Family field trip!

This past weekend I was able to make one of those impromptu trips home that my parents had been hoping would happen now that I'm within driving distance again. I was just in time for a family trip to the newly remodeled National Museum of American History. Besides Air and Space, this was always my favorite Smithsonian museum. When I was 5, I took home a First Ladies' gowns coloring book. It was a little frustrating since a good 25% of them were something impossible like white, cream, or "bombazine," but I loved it. I made my Mom read me the catalog entries a dozen times.

Here are my opinions of the new, somewhat improved NMAH.
Good Things

• Overall, the building is brighter and easier to navigate. I was surprised, though, at how little had changed in the overall floorplan.
  
• Vastly improved Star Spangled Banner display keeps the flag safe, but still looks cool. The walk-through exhibits about Fort McHenry and the flag's conservation were also good.
• The extensive "America at War" exhibit was patriotic but not jingoistic. There was plenty to see and touch. My brothers spent a good hour there, not surprisingly.
  
• The transportation section was greatly improved. I especially liked how they used turn-of-the-century DC as a case study for emerging interstate markets and transport.
  
• "Within These Walls," a 200 year study of a house in Ipswich, MA. They managed to fit in abolition, Irish immigrants, and the WWII homefront, along with a healthy dose of architecture. I was able to identify Queen Anne and Chippendale chairs in the Colonial section!

Not-s0-good things.

• Lines for the "pop" exhibits. What is this, Disney World? Lots of people want to see the ruby slippers and First Lady dresses. Why are they then in a cramped space with a narrow entrance? I was pleased to learn that the single First Ladies' room is only temporary, though.
  
• Restroom entrances are also preposterously narrow. What would someone do with a stroller if there was a line backed up to the door?
• My brothers reported that the invention section was mostly hand-wringing about the dangers of the nuclear age.
  
• Julia Child's kitchen was fun, albeit a little fluffy. It's indicative of our culture that everyone ended up just staring at the video clips of her show.

Overall, the exhibits tried to suit their "national" role, painting broad pictures of major historical trends. I'll be curious to see what other innovations arrive in coming months.

My favorite moment was walking through the 20th century war section. Each "generation" of my family related to something different. We all chuckled at the kitchy WWII war bond cartoons and posters. Then we arrived at Vietnam, which Dad could of course remember. We gathered around the plastic-wrapped avocado sofa to watch sobering news clips of Saigon. Then on to chunks of the Berlin Wall, which is one of my earliest news footage memories. I did a double take when a teeanger said, "Mom, what's the Berlin Wall?" My middle brother and sister were most fascinated by the twisted hunks of metal from the World Trade Center. Brother #3 didn't linger there; he was still in diapers when terrorists attacked it. What memories will he associate with war?

Two Palaces

On my San Antonio trip, I visited the Spanish Governor's Palace, a well-preserved downtown adobe building dating to around 1749. I thought it would be fun to compare it to the reproduction Governor's Palace in Colonial Williamsburg. Besides the contrast of Spanish and English building styles, their difference connote the difference in political clout and trade access of the two cities. CW's palace strives to be an equal with mansions in the mother country, while San Antonio's one-story, six-room home appears to be making the best of local materials.

The biggest history lesson I took away from San Antonio's palace was that people of the past were much hardier than we are! That morning was about 90 degrees. Even wearing shorts and walking past electric fans, I was ready for a break from the stuffy indoors in about 10 minutes. How did those Spanish aristocrats in ruffled shirts and high-collared jackets survive? How did business meetings not deteriorate into bickering between sweaty, cranky colonial staff? Were they just accustomed to the climate from birth?

Archeological dig in my parents' garage

During all this epic packing, I've come across artifacts from my past life that I haven't seen in years. Old textbooks and class notes, even the half-completed application from that time I wanted to study at the Jagellonian University in Poland. Now that a few years have passed I have no qualms about pitching all the physics tests and modern Russian fiction readings from the early WM years.

I also found the calendar pages that decorated my walls senior year of high school - cathedrals and architectural photography of India. The more things change...

"I'll take my heart into battle/Give that freedom bell a rattle!"

Today marks the passing of another celebrity - legendary journalist Walter Cronkite. Being young'uns, my siblings and I know him better as the voice of Benjamin Franklin in the animated TV show Liberty's Kids. We just bought the entire series on DVD - nerd party!

LK is a surprisingly good PBS production dramatizing major events of the Revolutionary War. We see Independence unfold through the eyes of Franklin and his print shop assistants- Moses, a free black man; James, an apprentice; Sarah, a British ex-pat girl ; and Henri, a mischievous French orphan. The newspaper business conveniently takes the spunky but often whiny kids around the colonies and back.

Just watched the Williamsburg episode, which was pretty well done. On an errand for a new printing press, the group attempts to rescue Moses' brother Cato from slavery. Cato instead tries for freedom by anwering Governor Dunmore's call for slave soldiers. There's still time to hear Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech at St. John's Church in Richmond. James and Henri even partake in the fine tradition of colonial wall jumping!

My one beef with LK is its' often self-righteous modernity. Any mention of the South must contain ardent denunciations of OMG SLAVERY. Did you know slavery is evil? Just in case, we'll say it a dozen more times and assure you that Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were more enlightened than bad old Virginia. James' passion for up-to-the-minute headlines also borders on laughable. He has the attitude of a frantic Twitterer releasing self-important news blasts to the world.

Oh yeah, and then there are the celebrity guest voices. Ben Stiller as Thomas Jefferson? Sylvester Stallone as Paul Revere? We nerd haven't stopped laughing about it.

The Distractions of Modernity

John Quincy Adams is one of my favorite presidents. He doesn't deserve obscurity and being the runner-up Adams (although his dad is also a great American). Even though JQA's time in office wasn't astounding, he is certainly one of the most effective ex-Presidents. After leaving the White House, he served in Congress for 17 years and fought against slavery. Now there's a public servant.

The Anchoress at First Things has a great post about JQA today, musing on his intense expressions in portraits, his penchant for skinny-dipping in the Potomac (it's true), and his impatience with being under the Presidential microscope.

“I can scarcely conceive a more harassing, teasing, wearying condition of existence.” If the foibles and nattering ankle biters were that annoying 200 years ago, imagine him being president in the day of internets, blogs, “netroots”, “wingnuts” and 24-hour-always-hungry news networks.
Perhaps it is the technology of the age that has brought affability and a gift for hucksterism to the fore in politics, and rendered them supremely consequential. I wonder how the giants who formed our nation would fare, these days, hunkering down with Chris Matthews and Barbara Walters. Would Ben Franklin’s genius be undermined or enhanced by insta-media? Would John Adams be considered too crotchety, like Bob Dole? Would George Washington be considered too staid? Would Thomas Jefferson have to endure the wrath of Keith Olbermann for daring to play his violin while something was left unresolved in the nation? Would any of them get elected under the intense scrutiny of our age, wherein - as Don Surber notes here - so many are so easily scandalized?

Oh technology. So useful but so distracting. Last night when I got home the power was out on our block. For the first time, I noticed the moonlight and insect chirping that are usually drowned out by streetlights and air conditioners. Conversations by candlelight are more peaceful, too. Surrounded by the warm glow of all the random candles from the reflection room, I finished some VSC year-end paperwork and made notes on my handbell music. I couldn't help thinking that this was how Mozart, Beethoven, and even JQA did their work. Did they get more done without Facebook or 24 hour news?

Abortion, Slavery and Obama

Continuing my week-long reflection on pro-life issues, I'd like to make some historical analogies. Considering abortion in American often sends my brain running for context from the past.

Abortion is the slavery of our times. Consider the similarities: a moral evil opposed by much of the population, but still supported as a right by many and protected by law. The lives and fate of one section of humanity (African-Americans, fetuses) fall under the authority of others.
Debates over this issue sharply divide the political sphere. Some people live close to the issue and feel passionately about it. For those who don't encounter it everyday, it's not as big a deal.

For instance, a Southern planter might have defended slavery as part of his right to property and prosperity, but a Northern factory worker would have been more concerned with his own family than whatever happens in other states. Similarly, I think abortion is not a part of daily life for most Americans. Women don't normally go around telling all their friends that they terminated a pregnancy last weekend. Sometimes the staggeringly large abortion statistics seem as far away as genocide in Darfur. Sometimes the really intense pro-lifers with bloody fetus posters seem too extreme, but that's when I remember that the abolitionist movement housed some pretty intense members as well. (See: John Brown and his military raids.)

All this talk about Obama at ND and the importance of dialogue, not demonizing, also turns me to slavery. When I took a course on "Museums and Slavery," I again learned the importance of words. Call them "enslavers", not "masters," or "owners." Don't use the passive voice about plantation chores - "the cotton was picked" by whom?? Enslaved people, who deserve as much attention as their wealthy enslavers. Our racially mixed-class had some fantastic discussions. Even though we had different backgrounds, we kept a respectful tone and learned a lot about each other. I still don't mind Confederate flag bumper stickers on pickup trucks, but I'm more sensitive now to how people can find them offensive.

Of course, our discussions were helped by the fact that we all agreed slavery was wrong. What about dialogue with enslavers? A constant dilemma for American historians is the fact that most of our country's founders indeed held other persons as property. Dealing with this again requires some respect. Instead of writing them all off as irrelevant bigoted white men, we honor their achievements while critiquing their personal practices. We also find comfort in the "good" ones who didn't treat enslaved workers cruelly. (See: George Washington freeing his slaves in his will)

This paradox is most evident in my pal Thomas Jefferson. Here we have a very intelligent, accomplished man who crafted beautiful words about our country, but also enslaved many of his fellow Americans. Monticello has embraced this paradox since Sally Hemings became a household name. Visitors to Jefferson's estate today are urged to ponder how one could write about liberty yet deny it to others.

In some ways Obama reminds me of Jefferson - they are both intelligent, well spoken champions of religious pluralism. How can our current President speak eloquently about protecting the weak and defenseless and yet condone the murder of our most vulnerable Americans? Maybe because, like Jefferson, he grew up in a culture where a moral evil was widely accepted.

Craigslist and material culture

I just finished a much-needed long phone conversation with my Mom, in which we discussed my immunization records, Latin Mass, and what dresses I should wear for my sister's graduation weekend, among other things.

St. Joseph was another topic of conversation. Mom often entrusts our family's needs to him, including the funds she keeps under his statue in the living room. (It really is handy when you are looking for gas money or your birthday check from Grandma.) Anyway, Friday was the feast of St. Joseph the worker, and he brought our family two blessings that day. My sister got enough financial aid to go to college, and some money turned up to buy a larger dresser for Brothers #2 and #3.

The dresser came from Craigslist through the daughter of its deceased former owner. As my brothers filled it with tshirts and socks, they discovered the artifacts of this woman's life - mostly prayer cards. One, "Prayer for those living alone," clued them in that she was a widow. They know her name from her BJ's Club shopping card. The dresser even smells like her because sachets and baby powder line the drawers.
Just another reminder of how the stuff we leave behind gives clues about the lives we lived.

What should we add to the National Mall?

The Smithsonian just released the 6 designs under consideration for the upcoming National Museum of African American History and Culture. All of the designs are decidedly modern, echoing the National Museum of the American Indian and East Wing of the National Gallery. This building, slated to open 2015, will likely be one of the last additions to the monuments and museums that already line the National Mall.
I'm excited to see how things turn out, and I hope the museum committee chooses something that will fit the dignity of the location. The slide show of options reminded me of HGTV's Designer's Challenge. Will the homeowners go with tasteful but boring, or ambitious and expensive? Will museum planners want a design that already dictate museum placement? Some architects proposed gallery names or "Door of No Return" slave ship mock-ups.

Here's my humble opinion on the slide show presentations.

1. Not bad. It wouldn't clash with the surrounding neo-classicism, but it wouldn't quite thrill either.
   
2. Ummm, this just looks silly. Like an alien structure from a children's TV show. The huge glass walls are a neat concept, but they don't mesh well with the hulking metal blob.
   
3. I like this one. The nautilus design makes a good use of space and nature, and reflects the circular Hirshorn gallery. An ascending spiral of galleries to a "Celebration" view of the monuments gives a good sense of journey. My only qualm is that this lends itself to a strict time line interpretation. Visitors might be reluctant to wander as their interests lead them. I'm also imagining a train of school kids running back down to the bottom once they've reached the end of the line.
   
4. Tasteful, with an organic feel, but also a little underwhelming. It's basically a decorated box.
   
5. What. The. Heck. Oh, I see, it's "a building made of natural materials, rising as of out of bedrock and muck," aka when Stonehenge imploded next to the Reflecting Pool. "Along one side runs a wetlands scene, a nod to historic Tiber Creek that ran through part of Washington. Its glass roof features etchings echoing Yoruba ancestral arts, and it also has an outdoor amphitheater facing Constitution Avenue." This creative-sounding description is code for "ego as huge as the stone pylons." If this were built, it would be all about the structure, not the exhibits inside it. Every aspect, from the ceiling beams to the outdoor projection screens, is in-your-face and over-the-top.
   
6. Ahhh, that's better. Dramatic but not like being pelted with boulders. The wood details are stunning, but I'm not sure how all of this would flow together. You can't just slap a ship's hull onto a rectangle. Also, I'm not sure how I feel about the very literal ship's masts at the entrance. African-American history isn't only about the slave trade.
   

"Lady Madonna, children at your feet, wonder how you manage to make ends meet." ~ The Beatles

Inadequate nutrition for poor people is always a matter of concern, but it's interesting to see how poverty diets have evolved over time. I'm currently reading Sweetness and Power, in which a anthropologist traces the history of sugar consumption and trade. I skimmed over the complicated mechanics of sugar cane processing, but the social history aspects are pretty cool. How did sugar evolve from the luxury of kings into the obesity-causing bane of school children?

Apparently in the Middle Ages sugar was considered a spice to be liberally sprinkled over meats or mixed into wine. It was also a status-symbol. Sumptuous feasts displayed elaborate sugar figurines or models.
Everything changed with colonization and industrialization. Thanks to the Caribbean, rum and sugar were available in large quantities. At the same time, temperance advocates promoted stimulants tea, coffee, and hot chocolate as alternatives to booze.

Here's where poverty comes in. For a family struggling to put food on the table, hot tea made bread and butter feel more like a meal. It didn't hurt that sugar in the tea provided a few extra calories. I was especially intrigued by the observation that poor Englishmen eventually deserted nutritious oatmeal for bread. Once moms began working in factories outside the home, store-bought bread was a lot easier to serve than all-day-simmering porridge. Jam on bread was also a cheap, tasty, sugary alternative to butter. That's right, fast food was already an issue for busy families in the 1840's. Even then, people were relying on caffeine and sugar to get them through the day.

An Emotional Tire Swing of a Weekend

Behold the "extensive grounds" and "happily situated" Winterthur museum and estate. Even in cold gray weather it's an impressive setting. The 7 (or is it 9?) story house houses early American furniture, rugs, art, and tableware by the truckload. Henry Francis Dupont collected it all after he got bitten by the antiques bug.

Needless to say, arriving there after a day of intense grant writing about poor people was serious culture shock. When I heard the other interviewees nerd-out over silver marks and ceramics, I felt in way over my head. I did my best to tread water, selling myself as the plucky church architecture enthusiast with lots of raw talent and love for museums. In interviews, I was pleased to realize that I have the makings of a good writer and educator. I wanted to start giving museum tours that minute. Whether Winterthur and I are right for each other remains to be seen, though.

On the postive side, everyone there is wonderfully friendly and kind. The faculty were nothing if not encouraging. They spent hours getting to know everyone, including a "speed dating" swanky dinner at a country club where they rotate tables at the change of every course. The current students, or Fellows, were also amazing. With snacks, coloring pages, play-doh, and tours through the museum, they kept us from going insane. Each class has a great sense of fun and comraderie. They also wear lots of cardigans and and old-fashioned-looking jewelry - my kind of wardrobe!

It was so wonderful to be back in the land where a person's favorite Founding Father is not only a legitimate conversation topic, it tells a lot about a person. (Luckily most of us agreed that Thomas Jefferson was a jerk who would toolishly own a Snuggie were he alive today.) It was exhilarating to proudly proclaim myself a Virginian and an historian.

On the other hand, there were many, many moments when things did not feel right. Unlike some of my peers, I did not gaze upon acres of furniture and feel that this was my calling in life. I do not currently give a care about metal curating or ships anchors or needlepoint or china patterns. Does all that stuff really matter to anyone? The beauty-loving and social-justice-loving halves of me were at war. It was jarring to finally visit a place I had revered for so long, and not immediately feel at home.

They call me with their decision tomorrow, so we'll see what God's will is for this one.

Studying "Stuff" for a Living

Tomorrow I'm heading to Delaware to interview for the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. (Historians like long wordy titles.) Here are some of the things you can study there:

"Gee whiz, don't you just love Flemish bond?" those brick students seem to be saying. At "history camp" last summer we got high schoolers to feel that way, I kid you not.

Obviously, I'm excited and nervous about the chance of attending such a great museum studies program. If it can help me learn to better get teenagers pumped about dead people's belongings, then I am all for it. Still, it's going to take some mental gymnastics to switch from today's grant proposal mayhem back to all the public history papers I wrote in college.

Big Picture

Google Maps and I have become pretty tight this year. With the VSC house set as my base, online maps have been indispensable for figuring out directions and just generally getting my bearings in a new place. For the first time, I actually understand compass directions and can figure out detours. Every now and then it's good to zoom out and see the entire street grid of St. Louis. It gives me a sense of what surrounds my house and office.

In grant writing it also helps to "zoom out" your focus sometimes. The other day I printed out some recent minority health statistics and was reminded all over again why we do what we do.

Of the African-American women who get pregnant in St. Louis, 25% don't get sufficient prenatal care, compared to 6% of white women. 14.8% percent of those women will deliver underweight babies. For every 1000 African-American babies born, about 16 will not see their first birthdays (three times more than white infants.)
Compared to white people in Missouri, the number of African-Americans with STDs or gunshot wounds is astronomical. So are statistics for homicide, HIV/AIDS deaths, and ER visits related to mental illness.

My Lifetime movie starring "Eve the single mom" is coming along nicely. I am actually enjoying the creative/editing process on this one, seeing how other people relate it to the big picture. One meeting with the Nicest Boss in the World turned into a deep discussion on poverty, violence, sexual abuse, the objectification of women in rap music, all the problems in the world, etc etc. Maybe I think too much about things sometimes!

Train of Thought

Ever since watching the Oscars on Sunday night I've been getting walloped by some kind of cold/congestion thing. It's clouding my brain and slowing my efficiency, except when it comes to random useless thoughts. Observe this morning's train of thought. (*Warning to any male readers - girl talk ensues*)

It all started when I read about fistula injuries in Africa.Reading about teenagers whose childbirth complications make them incontinent social outcasts reminded me of how lucky I am to be a woman in a country and century where giving birth no longer means risking your life. American women today are unlikely to join the historical record of stories that end "died in childbirth."

Then I started thinking about the c-sections and inducements and incubators that mean mom and baby can now both survive when not everything goes as it should. Of course, this doesn't mean birth is a piece of cake. Babies are still born too early, too small, too fragile. Just yesterday I heard about a woman at the shelter where another VSC girl works. This mom went in to be induced, and 36 hours later she's not even in labor! Another shelter resident is diabetic and recently was delivered of an 11 pound baby girl. With all our medical prowess and understanding of how to create life, we still can't control how children grow and choose to enter the world.

Then I told Grant Intern #4 about the doctors offering free fistula correction surgery in Africa, and that made her tell me about suburban moms who donate extra breast milk to African orphans. It sounds crazy, but they pack baggies of it in dry ice and ship it off. (Reminds me of those old threats of "There are starving children in China who would love to eat those peas!!") It's a little inefficent, but it's also a profound expression of giving of yourself and solidarity with the poor.

Then Intern #4 made a comment about wetnurses, and my head snapped back as nerdy analysis shot through my brain. "Omigosh!! That's, like, a reversal of the wetnurse ethnic roles that defined previous eras!" I exclaimed, picturing 19th century women outsourcing their maternal roles to slaves or house servants. Or even Pharoah's daughter fetching a Hebrew slave to suckle baby Moses. ("It's like you just had a seizure," observed intern #4.)

Then I started thinking about Eve, the "mother of all the living" whose departure from the approved produce section brought painful childbirth upon us all. I really love the sound of her name, and I would love to give it to my future daughter. I worry that Future Daughter would hate me for it, though. Can you imagine sitting through religion class saddled with a name associated with nudity, disobedience, and generally ruining the world for everyone else? I have a hard enough time being named for the matriarch who mistreated her slave and generally laughed in God's face.

Then I thought about how Eve can also represent Everywoman. Sure she made mistakes, but girlfriend was a pioneer too. She had to figure out marriage, childbirth, fashion design, and cooking without any mom or aunts or girlfriends or women's magazines.

Then I remembered the imaginary/composite/Lifetime movie client description I need to write for an upcoming grant application. I suddenly knew how I could begin describing the typical poverty-stricken single mother. I named her Eve.

Happy Black History Month!

Meet Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone, a notable St. Louis resident. Most people know about her because of the children's home that still bears her name. They might have heard that she, like Madame CJ Walker, was a pioneer in designing and marketing African-American hair care products. What they probably don't know is that she may have been the first African-American woman to become a millionaire, and that she lavished that fortune on her employees and on African-American schools and orphanages.
In it's 1920's and 30's heyday, Malone's Poro Company operated from an enormous St. Louis building that served as something of a community center, with an ice-cream parlor, barbershop, classrooms, and meeting space. Sadly, that building no longer exists, and Malone lost her fortune in a divorce and tax problems. She's faded from national memory since her death in 1957, but a street in north city bears her name.

I gave a little presentation about Annie Malone for one of NFNF's urban parenting classes this week. To be honest, I was terrified. Our clients can be a daunting audience. What do I, who am neither a nurse nor a parent nor a Black American, have to say that they will find helpful or interesting? After my "History of Christmas" presentation for a rural class, I have realized that the white heat of standing before a room of busy impoverished mothers forces you to melt hours of bookish research into a few nuggets of meaning. They aren't going to care about the accuracy of my footnotes or the nuances of segregation law. They aren't going to take detailed notes with an infant wiggling on their lap. I have to find the "So What?" of studying history, and find it fast.

So, I put as much human interest into the presentation as I could. I told them their stories were as much a part of history as those of the past. I encouraged telling family history to their kids, to give them a sense of heritage. I passed around pics of Annie Malone and Poro products. I held Malone up as someone who helped women become self-sufficient and who gave back to her community.
As always, our clients surprised me. A few were distracted, but two were especially interested a quick to volunteer comments about how they view Black History Month. Everyone liked my comments about Madame Walker's fabulous hats and my Dad's stories of his childhood misbehavior. Overall it was an exhilarating and humbling 10 minutes that passed in the blink of an eye.

And it was a look at faces of the future like these siblings:

Monday Morning news with my coffee

First, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch just printed an opinion piece listing NFNF as the number one agency to pledge to help. This is great publicity! (So long as Ashton Kutcher doesn't show up on our doorstep ready to be a "servant" to President Obama.)

Then I heard — and really listened to — President Obama's call to remake and rebuild our country together. It reignited that spark: What needs to be done and how can we help?

I decided it might be easier to partner with an established local charity or nonprofit and make a commitment to help out for a set amount of time each month with my children. There are dozens of worthy organizations in town, but it helps to call a few that match your interests and ask what sort of work their volunteers do...Think about the activities that appeal to young children, such as arts and crafts, playing with other children and visiting new places.

The list
I've narrowed my list to these 10 organizations and plan to choose one, with my children, that we can commit our time and resources to this year. It's another chance for my own children to believe we can change our small piece of the world.
1. Nurses for Newborns, 7259 Lansdowne Avenue, No. 100, Shrewsbury • 314-544-3433 • www.nfnf.org

Second, the NYT today analyzes statistics on food stamps and TANF (welfare assistance) in every state. Unemployment and food assistance seem to outpace monetary relief. This could mean many things: the system is inadequate or too strict, people think of TANF as a last resort, or people successfully move from TANF to jobs quickly. What you think seems to depend on whether you work for the liberal Brookings Institute or the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Here are Missouri's stats. From 2007-2008: unemployment increased 1.1%, food stamps recipients increased a whopping 11.1%, but welfare enrollment decreased 8.8%. Go figure. My first impression is that even employed people can get food stamps, so of course more would be enrolled there.

Lastly, here's some analysis of the all-important Super Bowl commercials. Most were pretty disappointing, but Pepsi has been getting my attention with their catchy new campaign. They've always marketed themselves as the soda of the hip, young generation. The soda of change and innovation vs. stodgy Coca-Cola Classic. So this year they have shrewdly adopted an Obama-esque circular logo and the slogan "Every generation refreshes the world." TV spots travel through stereotypes of the decades, showing flappers, greasers, hippies, and punk rockers clutching their rebellious soft drink. There' s just one problem with this "master narrative" of progress and protest.

A commercial by TBWA/Chiat/Day, featuring Mr. Dylan and Will.i.am, rewrites history by presenting Pepsi-Cola as the choice of peaceniks, hippies and other youthful rebels. In reality, the Pepsi-Cola parent, PepsiCo, was led at the time by Donald Kendall, a friend of Richard M. Nixon’s, and the soft drink was considered the Republican soda. (Ads That Pushed Our Usual (Well Worn) Buttons.)

Oh shoot, Pepsi execs. Maybe you should have done some research first. That's what you get for perceiving history as a chain of inevitable progress.

A few reasons wny I am applying to graduate school

With Thomas Jefferson in the St. Louis Arch museum

“One can accept the view that the historical record is fragmentary and incomplete, that recovery of the past is partial and difficult, and that historians will never finally agree in their interpretations, and yet can still believe intelligibly and not naively in an objective truth about the past that can be observed and empirically verified. Historians may never see and represent that truth wholly and finally, but some of them will come closer than others, be more complete, more objective, more honest, in their written history, and we will know it, and have known it, when we see it.” Gordon Wood in The New York Review of Books, 1991.

"The intellectual life is indeed an intense and ongoing conversation (occasionally a brawl) into which young academics seek entry and from which scholars draw vitality throughout their careers."(xiii)

"Popular culture is of great interest to me because I am fond of thinking of homes, churches, local libraries, and municipal buildings as the prosaic side of collective memory. In these often unassuming buildings are found things that tell us who we are by shaping out memories of the people, places, institutions, and events that have formed our lives-often in forgettable yet utterly tenacious ways. Religious stuff is a particular category of the things that mark the halls and walls and countertops of everyday life. Why bother to study it? In a nutshell, because there is something irresistable about the fact that human consciousness owes so much to cardboard icons and plastic buttons." (xi)

"And what will enrich our understanding of the worlds in which we live more than an historically informed analysis of the artifacts that articulate the worlds of others?" (pxv)

Visual Piety by David Morgan (Berkeley: Univ of California Press 1998)