Suggested reading list for HIS 101

As we gear up for a new semester, it occurred to me that I should post a suggested reading list for my students. Now, I know that because of your busy schedules, most of you have a hard enough time finding the time to read required books, but allow me the indulgence of telling you what I think you should also be reading (or listening to if you have an audiobook membership somewhere).



Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.
     This classic tells the story of immigrants in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. It's      fascinating, horrifying, edifying....makes us really glad to live when we do and not back then. This book also supposedly helped passage of landmark legislation that protects all of us--the creation of the  Food and Drug Administration.
Jack Finney, Time and Again.      
      Finney uses a rather implausible time travel device to bring middle class life in New York City in the 1880s to the pages of this remarkable book. If you can suspend your disbelief on how our hero gets to the 1880s, the book will reward you amply with fabulous period detail about daily life in the nation's most important city. Students who have read this book in classes where I have required it rave about it!
 
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. 
      Steinbeck's masterpiece tells the story of a family caught up in the horrors of the Great Depression. Like The Jungle, it too makes us happy not to have lived in the 1930s. If you have never read this book, you really must. 

Humanities and the current push for "STEM" subjects

By now, every parent of a college-age or soon-to-be-college age student has heard the pundits decrying America's paucity of math-science-technology majors. We'll be left behind, they cry. The U.S. will become a has-been economy if we don't train more engineers, they warn.

This kind of talk is all very well and good, but it fails to note at least two important factors: first, not all students are going to be good at math, science, or technology-related fields; and, second, college is not meant to be vocational training. A good college education should teach students how to think, how to reason, how to make a fact-based argument, how to appreciate what has come before.

Students who major in history, political science (an oxymoron, perhaps?), literature, sociology, and other such fields learn skills that will be valuable in any occupation. They learn to read carefully to retain content, to question and keep open minds to what they may find, to research thoroughly, to pull facts and details from disparate sources to create a new argument. How can these not relate to any career anyone follows? How can these not be good for the modern American economy?

"Step foot"?

Like most college professors, I am now grading many papers. And this brings up all sorts of grammar and usage-related questions and leads me to ask again what is being taught these days? One of the new phrases I'm finding is this:

"from the time the first settlers step foot on the continent..."

Step foot? Where did this come from? And why are teachers not correcting this? It's set foot.

One can either step, or one can set foot, but it makes no sense to say that one steps foot. I am mystified where these things come from, why they take hold, and why they're not strangled immediately by teachers.

Here's another one that amazes me. "He lead the miners to the lead mine."

Is no one correcting the incorrect spelling of the past tense of the verb "to lead"? I see this a lot.  It's led.

And why does everyone these days write dates incorrectly? It's not December 17th, 2011. It's December 17, 2011. I even see college administrators do this frequently. It looks so silly with that ordinal hovering over the comma. That alone should let people know that it's not correct.

And permit me one more: there's no such word as alright.  It's two words: all right.


All right, enough from me.

Of received wisdom and turkeys

My subject today is turkeys--no, not the Thanksgiving kind. I am talking today about wild turkeys and received wisdom. Do we not usually call someone who is clueless or oblivious a "turkey"? I imagine we've all done that at one time or another.

But I was fortunate enough to catch a documentary last night on our local PBS station about a man named Joe who raised sixteen turkey eggs that he found. He managed to hatch them all, lost only three in their early months, and brought the other thirteen to adulthood. He was, in essence, their mother.

It is a truly beautifully made story about the raising of these turkeys, but aside from just being interesting, it carries a strong yet subtle message: challenge received wisdom.

Here's how: in spending every day with his brood, walking through the woods and examining the flora and fauna through their eyes, Joe learned that they were anything but stupid, anything but clueless, anything but oblivious. They had amazing instinctual knowledge and they had a language. They had distinctly different sounds for different animals they encountered. Our dismissive colloquial use of the term turkey is clearly rooted in a misconception about the intelligence of these birds.

So how does that connect with received wisdom? I often talk with students about historians' need to question historical truisms. What I mean by that term is stories like Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac, or the idea that Pocahontas saved John Smith, or that the Salem witch trials were merely the result of some girls' collective hysteria. If historians never questioned these "old chestnuts," how would we as a people ever learn the truth about our past?

So, the collective wisdom about turkeys being bird brains is obviously untrue (and we know that now because someone took the time to investigate it), neither Washington nor anyone threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, John Smith was probably spared because he acted bravely in the face of imminent death, and the Salem witch trials had more to do with old grudges and uppity women.

Question what we think we know. Maybe it's correct, but maybe it's not.

"My life as a turkey" on PBS