectors,” delves into Rebecca Knuth’s recent book Libricide to discuss the ways that librarians, archivists, curators, and other information professionals have both resisted and supported censorship. Knuth argues that “libricide” is part of a calculated effort by extremists to destroy a peoples’ culture by undermining its written heritage.
One quick rumination: I was thinking about Pierre Bourdieu while reading the post and it made me agree even more wholeheartedly as I read. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu argued that culture is best understood as habitus: the set of strategies, or the “rulebook,” by which people live. If x occurs, our habitus instructs us, do y. For its participants, the habitus is true. This is what troubles so many people about postmodernism. It acknowledges that what is true within one habitus is not true within another. Librarians may or may not choose to worry about truth, but a culture’s texts, in whatever form they take, are critical building blocks of habitus; and, for the culture within which they are embedded, libraries are regarded as repositories of truth. Extremism seeks to undermine truth by attacking existing authorities as well as free thought. If truth and culture are intertwined at the library—and if you’re the kind of person inclined to read the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Blog, I’m willing to bet you agree that they are—it is no wonder that libraries are often the first target of extremists. Information professionals occupy the vanguard of the fight against extremism.
Here’s a link to the post, once again.
March 2018
Bockstoce, John R. White Fox and Icy Seas in the Western Arctic: The Fur Trade, Transportation, and Change in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Link
Calloway, Colin. The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Link
Graber, Jennifer. The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Link
Little, Ann. The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Link
Monaco, C.S. The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Link
April 2018
Kracht, Benjmain R. Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas: The Ghost Dance, Peyote, and Christianity. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Link
Nohelani Teves, Stephanie. Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Link (Image)
Schulze, Jeffrey M. Are We Not Foreigners Here?: Indigenous Nationalism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Link
Sharfstein, Daniel J. Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018. Link
May 2018
Biolsi, Thomas. Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Link
Haynes, Joshua. Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770-1796. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Link
June 2018
Archer, Seth. Sharks Upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778–1855. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Link
Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Link
Short clip from a ten minute snow flurry this morning in Tallahassee, Florida.
Between cleanup from one hurricane, preparation for another later this week, dissertation research in history, coursework in Information Science, and a mini-vacation last weekend, I haven’t had much time to think about the mobile Zotero project. I still don’t have a name for the project, but I have at least started building a list of required features. So here, without further ado, is the first list:
Time to start digging into Zotero’s API, seeing how it translates into Swift, and looking at any existing libraries that might solve some of these problems for me. Avast!
Tropicana Field, St. Petersburg, Florida.
As a scholar and open source devotee, Zotero is my life. (Click the link to learn about the best bibliographic management software in the world.) I use it as a personal library, a personal assistant. Sometimes it feels almost like a second brain: the brain where I’ve stored all of the connections between books and ideas that I need to function as a historian so I can focus on other things with the brain in my head.
The only thing it’s missing—and this is HUGE—is a useful mobile client. I’ve tried what’s out there and it just doesn’t work for me. As in, it doesn’t work. Period. So for the past few years I’ve been struggling to use the mobile web client, which is sorta OK, but it is weakest exactly where I need Zotero to be strongest: search.
Rather than continue struggling to operate my second brain, I realized that this is an opportunity. Why not develop my own Zotero client for iPhone and learn Swift along the way?
Consider this, then, the first in a long series of posts documenting the creation of this tool. I have yet to name the project and will begin listing features in future posts. Like Zotero, this will be a truly open source endeavor. I encourage anyone reading this to chime in with ideas or suggestions. If you’d like to volunteer, send me an email or comment below.
Let’s build Zotero for iPhone!
C.B. Crenshaw 