Papers, papers, papers

It's coming down to the end of the term -- just a little less than a month to go, and it all goes too fast at this point.

So I have three papers to do.  I've got the research done on two of them, and almost done on the third.  That third one is for my Geologic History of Florida class.  It's been fascinating learning how Florida formed out of the ancient bits of this and that tectonic plate.  The paper I'm doing is on the formation and composition of the soils around St. Augustine, Florida, which relates it to my overall research project on St. Augustine during the Second Spanish Period (1784-1821). One of the aspects I'm interested in is what the people in and around St. Augustine had available to eat, which was, of course, influenced by the condition and capability of the soil.

Another paper is for Early Florida history class, which deals mainly with the First Spanish Period (1513-1763).  However, my paper is the oddball in the class, because our professor, who is on the federal commission for the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine, scheduled for 2015, wanted a paper done on the 400th anniversary, which took place in 1965, and which ran smack dab into the civil rights movement in St. Augustine.  It's been a fascinating study.

The third paper is for my Florida Politics Since World War II class.  I'm ambivalent about politics.  I've come to feel like the waggish tagline says:  Poly = many; tics = bloodsucking insects.  But this paper topic I've picked is very interesting in that nobody has written about it in any of the usual academic venues -- books and peer-reviewed journals.  There is a paragraph about it in a book on LeRoy Collins; there is another paragraph in a book on the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office.  There is nothing about it in the Florida Historical Quarterly.  So I'm breaking new academic ground here, and that is exciting.  Hey, so I'm a nerd!

Anyway, I've mentioned here in this blog what I'm writing about for this class:  Governor LeRoy Collins's suspension of Sheriff Al Cahill of Duval County in 1958.  I've interviewed a couple retired Jacksonville cops for this, and gotten good information from them.  That's fun!  These guys are great!

I've had to do a bunch of traveling for these papers, because of course now that I'm going to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, I'm doing papers on events and conditions in North Florida, and have to keep going back up there (where my permanent home is) to do research!

And that's what I've been doing for the past several weeks.
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Life as a Graduate Student, or: Road Trip!

I have three papers this term, all of which deal with events or conditions back home in north Florida, now that I'm going to graduate school in south Florida!  That just figures.

My classes are on Tuesday and Thursday, giving me a four-day weekend.  That makes going home quite doable.  I had not expected to come back much before next month, but decided to come up and do some research.  It has been rather a disappointment to the family, because my main purpose being research has meant not much family time, but my husband and I did watch "Apollo 13" last night -- even though half the time I had my nose in my computer, arranging the newspaper articles I had photographed off the microfilm at the library!  Such is the life of a graduate student. 

I did, however, see enough of the movie for the final several minutes to bring the usual tears to my eyes.  I can't see that movie without getting teary-eyed.  I remember that event, and the waiting to see if the astronauts had made it through re-entry.

I've spent the last two days, Friday and Saturday, in the main Jacksonville Public Library.  I left Pinellas Park early Friday and went directly to the library (after having lunch at a favorite restaurant in Jacksonville's Riverside neighborhood, that is).  I spent the afternoon going through the Florida Times-Union index and found some interesting and wonderful information for my paper in the Florida politics course.

That paper deals with Governor Leroy Collins's suspension of Duval County sheriff Al Cahill in 1958.  Lots has been written about Leroy Collins and his term as governor of Florida.  The vast majority of these writings have to do with his actions related to civil rights.  Nobody, as far as I have found out, has written anything about the suspension of Cahill. 

That event is another one I remember.  I grew up in Jacksonville.  I was eleven years old at the time, and I read the newspapers.  The story was all over the papers and the television news.  Cahill had just taken office the year before, having defeated Rex Sweat, who had been sheriff of Duval County since 1932.  His removal was the end of a string of sheriffs who attained office with no prior law enforcement experience.  A new tone was set when Governor Collins appointed Dale G. Carson, an FBI agent, as Cahill's replacement.

I have a number of questions I'll be addressing in this paper.  I'm going to enjoy this -- I do like breaking new ground.  That's what we historians are supposed to do.
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Journal advice

I had lunch with my friend Barbara today.  We met in 1986 at a Star Trek movie.  We were big Trek fans then, and accumulated a circle of friends who were, too.  We had some great times.  We have moved on, yet we fondly remember those days.  Our friends have moved on with us, and we still keep in touch with the hard core.

Barbara is optimistic and a fountain of positive wisdom.  She has encouraged me to keep a daily journal, even if only to write one sentence.  So I'm going to do that.  The journal will be hard copy, and sometimes I will record in there things that I wish to keep private.  But I will also, from time to time, reprint here the entries that pertain to the subject of this blog: the journey of a historian-in-training.

The first entry will probably be tonight.  Tomorrow is the day my husband and I lug a bunch of my stuff -- mostly books! -- to my new digs, in the home of a family friend, four hours south of where we make our home.  I'm looking forward to the living arrangement, which is eminently suitable for both of us.  Our friend has just painted the interior of her house, and is also going to install a new ceiling fan for me in my room.  I saw the color she had in mind for my room, and I like it a lot.

I'm looking forward to the program in which I will be working on my master's degree.  The Florida Studies program at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg is an interdisciplinary program, and in addition to history courses concentrating mainly on colonial Spanish Florida, I will take courses in other subjects which are related and which I think will enhance my research. 

For instance, this term, in addition to a seminar in Early Florida and a seminar in Florida Politics Since World War II (which is required of all Florida Studies majors), I will be taking Geologic History of Florida.  I think an understanding of the geology is important to my understanding of the soils of St. Augustine, which in turn is necessary to an understanding of what food crops would grow there!

Related to that will be a course or courses in the environment and environmental history of Florida.  I have already had one course in Florida's environmental history at the University of North Florida.  That course concentrated on the area of the St. Johns River, which includes St. Augustine.  I had not anticipated the course would be so deeply relevant to my inquiries, but it surprised me.

I also anticipate taking a basic economics course, because part of my study of St. Augustine during the Second Spanish Period is to study the economy, possibly to find new material to bring out about that economy, from information I will be digging out of the East Florida Papers and other original documents.

 My car is packed, and tomorrow we put the rest of my stuff -- including a bookcase, a file cabinet, and my office chair -- in my husband's F-150.  This is going to be an adventure.
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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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A Little Florida History: the Midwives' Song

Today I am going to relate a tale from my own childhood, which reveals a little Florida history from the mid-twentieth century.

My aunt, Elizabeth Reed, was a public health nurse and in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, Director of Health Information for the State Board of Health, as it was known in those days.  Today it is the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.

In this capacity, she traveled around the state of Florida, making speeches, observing conditions, and otherwise gathering data on Florida public health.  One experience she had was in the Florida panhandle, in Tallahassee, with a group of midwives who served the surrounding rural area, in the 1940s.  There was a shortage of doctors in these rural areas, so these midwives were on the front lines in assuring safe childbirth.  The state of Florida wanted to assure that they used the latest in aseptic practice (handwashing, sterilizing equipment, etc.).

These women were in the main not well-educated.  The nurses who trained them used "visual aids," as in one meeting where the nurse was making the point that the infant mortality rate was still too high, and emphasizing the need for good aseptic practice.  The nurse stood at the head of the group with a jar of beans, saying that for every bean in the jar, there had been a woman or child who died in childbirth as a result of carelessness on the part of a midwife or midwives.

Just then, two women entered the meeting late, and took seats in the back of the room.  Another woman seated up front looked back and saw them.  Then she turned forward again and said to the nurse who was training them, "You see Sister A---- what just come in?  Two of them beans is hers!"

The ladies had a song they sang for what today would be called "team building."  Here are the first two verses and the chorus.  Unfortunately, I cannot remember the third verse.

The Midwives' Song

We midwives will help you
As your dearest friend,
For we are all midwives indeed!
We help build the nation,
Assistance we lend,
For we are all midwives indeed!

For we are all midwives, indeed! (Hallelujah!)
For we are all midwives, indeed!
We know what is right,
And we work day and night,
For we are all midwives, indeed!

There are babies in Heaven,
Who should be on Earth,
For we are all midwives, indeed!
They had no good midwife
Assist them in birth,
For we are all midwives, indeed!

For we are all midwives, indeed! (Hallelujah!)
For we are all midwives, indeed!
We know what is right,
And we work day and night,
For we are all midwives, indeed!
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What kind of historian am I?

That's a question I am spending some time this summer thinking about.  I am reading a book on historiography - the study of writing about history.  It is Caroline Hoefferle's The Essential Historiographic Reader, in which the author describes the various "schools" of historigraphy by discussing their history and development.  She starts with the Greeks and Romans and moves forward right up to the 21st century.

Some of the schools of historiography do not impress me, and many of them have been discredited by time and historical events - so history affects itself.  However, I have found out that I am, for one thing, a "historicist."  This school tells us we must examine the past on its own terms.  I have long been critical of "presentism" - judging the past by the standards of the present.  I have felt that the only fair way to examine history is to examine it in terms of its times.  Sure, these days we are convinced (well, most of us . . . ) that slavery was and is an evil.  But when we are talking about ancient Rome and its system of slavery, when we are talking about the events before and during the Civil War and about the causes of that war, we need to put ourselves in the ethos of those time periods.  Unless we do that, we cannot understand what the concept of slavery meant to those people, or to certain segments of the people, at that time, which means we cannot have a firm understanding of how these conditions came to exist in the first place.

Or, take the case of Prohibition, the era of the Volstead Act (1919-1933) in the U.S.  Nowadays, we are convinced that the Volstead Act was a mistake, a stupid law that did nothing to curb or eliminate excessive drinking, drunkenness, and the social toll they exact, and did everything to give rise to the modern specter of organized crime.  But when we want to examine the roots of the Volstead Act, the conditions and social movements that led up to its passage, we have to place ourselves in that time period, using the social and emotional tools that they people of the time had available.  We cannot look at it through 21st century eyes and give an accurate and reliable account of how it came about.

I arrived at this viewpoint through reading and thinking about history, and about how I would go about doing it.  So, okay, I'm a historicist.  And schools of historiography are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

I have several other books on historiography that I am going to plow through in the next several months.  I will post again on my explorations into what kind of historian I am.
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Hurry up and wait

So I have my application in to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.  My transcripts have been ordered.  I've mailed off my request for a waiver of the GRE.  I've indicated who I want letters of recommendation from.  I've submitted a letter of intent (why do I want to get into the Florida Studies program?), and I've sent a writing sample.

Now it is time to sit patiently and wait, something I'm completely incapable of!  So I'll be itching and climbing the walls until I hear.   And so it goes.
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