Recently in School Category
Georgian Architecture.
Exam break at UNC (thanks for the link Elizabeth). Of course, for this to happen, you have to have this many students in the library. And to any of my Duke friends who may watch it to the end, when I was there, it was "go to hell STATE." (at least half the time....)
If you follow football recruiting, you may have seen that in the last month, there have been a number of highly recruited players who have de-committed from earlier choices and opted to play for UNC instead. Most of these were from Clemson, whose program seemed to be in the tank just a few weeks ago. However, one major recruit who had picked the University of South Carolina has recently made news because Steve Spurrier has made a special effort to win him back, even by claiming that USC is a better academic institution than UNC.
Sorry Steve, I'm sure there are many fine graduates of your school, and a college is only what you make of it, but I'll keep my UNC degree, thank you very much.
Here's a humorous take on the story that includes a few relevant numbers.
In other sports news, I learned today that many, many members of my family will be making the trip to Charlotte for the UNC's bowl game, but not us, who will still be in CO at the time. But I have big plans to drag Brooklynne and Ben out to some Colorado Springs watering hole to watch from afar, so I'll be there in spirit.
Here's another thought-provoking article. Apparently, the commentatory thinks competition is what public education really needs. Brooklynne and I have had some really tough conversations with friends and each other lately about school choices. Several of our friends have kids just a little older than Halleigh who will soon be entering school. So here come the value decisions--public v. private, home school or outsource, liberal, classical, traditional, religious, secular, do you use the word "no," do you make a kid say "I'm sorry," the role of sports, extra cirriculars, class size, personalized learning plans, local, cross-town, etc., etc., etc.
I don't mean to be overly cynical, but when it comes down to it, does all this really matter in a way we can predict? What I mean is that Halleigh already has all the tools I believe it will take for her to get a good education and be prepared and successful in college and beyond: parents and family that are educated and deeply invested in her, the socio-economic advantages that give her a vast head start, presumably a good moral, ethical, and behavioral grounding, and--I'll be the one to say it--promising signs of a fortunate set of genes. Everything beyond that is icing on the cake. So with all these things in her favor, do we have the freedom to be less demanding of her schooling, or do we have more of a responsibility to squeeze every bit of training out of what we can get in 20 or so years?
Are there any other parents with opinions reading this?
The UNC community seems to be universally pleased by the announcement that Holden Thorp will be the next Chancelor of the University, and as the news spread around I kept thinking, I know I've heard that name before.
Then this morning it struck me. Holden Thorp was my professor in Chem 21. My Chem 21 class is also renowned for my stirring rendition of the "Photosynthesis Rap" (written to the beats of Coolio's Rollin' with my Hommies and performed in costume) and my A+ essay that used Star Wars as a metaphor for electron orbitals and spin. I always knew Holden and I had a connection.
Chem 21 is also one of those classes I wish I had back. Yesterday, I had a laugh with Dave, Elizabeth, and Skip about how much of a slacker I was in college. It's funny in a way, but when I think seriously about it, I think I was way too immature to take advantage of the opportunity that college could have been. I wasted alot of potential for 2 and a half years before I realized that, and by that time, it was mostly too late.
I hope I get to hang out with Holden again some time, and I hope he remembers me (he knew all of us by name by the second week of class). If he does I might tell him all of this and see what he says. That would be an interesting conversation.
Now reading....
Synopsis: During the Cold War, as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East, it was widely acknowledged that poor race relations in the States were making the country vulnerable to the Soviets' anti-American propaganda. State-sponsored Jazz tours which visited these contested regions between 1954 and the early 1970s were meant to communicate an image of a color-blind American democracy that did not exist in reality. However, the artists often made connections between the emerging Civil Rights movement in the US, and the anticolonial revolts in the regions they were touring, and blurred the lines between promoting the interests of the United States and rejecting the white supremacy that was still a powerful force in America.
Now reading....
Thesis:
Americans continued a long tradition of English political celebrations by adapting these fetes to suit their new political situation after the Revolution. While past scholarship has been interested in a supposed American nationalism expressed in these parades, holidays, celebratory dinners and oratories, Waldstreicher demonstrates that these events were highly politicized and represent dissent and contentiousness in the early republic, rather than a consensous, or unitary nationalism. The political divisions that can be seen in the celebrations that followed independence, the ratification of the Constitution, and the rise of party politics are evidence of how various ideas of nationalism became manifest and were practiced the everyday lives of people throughout the states.
Why write this book:
- To reveal the struggle over the direction and form of the new republic.
- To show that political expression was practiced widely by the general public and by people from all social and economic classes.
- To show that nationalism should be studied in its practical manifestations, and not just through the lens of ideology.
Now reading....
- "The sexual revolution theat Puritan architects had in mind was acheived only in part as the invocation of religious ideals clashed with the limitations of popular support and the practical challenges of sexual regulation." This was complicated by a trend to eroticize spiritual practices.
- Attempts to make white women the repository of racial purity distracted attention from interracial unions involving white male planters.
- The revolutionary rhetoric of independence offered both a language to justify sexual independence, as well as an ideology that placed moral virtue at the center of republican institutions.
Citation: Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).
Thesis: The upheaval of the Civil War affected three generations of women in the south in discrete ways. Women born before 1820 embraced few changes in status, while women born between 1820 and 1849, and women born 1850 and after, increasingly took advantage of the disruption in scoial order to stake out more independent positions in the public sphere.
Theoretical Framework: Age and pre-Civil War experience mediated how aggressively women pursued changes in status in the postwar south.
Methodology: The study is based on a handfull of VA and NC counties which Censer uses to generalize about the experience of women throughout the middle south. She also focuses entirely on elite, well-educated (white) women, because, as Censer argues, these women had the opportunity to reconstruct southern ideals of womanhood in the aftermath of the war.
Sources: Personal papers, published and unpublished literature, newspapers, county record, census records, diaries, etc.
What Engine Drives the Book: Discrepencies in historical evidence call for a new theory that can reconcile conflicting conclusions regarding how the status of women changed (or did not change) in the post-Civil War south.
Place in Historiography: Censer suggests that the period immediately following the Civil War is the least studied era in the history of southern women. She also notes a debate among historians regarding the nature and magnitude of change in the position of women following the Civil War. She notes Anne Scott's classic thesis that the war helped liberate southern women, and a series of works disputing this theory. Censer agrees mostly with Scott, but tries to reconcile the dissenting evidence by showing differences in how each generation of women reacted to, and were affected by the war.
Key Points:
Strengths: Censer's age analysis offers a very convincing arguement about why historians have found vastly different evidence about the magnitude of change in the status of southern women.
Weaknesses: The exclusive focus on elite women allows Censer to draw specific conclusions about this group, but ignoring the wider range of women's experiences makes it hard to prove any generalizations (or even contrasts) about womanhood in the south.
