jliedl.ca

Fog’s rising around our house in thick waves. The sidewalks are death traps, plated with ice lying beneath water trapped between snowbanks.

We walked the dogs on the streets: annoying to drivers, I’ll admit, but the only way to get around. Both of them were miserable about the wet, mucky conditions which required vigorous towel-downs on coming home.

The roads are little better than the sidewalks, thanks to frequent visits from the city trucks, motoring by with plows lifted and leaving sand in their wake. The yards are still white with snow but it’s sagged into a heavy compression.

Thank goodness I can work from home until I go to the dentist’s although both of us have had to motor out this morning. First to take youngest to school and second to pick up eldest from her last exam of the high school term. Now? Back to polishing up tomorrow’s course prep on Rome’s fifth century crises so the afternoon can be all about writing.

“By means of two legal fictions, that corporations are people and money is speech, the Roberts court has turned America from a democracy to a plutocracy.” — Norman N. Holland, Professor Emeritus, Univ. of Florida on the SCOTUS decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission

Skimming through the NYT sections, I came across a compelling and interesting story about the increasing involvement of children raised by same-sex parents in advocating for the legalization of same-sex marriage in parts of the U.S.

Guess where that story’s filed by section in the NYT.

No, guess! (No fair peeking at the URL!) Read more »

In between writing about the historical role of housewifery, I ran across this gem which reminds me that doing a segment in our historical methods course on the revolutions of the 17th century could be great fun: J. M. Wallace’s 1688 and the Problem of Modernity thoughtfully responding to 1688: The First Modern Revolution by Steve Pincus.

Don’t know what the book’s about? See this sometimes woodenly-presented YouTube video from last March with the always engaging Professor Pincus about how his book challenges the conventional wisdom about 1688 as the sensible, modest and atypical revolution in contrast to others of the era that were radical and reformative. He makes a good case for seeing 1688 in a broader context and rethinking our assumptions about this event.

I cobbled together a list of one hundred individuals who were important to the history of early medieval Europe with many thanks to you, my blog-readers, for many suggestions that expanded my list greatly.

This list is, of course, not exhaustive. My priority was to choose subjects for whom enough English-language materials exist (and are accessible from Laurentian) that my students can write analytic biographies of their chosen individual. With 83 registered, we should have enough wiggle-room on the list to accommodate most of them.

Feel free to suggest more names that I missed. They probably won’t make it into this year’s list but I’m sure I’ll be teaching this course again. Read more »

Today I’ve been writing about the Society for Promoting the Education of Women. Yes, SPEW. It’s a very interesting and worthy organization that broke new ground in training women for many careers (including book-keeping and shorthand which had previously not been regularly taught to women) as well as operating as an employment registry for women seeking work at a time where that was pretty radical.

They changed the name in 1926 to the Society for Promoting the Training of Women but I prefer the original version. Don’t you?

The hall is starting to ring with voices as a few classes let out just in advance of the 11:20 end of period. I look up from my desk to see students striding by. Some are talking on their cell-phones, some are talking with friends, others hurrying with purpose either toward the classroom building or, more leisurely, toward the cafeteria.

What I don’t see or hear much of are doors opening and closing. Even though we have a few heavy doors at the end of the hallway, this corridor is literally lined with office doors (each painted a deep, disturbing crimson — this is how you differentiate the second floor from the ground floor’s deep blue and the third floor’s fiery orange). Almost every door is closed. As I walked to my office an hour ago, I passed by one open office door. The rest were closed, although if I strained my neck, I could see one more office door open in the range belonging to the next department down.

My door is almost always open when I’m in the office even outside of office hours. I’ll close my door occasionally during lunch, for complicated phone calls or when I’m embroiled in a tricky bit of rewriting. But I’m an exception to a growing rule and I’m not saying this in curmudgeonly “I’m such a better prof than others are” fashion, but more in bemusement as I watch trends emerge.

Flashback to 1991 when I started here and, on a weekday when classes were in term, half the doors were open. We had a few more doors that led to classrooms (now subdivided into faculty offices), true. But the fact that many more doors are closed these days than open speaks to changes in the university.

Are we less student-oriented? I don’t really think so, Read more »

Now that I’ve emerged, pretty much, from the wreckage of last term, I’m assessing the damage. I’m figuring out what I let slip through the cracks (more than I’d like) and what has to be fixed first. It isn’t always a pretty picture!

Blogging seems like a luxury I can’t afford at the moment. I know that’s not true: it doesn’t take that long to post so I’ll try to push past the feelings of guilt and self-loathing that threaten.

In good news, I had coffee with super former grad student who was back in town visiting friends and picked up the bound copies of her M.A. It was great to see her and catch up on things. It’s also good that I don’t have to go in tomorrow until it’s time to teach: I have a whack-load of email correspondence to work through and another thousand words to write on my current project.

This certainly is cooler than anything that your grandfather did in the past week:

Christopher Lee records a Charlemagne-themed metal album.

As fodder for my students’ research assignment in the early medieval survey (sophomore level), I’m assembling a list of names of early medieval figures, prominent enough that they can be researched in English from a modest regional university library (that at least does own a copy of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages) but not so easy as to take no effort (i.e. no Charlemagne). I’m focusing on the period from about 300-950.

I need approximately 85 names, though, so each student can have their own individual to research and on whom they can share the information. So hit me with the names of your favourite early medieval historical figures: chroniclers, warleaders, queens, abbesses, monks, bishops, kings and the like! Please?