#guldi

[sosation]

The History Manifesto

The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage (2014) is a fantastic book that, personally to me, is life affirming-- something that I've believed all along but have never heard expressed (until this class) and what I wanted to hear. I really think this book should be presented to history undergrads to contextualize their role in academia. One thing that this book has reminded me of is the power and importance of context. Historians are better than any other discipline at applying context to any given situation and, as the book explains, the longue-durée is the most appropriate framework for conveying this type of context. My own personal academic struggles, I feel, are largely due to my lack of understanding of a given context. As someone who is going into teaching history at the high school level I am very glad that I read this book, as it will provide me with the comfort afforded by the backing and encouragement of the discipline itself. Rather than becoming a “history teacher who rallies against ‘traditional school of thought’” I will understand the context of History, itself as a discipline, and its historical role in speaking truth to power. I am not alone. I am where I am supposed to be.

The focus on interdisciplinary engagement, as stated in your previous course The History of Natural Disasters, is one thing, among many, that struck a chord with me. The value of such discourse seems obvious to one who thinks about it for a moment but it is unfortunate that such discourse in academia is rare. This point is complimented with the fact that History as a discipline lends itself to interdisciplinary facilitation. History encompasses so many other disciplines in its analyses and itself provides histories of those disciplines for analysis. 

As someone whose academic beginnings as a psychology major at UNT involved acceptance of the types of short-sighted truisms mentioned in the book presented by evolutionary psychologists, economists and sociologists (capitalism as a savior, one possible climate future), the argument that the book makes against the naive zeitgeist of the current line of social and political thought is more than valid. This final semester of grad school has been the most influential, thought-provoking, fun and intellectually stimulating semester of my entire UTA career (2012-2018). This is partially due the juxtaposition of my History/Geography undergrad with my Education graduate experience and that this semester was weighted with more History classes. The School of Education, in my experience, is less of a school where thoughts and ideas are exchanged, pondered and expounded upon but rather an entity for the indoctrination of many of the societal truisms discussed in the book and a place where the longue-durée seemingly doesn’t exist. The other half of why this semester was amazing is because these classes (HIST 5339, and Dr. Babiracki’s Space, Material Culture and the Cold War) are my wheelhouse, you are good professors and the school of history, at least at UTA and from my perspective, isn’t vapid and vacuous.

Which is why, again, this book was so satisfying and as I said earlier “life affirming.” It empowers me to speak on behalf of historians, the longue-durée, and history as a discipline, to educate my colleagues and students on the importance of a historical perspective, regardless of the field. I finally feel (due to this book specifically, and this class more generally) that I have a proper “context” to my personal goal in life of educating those around me in history/geography/humanity etc., to empower them to make informed and educated choices, and to hopefully have the tools to visualize and create a better world. I felt so inspired by this book (and the semester in general) that I created a new public Instagram account where I post photos of text from history books and articles that I read: @pasts_present_futures. I created this with the hopes that my friends and students will learn to see things from a more historical perspective.

History stands for something and this book made that very clear. As someone who is passionate about history, and passionate about educating, I could not have asked for a better book to read right now.

 Anthony Sosa

Dr. Christopher Morris

Historical Methods

HIST 5339.001 

12-3-18 

[stacktivism]

Eric Hysen is a member of a new generation of recent college graduates whose questions about the future leave them unsatisfied with one-dimensional measurements. Individuals like these bring questions about the past to bear on speculation about how world-systems change on enormous scales. Indeed, Hysen is hoping to inaugurate exactly such a pivotal change in the institutions around him. Hysen's role at Google is to oversee the development of open voting protocols and open government schemes. His group has established important landmarks for how Google can automate and scale the process of voluntary hacker groups opening up their government's data, including setting up a digital infrastructure for licensing and sharing data across platforms. To my mind, however, Hysen's recent talk stops short in its ambitions of the broader vistas he sets us up for in his introduction. "We're not living up to our potential," Hysen states, throwing down the gauntlet. He looks back three hundred years, and comes up with the turnpike trust revolution of seventeenth-century England, which, as he states, helped to diminish the length of the average Cambridge student's journey to London from two days to seven hours. Now Hysen's talk explicitly points to the first chapter of the transport revolution, the creation of turnpike trusts by parliament, as an example of how private enterprises working with government support can revolutionize an economic system. But much of what Hysen is interested in -- the standardization of milestones, the straightening of paths, the leveling of hills and filling in of ditches in order to create flat roads and thus shorter journeys -- was actually part of a slightly later revolution, not the turnpike revolution of 1660-1760, but the interkingdom highway revolution of 1785-1848. It's that latter revolution that interested me, and I wrote a book about it, setting it out in the history of infrastructure from ancient Persia to the internet. I argued that the interkingdom highway revolution -- not the turnpike trusts -- was the revolution that gave us the modern economy as we know it today. What separates the two revolutions is a difference in scale that shifted everything. In the turnpike revolution, a hundred road startups appeared and improved transportation for a few wealthy individuals, creating a map of affluent towns with cobblestone roads, kicking back the returns to their happy investors. In the interkingdom highway revolution, those small road startups were bought out and grafted together by a government initiative that had a radical new purpose. It wouldn't be roads just for the few and wealthy any more. Now, roads would be built to the poorest communities, the ones that normally couldn't afford to link up with prosperous markets. Consider the implications for Google. Hysen has smart landmarks -- interoperable data, more regular voluntary hackathon events -- but few of them address this question of reaching people who are on the outside of the normal flow of capitalism. As a result, Silicon Valley money, whether working in California or Berlin or Bangalore, tends to create a bubble world of privileged software developers creating apps to buy and sell bangles or cars or the best bike routes, mainly catering to other privileged folk of their own race and class. Like the turnpike trusts of the seventeenth century, they improve a mile or two of road, serving a smooth ride to the the cream of the population. But for everyone else, life goes on unchanged.

Quote from a must read response by Jo Guldi to previously linked 'Let’s build the road network of civic tech'. by Googler Eric Hysen

finally! google begins to think big (big history, that is) - http://landscape.blogspot.co.uk/ via evgenymorozov