The Past Speaks

I got an interesting appeal for advice in my inbox today. I have no expertise in this area but am re-posting the email here for you guys to read.

One of the toughest tasks an archivist faces in making decisions about which documents are worth saving.  Ideally, we would save every scrap of paper but this simply isn’t possible. Some form of sorting and sampling is required, but the task  of sorting through all of the documents is complex because the nature of historical research has changed dramatically over the years, with the focus broadening from the activities and papers of a few famous individuals to the activities of regular people.

“The National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) is embarking on a major project relating to bankruptcy case files.  Marvin Kabakoff is an appraisal archivist at NARA’s Northeast Region in Waltham, MA, and one of the project team leaders.  Mary Eschelbach Hansen of the Department of Economics at American University is helping NARA to solicit the input of economic and business historians.

Currently, Federal Records Centers (FRCs) maintain over one million cubic feet of bankruptcy records from Federal courts, consisting of some 25 million individual (personal and business) bankruptcy cases.  While many cases could be disposed of 20 years after their retirement to an FRC, there is currently a hold on disposal.  Nearly all case files are extant. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts pays a large fee for storage of case files in FRCs, and it would like the retention issue resolved as quickly as possible. If case files are assessed as permanent, they are legally transferred to NARA, which is then responsible for storage costs.

NARA must determine the historical value of the case files. It has already been determined that files relating to cases closed prior to 1940 will be permanent, as will specific types of bankruptcies filed under the Acts of 1898 and 1978, such as railroads, municipalities, stockbrokers, etc.  Court dockets will also be permanent. The main problem is the large number of post-war case files. We are considering several options, including keeping a large percentage of case files from districts on a ten-year rotating basis and keeping a smaller sample of case files from each district in each year.

Your input will be valuable for assessment of the records, and we have several questions for you:
•   Did you know that historical case files were available at the FRCs?
•   How valuable might case files be for your personal research or for research in your field?
•   Would you be more likely to use case files if they were digitized?
•   Are there specific case files that NARA should identify as historically significant?

To answer these questions, and to request more information about this project, please respond to our very brief survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HCVNV2R by Friday, September 10, 2010.”

Act soon!

In late August, I read a really interesting article about Darden, the parent company of Oliver Garden, the US restaurant chain. The article was filled with neat facts. I learned that the CEO is Clarence Otis, a black guy who grew up in the Watts area of LA during the riot-filled 1960s. Olive Garden revitalized its menu in the 1990s by sending employees to Tuscany to learn from actual Italians. Part of the firm’s success is due to the intelligent use of IT, including the computer systems that ensure you never have to wait long for a meal. I got the impression of a progressive and social responsible company that treats its workers relatively well and competes by being smart, not mean. Read more here.

On 3 September, blogger Matthew Yglesias made a post arguing that universities need to be more like Oliver Garden– they need to find ways to making a quality product cheaper. See here. He wrote:

The point, however, is not to argue the merits of these restaurants but merely to observe that they’re successful. And in particular, they’re successful at exactly what our health care & university systems are terrible at, namely actually balancing cost and quality or even at times finding innovative ways to skimp on quality. I doubt anyone involved would try to convince you that the Olive Garden is the world’s greatest Italian restaurant. But the point of something like their “Culinary Institute of Tuscany” exercise is precisely to identify top-quality practices and then think if there’s some way to do something vaguely similar for radically less money. If you look at the trajectory of college tuition, it’s clear that we’re not going to be able to simultaneously stay on that pace and expand the number of people who go to college. But a college degree seems to be very valuable. If it were possible to provide even a fraction of that value to more people cheaply, we’d be making major progress.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently carried an article that was in reply to Ygelsias’s post about introducing Olive Garden concepts to higher education. See here.

The OECD reports that:

Out of 32 developed countries, Canada had the second-highest rate of education spending in proportion to its GDP at more than 2.5%, trailing only the United States. A high proportion of that spending, 43.4 per cent in 2007, came from private sources, primarily tuition fees.

See here and here.

Sadly, the OECD did not give a detailed breakdown on whether the money is well spent. It is common knowledge that the US spends a higher proportion of GDP on health care than Canada and gets worse outcomes, at least in terms of life expectancy and cancer mortality. It is common knowledge that the US does almost twice as many C-sections per capita as Canada. Stats of this sort allow us to evaluate these two health care systems.

Applying the same sort of analysis to the university sector would involve looking at cost per student relative to GDP. Much of the money in US higher education is spent on frills like landscaping and sports teams. Ireland has zero tuition fees for EU students but it accomplished it by being ruthless in cutting out such unnecessary expenditure and by restricting postsecondary education to the brighter half of the youth cohort. Irish academics who visit the US notice that the campuses have lots of fountains, stadiums, mascots (!), and other wasteful crap.

Commenting on the same OECD report, the Irish Times reports that education spending in Ireland was among the lowest in the OECD, even at the height of that country’s boom.  See here. In another article, the paper reports that in 2007 “Ireland spent only 1.2 per cent of GDP on higher education, well below the OECD average.” See here. The funny thing is: the participation rates in post-secondary education is high, academic salaries are internationally competitive, and tuition is free.

The world university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)/THES, which take such factors as teacher-student ratios into account, show that Trinity College Dublin is a pretty good institution (52nd in the world), while UCD is 114 (still not too bad).

So why can the Irish can do so much with so little?  Methinks that university administrators need to get their asses on a plan to Dublin. Better yet, they should call Dublin on Skype and figure out what the Irish are doing right.

I admit that some of the money the US ploughs into higher education brings a big return for society. Look at all the start-ups near the Stanford campus. But much of it is wasted. My hunch is that the average American student would be better off under the Irish model.

The New York Times recently carried an article about the various proposals that have been made to restructure higher education in that country. The provocative title is “The End of Tenure” but the solutions proposed go far beyond that. This is my favourite sentence:

And if colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic ­facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but we can start by getting rid of all of the mascots at North American universities.

Check out this piece, The Academic Athletics Trade-Off.

Finally, I should warn historians of Dr Gregory’s ilk that the past is no more their exclusive territory than the novel is that of the literary critic. As Arnold Schwarzenegger so eloquently said in Terminator, ‘I will be back,’ and so will all the other social scientists who have make such an important contribution to the study of history over the last 100 years.

This is from an essay Ranald Michie of the University of Durham wrote in response to a negative review of his Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815-1914 that appeared on the Reviews in History website.

Next week, I begin teaching a third-year course on the history of western North America.

Actually, the official title of this course is “the History of the Canadian West”. However, my lectures will deal with western North America as a whole, since it is impossible to understand the history of western Canada without knowing about events south of the border. The 49th parallel transects biomes, traditional aboriginal territories, and natural economic communities. Despite the best efforts of governments based in the eastern time zone to exercise control over the border, animals, drugs, and illegal migrants continue to flow across it. These efforts have included removing all vegetation along the 49th parallel.

Many westerners dislike the border and the central government power it represents. Some First Nations regard the border as illegitimate. Anti-Ottawa sentiment is also common among whites in western Canada. In Alberta, many right-wing people believe that they have more in common with their American neighbours than with central Canadians. Some left-wing ecologists in BC and the Pacific North West have dreamt of establishing a new nation called Cascadia. Separation from Canada remains a topic of conversation in Alberta. Separatist sentiment is western Canada can be found at both ends of the political spectrum.

The situation in the United States is similar. Anti-central government sentiment is also pronounced in the American West. In some cases, this sentiment translates into outright secessionism, as in the case of Hawaii. In other cases, dislike of Washington takes the form of hostility to specific federal government policies and strong regional or state identities.

Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater once said that he would be happy if the whole eastern seaboard of the United States fell into the Atlantic Ocean. During the Bush Presidency, it was not unknown for Californians travelling overseas to tell people that they are from “California” rather than “the U.S.”.

The American West has been the birthplace of many protest movements of both the political left and the political right. Some of these protest movements crossed the border and became part of western Canadian political history.

There is a strong libertarian movement in western North America. Western libertarians tend favour policies such as low taxes, unrestricted immigration, the right to carry handguns, and the legalization of divorce, homosexuality, pornography, drugs, gambling, and prostitution.  Barry Goldwater, the archetypical western libertarian, hated the social programs of the New Deal, but he also hated the religious right.

The environmental, Native rights, and gay rights movements have also been strong in western North America. Greenpeace was created in Vancouver. The first openly gay public official was elected in San Francisco, where he was quickly assassinated.

There are others reasons for treating the histories of the American and Canadian Wests in a single course. Large First Nations and East Asian populations are two things the American and Canadian Wests have in common. The economies of the two regions face similar environmental challenges. In the nineteenth century, both regions had skewed sex ratios, which changed gender roles, at least according to some historians. It is no coincidence that the first jurisdictions in North America to give women the right to vote tended to be in the west.

Logo of Greenpeace. Founded Vancouver, 1971.

The course explores major topics in the political, social, and economic history of western North America. These themes include:

1)    First Nations
2)    race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism
3)    Canada and the United States as Pacific nations
4)    state formation, regulation, and individual liberty
5)    gender, sexuality, and illicit substances

As a vehicle for teaching these broad themes, I have adopted a “history through biography” approach, so each lecture revolves around the life and times of an individual. The men and women who are the subject of my lectures come from diverse social groups and historical epochs.

The Canadian and American Wests arguably have more in common with each other than with the eastern regions of their respective nations. This raises the question of whether “Canada” is a useful concept for historians. Are Canada and the United States fictive concepts?

At the end of this course, you should be able to both defend and criticize the usefulness to historians of such geographical terms as “Canada”, “Western North America”, “the Canadian West,” and “the Canadian Prairies”. The western provinces and states have much in common with each other, but region is also very diverse. You should also be prepared to tell me where Western North America begins and to debate whether the 49th parallel actually matters.

The students will be writing an essay and a book review. The book I have selected for review is:  Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), which compares post-1941 Japanese North American internment in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Robinson’s book is a first-class work of pan-North American history.

Lecture Schedule

Starting this week, I am going to be teaching a first-year course on Canadian history before Confederation. The class is designed to address major themes in Canadian history from the end of the last Ice Age to the entry of PEI into Confederation.  I’ve pasted a list of the lectures below.  I am using a textbook called Origins, which is probably the most popular textbook for courses of this nature. In the post-Confederation Canadian history survey course, I use a book called Destinies by the same authors.

Page numbers for the weekly textbook readings refer to the fifth edition. Most lectures are accompanied by a map on Google Maps that I have created to familiarize students with the geography.

There are three written assignments, a mid-term, and a final exam.

Two of the assignments have 18th century Montreal as their theme. The first of these papers is about a Black slave who was executed at Montreal in 1734. It is based on this website. The students have to read a set of primary sources and then determine whether she was guilty of the crime for which she was executed.

The second assignment asks students to write a paper about the 1749 visit to Montreal of Pehr Kalm, a Finno-Swedish botanist. Kalm’s travel diary was translated into English and published in London the early 1770s. This journal is now available online in PDF format. The students are required to read the pages for the journal for the relevant dates and then write a paper answering some questions about Kalm’s comments about Montreal. The whole point of this assignment is to teach students about bias in primary sources. Kalm was massively biased in favour of the people of New France and casts all sorts of aspersions on the people of the British Colonies. Students will find out from another source I have given them that Sweden was allied with France at the time of Kalm’s visit and will be able to draw their own conclusions.

The third assignment deals with Manitoulin Island, which is within driving distance of Sudbury and familiar to many of my students. I’m using this local case study to teach the students about Native land claims and treaties.  The students will write a 3-page report on the 1862 Manitoulin Treaty.

This is the subject of a recent post by historian David Turner. As someone who has brought my digital camera into a fair number of archives, I was really interested by what Turner has to say!

Check out this post.  There is some great secondary literature on the history of alcohol in Canada. Every year, I give a lecture in my Canadian history survey course called “Booze: the History of Drinking in Canada”. The students seem to like that lecture, although I suspect they might prefer an actual brewery tour 😉