The term is over!

I'm back home from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, where I'm running hard after a Master of Liberal Arts in Florida Studies.  This term was hard, but I also goofed off a bit.  In grad school, there are no Latin Honors (cum laude and all that), no honors in the major, so I have decided to study, yes, but also not to get all knotted up about it, and if I make a B, that's fine.  That's all I need.  But so far, I seem to be heading toward A's.  That's fine, too.  I certainly do not mind.

The toughest class was Theory of History.  Theoretical stuff makes my head hurt, anyway, but historical theory can get really out there.  The professor is a young neo-hippie (doesn't even own a car) who is uber-smart.  He's very fond of the French Revolution, so we read a lot of translations of French historians.  I've already talked about being a bit of an Annaliste in my own methods. I like background in my histories.  We explored other theories and methods, some of them I liked, some I didn't.  Post-structuralism (post-modernism) can only, in my opinion, lead to paralysis.  If you believe there's no such thing as "truth," what do you do as a historian?  Why bother?  I think there is such a thing as "truth," though it may not always -- or ever -- be absolute.  I think we can say things about the past that are true, and from which we can learn.

The seminar in Modern Florida was not that tough, but there was a lot of reading, some of it absolutely excellent.  One of those was Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, an account of a very dark incident in the history of the United States and of Florida.  Dr. Arsenault, who conducted the seminar, assigned the book, and almost all of us agreed that it was the best of the books we were assigned.  The author, Gilbert King, won a Pulitzer Prize just last month for the book, and it is well-deserved.  I did my paper for this course on "Prohibition and the Coast Guard in St. Petersburg, 1927-1933."  I'm waiting for feedback from Dr. Arsenault on that.  It was fun to do, and interesting to me because Prohibition is one of my favorite periods of U.S. history, and I served in the Coast Guard.  My husband also served (he's the reason I joined), and was stationed in St. Petersburg in the early 1970s.  Our younger daughter was born there.

And Dr. Arsenault gives great parties!

The last class I took was in Feature Writing (as in newspapers and magazines), which I took to satisfy the writing requirement for the Florida Studies degree.  I chose that course, as I figured there would be far less reading in that than in a literature course, which was another way to satisfy the requirement.  I didn't need 10 books to read on top of what I had to read for Theory and Modern Florida, and I hate having books assigned and then having to dissect them looking for what I think is often not there.  But I won't get into that.

The Feature Writing course was interesting, though the professor in the beginning was too enamored of the technology of the online component.  The University of South Florida is switching from Blackboard (used for mounting assignments, receiving submissions of homework and papers, e-mail service to the class, and other functions) to Canvas.  We used Blackboard at the University of North Florida, where I did my post-bacc work, and I thought it was a dog.  I think Canvas is a pig.  Paper works.

The other reason I took Feature Writing was that we actually WROTE!  We had to do two major feature articles (2500 words or more).  Mine won't be published -- that's not where my interest lies.  But it was fascinating to do the articles.  The first one was on suicide, a rather grim topic.  I learned a heck of a lot, and once I get back home, plan to do some awareness work.  It's just so important.  The second article was on the great white shark.  That was most fascinating.  I chose to focus on the shark that was tagged in March off the coast of Jacksonville, FL, and the efforts of OCEARCH to tag and track great white sharks around the world.

And that was my term.

What Kind of Historian Am I? - part 2

So in my last post on this topic, I declared that I am a "historicist" - that is, I hold to the idea that we must evaluate historical persons and events in terms of their own times, not our times.

The next "school" of history and historiography I identify with is called the Annales school, named after a group of French historians led by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, publishers of the Annales d'histoire economique et sociale (Annals of Economic and Social History).  As with my historicism, I arrived at my congruence with the Annalistes by my own route, in thinking about why we do history and how we do history.  I figure things out on my own; I do not seek out ideologies to identify with.  In fact, I distrust and am highly suspicious of ideologies and ideologues.

The Annalistes got tired of the dominance of political and diplomatic history.  There's more to it than that, they realized.  They sought a holistic approach.  They looked at the big picture.  I like the big picture; too many people today are short-sighted, concentrating on minutiae, when they should step back and see the broader landscape.  That broader landscape is what I am after in my study of history.

Annalistes like Fernand Braudel embarked on massive studies.  Braudel produced a two-volume work, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which encompassed political, social, economic, intellectual and geographic factors.  This is the sort of thing I'm after in my study of St. Augustine, Florida, during the Second Spanish Period (1784-1821).  There were political factors at play, such as repeated attempts by British colonists, and later by Americans, to take Florida from Spain; there were economic factors -- shortages of cold cash and staple goods; there were social factors -- the Catholic church, practices concerning marriage and child-rearing, for instance; there were geographic factors -- St. Augustine is bordered by rivers and a swamp, and the presence of the swamp produced public health problems.  History, I have always been convinced, is a great deal more complex than we usually find it presented in books.

Basically, what I'm looking for is a Unified Field Theory of history!
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