Past experience tells me that this is the day where we're all supposed to plaster something optimistic and upbeat on our blogs/twitter/wall and dive headlong into the new year with all the confidence that a few glasses of champagne assures us we can use to definitely get it all together this year. And that's all well and good...optimism and confidence are good factors to have in the equation.

But here's the other thing experience has taught me (in spades thanks to you, 2016): life never goes as planned, and there will always be hurdles to clear. At least a few of them will lead to face plants or otherwise non-graceful demonstrations of our adulting prowess. So I'm not going to sit here and write about how wonderful and amazing the last year has been, because in truth it was kind of a nightmare.

Here's the thing though...you usually learn more from the things that challenge you than you do from the things that go right. And to the credit of 2016, despite it bascially being a raging, out-of-control dumpster fire, all of the really terrible things did have their upsides. I learned a lot.

For instance...

The Challenge: My dad died.
And it was, as I'm sure I don't really need to explain, the worst. I've been to a lot of funerals in my life (thanks to my grandma having 12 brothers and sisters), but no amount of understanding that death is a process will prepare you to stand by the bedside of someone you love and hold their hand while they take their last breath. Nothing will prepare you to buy a cemetery plot, or call a funeral home, or write a eulogy for the first time. Nothing -- and I truly mean nothing -- will prepare you for all the little moments that deliver blows reminding you of the enormity of that loss. Like when you go to open a Christmas present and it reminds you of how dad always had his pocket knife ready, because he always insisted on cutting the tape on his presents instead of tearing the paper like the rest of us. And then you spend an hour crying on Christmas morning because you really, really could have used a pocket knife just then.

The Lesson: Things like this show you who your friends are.
When I think back on the months immediately surrounding my dad's death, there's a clear contrast between the grief and how blessed I felt to have some truly amazing people in my life. There is the friend who dropped everything to drive me to the airport, kept the cats alive, and did a million other things so I didn't have to worry because I knew my house was in good hands. There are the colleagues who took over my classes without question, allowing me to be there with my dad for his last few days, to actually hold his hand in those last moments, and plan a funeral I know he would have felt honored by. There are the friends who drove for hours just to provide hugs and tell me it was going to be okay (and let me cry on them, like a lot). You know that Tracy Lawrence song, "Find Out Who Your Friends Are"? I did. And that's as amazing as they are. Beyond that simple fact, which is kind of a big deal in and of itself, this is the first major life event I can remember really facing as an adult where I needed support, and the people around me really came through. That to me means I've learned from the past and surrounded myself with good people. This bodes well for times ahead.


The Challenge: Adulting is stressful. And way too complicated sometimes.
As I've posted about previously, my dad left a crazy complicated estate that it looks like I'll have the joy of dealing with for years to come. There are multiple parts to it in multiple states that require multiple lawyers and multiple court dates. There is currently no end in sight. The whole situation is high-stress, and it requires a higher level of adulting than I initially anticipated or was prepared for. When someone close to you dies, it seems like there should be a grace period during which you're permitted to adult at a minimal level and just deal with your grief. It turns out the reality is basically the exact opposite of that when there are a bunch of people counting on you to be the mature, responsible one in the family.

The Lesson: Things like this teach you trust, delegation and time management. Seriously.
If I had to deal with all of this on my own, I'd go crazy. I'm historically bad at delegating tasks to other people, and time management has never been my strong suit. A lot of this comes back to perfectionism, which as an academic is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing for things like thorough research, strong writing, relentless editing and the like. It's not so good when the struggle with perfectionism becomes so real that you destroy your productivity with constant second-guessing and the need to revise just one more time. Dealing with this estate has successfully destroyed the roadblocks that used to prevent me from delegating things to other people, because I no longer have that luxury. Being forced to delegate because you can't physically do it all yourself is excellent exposure therapy. You learn to choose people you trust and let them do their job. It really does make life easier once you get used to it, and it also leaves you more time for focusing on the things that truly need your attention. This is the exact reason at least one of the lawyers will get a shout out in my book ackhowledgements...thanks for dealing with all the lawyery stuff so I had time to write, Sullivan.


The Challenge: Grief is not a linear process.
This was probably my biggest take-away from 2016. Somehow I expected that once the actual death occurred, it would be a relatively straightforward (but still terrible) process of denial and anger and acceptance and then I'd be able to emotionally move on. I did go through those stages, and I did move forward, but they were not what I expected. Sometimes I see something that reminds me of my dad and I forget he's dead for a second. I'm often angry that cancer is a thing we still can't cure. I've sort of accepted that my dad fought as hard as he could and it was just his time. But these things are not linear. They overlap, curve back on themselves, and throw you for loops you didn't see coming. They will catch you by surprise and send you reeling (or into tears) when you least expect it. But you'll learn perseverance from that. And also to carry tissues.

The Lesson: Life is short. Be fearless and try things.
I found dealing with grief easier while on the road, and I was fortunate enough to be able to travel in the months after my dad's death. But there was more to it than just seeing some new things and finding distractions. Nothing will force you to confront the reality that life is short like dealing with the death of someone close to you. You will have a moment when it becomes crystal clear that you can either try the things that scare you and find out what they actually feel like, or you can sit around wondering what it would be like if you did. That is how I found myself traveling through Paris alone, watching the sun set over the Grand Canyon (also alone), and jumping out of an airplane (not alone) this summer. And all of these things were worth it. Beyond that, overcoming fears is a self-fulfilling process -- do it once, so you know you can, and you tend to keep looking for things to reaffirm that new-found sense of freedom you find when you conquer something you never thought you'd do. My dad was always very afraid to try new things, so this kind of feels like something I'm doing for both of us, and that's a legitimately special and rewarding feeling.


I have lots of friends and family members who are firm proponents of the idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Judging from 2016, I'm basically superwoman.

I will have you all know that it's Monday night, and I am working late (again). This isn't an abnormal occurrence. Partly its that this job just sometimes takes all the extra hours I can afford to throw at it, and I like working after hours when there's no one here because it's super quiet. I also tend to be kind of a night owl and do my best work after what most people consider "regular working hours" (which are not always really a thing in this profession anyway). I'm not complaining.

I've long wondered whether I was just born with night owl tendencies, or if it's something that developed from keeping the schedule my father kept when I was growing up. As I've mentioned in other posts, I grew up on a farm in California, and farming meant late hours. We never had dinner until my father was home, and it was not unusual for him to show up at home well past 9:00. I grew up with the knowledge that in the hours that passed between sunset and his truck coming up the drive way, he'd likely been in his shop at the main section of the ranch. I'd look out the window waiting to see headlights, and by the time he backed up in front of our house I was ready to race outside to meet him. Dad had a habit, which he never abandoned, of always letting his vehicle idle for a few minutes before he shut the engine off. It did not matter if this was a tractor, his truck, or (later in life) a 2000 Ford Focus. When I was little, that meant I had a solid 3-5 minutes when he pulled up to go outside and sit on his lap waiting until it was acceptable to turn off the truck and go inside. I was really good at key turning, but only on his 1978 Ford. The tractors I never mastered, beyond the art of riding on them.

Dad only had one vice. This was a man who never (and I truly do mean never) had a drink, smoked a cigarette, tried gambling, or developed any real hobbies outside of tractor collecting. After he passed, as I struggled through writing his eulogy, it occurred to me that he might be the only person I've ever known who I don't think could be called out for telling a lie. He sometimes minimized his tractor buying habit, but in his mind I'm sure everything that came out of his mouth was legit. (I asked his younger brother about this, and he confirmed that even as kids my dad was honest to the point of annoyance. Little brother never got away with anything because of it). Dad's only weakness came with yellow paint and two tracks. Looking back, I think this probably stemmed to his childhood. My grandfather preferred working with horses, but his brother bought the first tractor they ever had on the ranch. The tractor, unlike the horses or my grandfather, never put up a fuss about things.

I recently came across a few old pictures, and I think these two basically capture dad's thoughts on the matter. He patiently tolerated most things, but he literally ran toward tractors for his entire life:

It wasn't until dad had died, and I was searching through old photos for his funeral services, that I realized how much even the visual record of my childhood was impacted by his habit. There were lots of photos of him with my brother and I, but nearly all of them included tractors in some form or other. When I was little, this involved being cute and riding on tractors. As I got older it just involved being slightly larger and riding on tractors. The tractors had always been an ever-present and unmistakable part of my life, and I resented them. Few things have indicated to me how profoundly or how much like one of the recent trips back to the ranch for a mediation meeting that required entering the shop where my dad spent most of my childhood. Most of the tractors have been moved to Washington, where he spent the last ten years of his life, but the shop was just how I remembered it. It still smelled like grease and diesel fuel, dust and old metal. A yellowed note on the door in dad's unmistakable cursive handwriting felt like it might have been there yesterday. It felt like walking into a time capsule, and a million scattered memories. Somehow, that wasn't even the painful part.

The painful part was the implicit sense I carried growing up that despite his protestations otherwise, the tractors came first. I don't think he meant for it to be that way, but that was how his brain worked. Dad's collecting extended far beyond obsessive, to the point where I lost count altogether. It did not matter if the tractors ran (some did, some didn't), or if they would ever run (in truth, he had so many that he rarely finished a project), or if there was money for them (mostly there wasn't). It wasn't until I was an adult, long since on my own, that I started to wonder if there wasn't some sort of underlying mental health issue playing into the mix. Dad was very OCD, extremely anxious, and incredibly smart, but often stopped himself from starting projects for fear of how time consuming they would become. His hoarding impacted every aspect of my childhood, but his intentions - however misguided - were always in the right place. I never understood his obsession with tractors, and he never understood my disinterest or frustration. It wasn't until he died, when emails and letters started pouring in, that I learned he was internationally known as one of the foremost experts on Caterpillar tractors. I'm not sure it softened my opinions of them much, but it did help me appreciate the depths of his knowledge. The historian in me was somehow more impressed with the extensive knowledge he developed than with the actual collection itself. My brother and I took after him in different ways - him toward the tractors and the ability to fix just about anything, and me toward books and an education. Understanding for the first time that dad's tractor obsession also translated into expert-level knowledge was perhaps the first time I felt a connection with my own chosen profession of research and teaching. I'm certain dad loves this as much as the tractors.

All of my feels would not fit into one blog post. Also, this will be a fairly mushy, sad blog post. No apologies. Sometimes you have to write what you feel.

If I'm feeling extra nostalgic lately, it's because this has been kind of a crazy year by any standards. March 3rd, 2016 was my dad's 68th birthday. We spent it in the hospital with a morphine drip, saying goodbye, and on March 5th, he died. While in a lot of ways this was expected after a decade-long battle with cancer, there's really only so much you can do to prepare for the heartbreaking finality of losing a parent. There's even less you can do to prepare for managing all of the aftermath that comes along with it.

It was hard to talk about dad's impending death in front of him, so we spoke in code. Picking out a cemetery plot became "buying real estate." The hand-made coffin my brother constructed became somewhat affectionately known as "the box." The ancient Jeep that my dad had patiently restored and that we used as a farm truck for years became "the ride" after the decision was made to use it in place of a hearse.

After the funeral, while everyone else tried to go back to life as normal, I headed to California for the first time in almost a decade to meet with lawyers and begin the long process of settling my dad's estate. In addition to forcing me to return to a place I've been very successful at avoiding, it took me to one of the last places my dad had visited - a somewhat unlikely truck stop / winery / fruit stand / gas station / RV park called Casa de Fruta. There's a lot of good things about the place. They have a 24-hour restaurant with pretty good food and you can buy a bunch of different flavors of wine there. It's also a short drive from there to the lawyer's office, but costs half as much as staying anywhere else in the area.

All well and good, but Casa de  Fruta has something else going for it that my dad really enjoyed. Tractors. Old, rusty, falling apart tractors that are never going to move, much less run, again. In other words, exactly the kind my dad loved to look at and discuss endlessly.

Dad collected* tractors for most of his life. They were a constant part of my childhood, and most of my memories (and pictures) with dad involve being on a tractor somewhere on the ranch. So it was more than a little overwhelming to wander down the little paths at Casa de Fruta with their endless lines of decaying antique equipment lining both sides, and know that dad had been there, surely stopping and assessing and talking on and on about each one. This was a place that dad could not have helped but feel a connection to.

I felt strangely connected too, despite the fact that I spent much of my life trying not to absorb all of the tractor knowledge I'm sure he wanted to impart to me. In some ways, I felt more attachment to this place than to the actual ranch where I grew up. In thinking about place and how it shapes us, I guess that makes sense.

Dad was forced to leave the ranch, whether he wanted to or not. But Casa de Fruta was a quirky place he could visit when he had to travel back to California, and for a few minutes in the morning after coffee he could wander around the paths and enjoy something he loved without the stress of lawyers and lawsuits and the problematic clean up that wasn't finished during his lifetime. It also turned out, as I was informed during one recent trip back, that one of the tractors on display was in use at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo while my dad was a student there in the late 1960s. He'd found it on one trip and known it instantly, and the owners of Casa de Fruta and anyone else who would listen consequently got to learn more than I'm sure they ever wanted to about it as he described its earlier life with great enthusiasm. This is a much more pleasant way to remember dad than his final days.

Saying goodbye isn't easy, but you learn to find the moments that make you smile. Going through this process, I'm finding that this holds true for people as well as places. It's a sense that I put into practice as much in teaching and writing history - which by definition often involves a contingency of goodbyes and letting go - as much as in everyday life. In some ways, dad's sense that something could be could be worn and faded and heavily-used speaks to the way I think about practicing history. Sometimes its hard to face and just as hard to put to rest, but there's always something to learn from it.

*by "collected" I really mean "hoarded." Sorry, dad.

 I've never been one to apologize for getting emotional. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable and depends who you ask, but it is what it is. This isn't something I regularly focus on, but 2016 as a year has basically been a dumpster fire that provided me with a free license on unlimited feelings. It is not clear to me when this expires.

There is something to be said for the connection between drawing on emotional connections and the practice of being a historian. It's something I've spent a lot of time considering as I process my dissertation into a book manuscript and try to find the right balance between passionately telling the life-story of the woman I've invested my career to this point researching and letting my own emotions sink too far into purple prose. For me there's always been a deep connection between places and the emotional connections we develop to them and the way I see myself as a historian. For me, that means going to back to where I grew up, which as I've posted about, brings up a lot of conflicting emotions. I don't have any shame about having all the feels about this place.

I somehow knew, even as a child, that more than a small part of how I experienced life was very much shaped by the past. Maybe part of it was because we didn't have TV until I was 16, or the way my grandfather insisted on doing things like it was mostly still 1954. My earliest views on the world were shaped by Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy as much as they were by the fact that it was the 1980s.

But there was more to it than that. My grandmother, of whom I have very few photographs because she hated having her picture taken, came from a family of 13. Of her brothers and sisters, two never left the home they were born in, and her youngest sister, my great aunt Hazel, died there just before I turned 10. Cleaning out that house was something of an archaeological experiment, given the time the family had lived in it and the reality that they were what can only be described as hoarders - having lived through the Great Depression, they took saving things seriously.

It was in the midst of cleaning out that house that I came across a picture that fundamentally shaped the way I thought about the past, and contributed somewhat directly to my becoming a historian.

I found the picture wrapped in tissue paper, stuffed into an old cigar box in Hazel's bedroom. I assumed at first it must have been a brother - my grandmother had several relatives who served in the Navy during World War II, including a brother who died decades before I was born. I took the photograph and several others to my grandmother's house, and recall clearly asking about them. Some others she had explanations for, but this photo met with a somewhat terse response that made it clear our discussion of the subject was over.

"Hazel had several men who wanted to marry her," my grandmother informed me with a sigh. "But she never did, she just waited for that one to come back."

That was the absolute end of our talk about the matter. Several later attempts to pry for information led nowhere, and at the time I was too young to understand most of the implications. All I knew was that my great aunt Hazel died alone in her bed, having waited half a century for a man who never came home. If there was more to the story, my grandmother was careful to never share it, and by the time I was old enough to ask more questions, she was gone.

I started using the photograph in classes a few semesters ago as a way to convey to my students that individual human experiences are always at the heart of history, and that even when we discuss big topics like "World War II" we're really still talking about things that shaped the lives of ordinary people. I tell them what I know - that I have no idea who this guy is. Hazel would have been in her late teens during World War II, and the family lived about 30 miles south of San Francisco. It's conceivable she went there for a number of reasons, including volunteering for the Red Cross, which some other old papers in her things suggested she might have done. I don't know how well she knew this unnamed officer, but given the location it's likely he sailed for the Pacific Theater. Beyond that are a sea of possibilities. Maybe he was killed and she couldn't bear it. Maybe he went missing and she spent the next decades of her life hoping for an unlikely return. Maybe he did come back, but not to Hazel.

My students, inevitably, want answers, and realistically I could probably find them if I dug hard enough. But I'm not always sure that I want to. The unknowns in this story fit emotionally with the disconnect I always felt to Hazel, who rarely came to family dinners and who I'm not sure I ever heard speak a complete sentence. The mystery seems appropriate for the blank spaces I can't possibly hope to fill in for her life.

But back to the feels. Perhaps because I always felt growing up that I would never belong in the place I came from, I often found myself searching for a deeper sense of my own history. In some ways I feel that more acutely now that I've been away from this place for going on two decades and with all the legal wrangling it's tied up in, I really can't go home. There's a certain amount of clarity that comes from knowing that. Uncovering a real-life World War II mystery was one of the things that pushed me to study history as an undergraduate student, and I've carried that sense of searching for connections between place and personal history into my professional work on Montana. Perhaps the reason I connected so strongly to Virginia City in the first place, and to the story of a single woman living there, was because I felt that in telling her story, I might capture that sense of place and how it shaped a life in ways that I know I'll never figure out with my own family.  The historian in me wants to know. The rest of me prefers the mystery.

"Home" has always been sort of a sticky concept for me. As a historian, I'm interested in the role of place and space in making humans do what they do, and it probably has something to do with past experience. I have a place I grew up in, like most people, but I also have a deeply conflicted relationship with it. I have fond memories, but mostly I don't miss it. And no offense to Bon Jovi, but sometimes even when the place is still there, you can't go home.

I grew up in California, in a place that in some ways was amazing. My grandfather and great uncle, born to Sicilian immigrant parents in a tiny farming enclave south of San Francisco, worked their entire lives for the 1,200 acres they turned into Arata Brothers Ranch. During the Depression they grew pumpkins and started what can only be described as a craze. (Seriously...google it. There's even an annual festival now. I'm not going to post a link here because I sort of hate it). When the United States entered World War II, they expanded dairy operations, milking more than sixty cows twice a day, every day, by hand, working side-by-side like they did most things. My father was born in 1948, and by the time I came along he was farming hundreds of acres of hay, wheat, and barley while my grandpa and great uncle continued milking a few cows twice a day, every day, by hand still side-by-side.

Some of growing up there shaped me in the best of ways. Grandpa loved horses, and with 1,200 acres at my disposal riding all day was an option. I explored canyons and trails that sparked my imagination, collected arrowheads that hinted at a much older history, and watched a hundred sunsets over the Pacific Ocean from the back of a horse. In the summers the hills bloomed with honeysuckle and sage, blood red Indian Paintbrush and delicate orange Poppies. There were old barns where we stacked hay bales thirty feet high, and sometimes when exploring them I'd find the worn initials of some earlier visitor carved into their timbers. It was picture-perfect and beautiful, and it inspired me.

That was part of the story. There was also the part where my father was a hoarder, and the house I grew up in deteriorated severely as I got older. There was the reality that despite my grandfather and his brother remaining partners in all of their work until my grandfather's death in 2005, the rest of the family didn't always get along. But most of all there was the somehow sickening knowledge from an early age that this place would never really be home. No matter how much I might have wanted to stay there was no future for me there, so when I was eighteen I left. And somehow I knew then that no matter where I ended up (Oklahoma, I assure you, was not on the radar, but God's sense of humor deserves its own post), I wouldn't be back. Befitting the size of this property, it's not all going to fit into one blog post, so I will leave this one at the set up:

Before my grandfather and great uncle died, they sold the development rights to the ranch to an open space trust. They wanted to preserve the place they spent their lives building something. Each of them left their heirs a trust with partial rights to the land. Ironically, the ranch stayed together, but in doing so it tore the rest of the family apart. My father spent his last ten years of life unwillingly engaged in numerous legal battles over how to part with it, with few good options. My grandfather and great uncle each owned half of the ranch, but because the development rights contained a legally binding clause about the property remaining in one piece, it had to stay together. Between the property taxes and the inability to make a living farming there, it was impossible to keep the ranch, but equally impossible to sell it, because that requires both parties who took over the original trusts to agree on things. Even the California court system has now officially ruled is impossible and we have been legally declared incapable of coming to an agreement...this is the most boring family feud in the history of family feuds and formally known as Arata et al vs. Arata et al (2014). Basically, neither of can afford to buy the other out, and neither of us can afford to stay there, so the state of California has armed us with a court-appointed mediator who gets to make decisions for us. He's a nice enough guy, and definitely deserves all the money we pay him to be a reasonable human being and put up with us.

A recent mediation over the property forced me to go back for the first time in about a decade and got both historian-Laura and grew-up-there-Laura thinking about how the places where we experience life shape us. I have avoided going back for a lot of reasons, but most significantly because there's the punch-in-the-face reality of what happens to a place when it's basically abandoned. I can't really explain what it feels like to see the literally shattered pieces of your childhood in that condition, but I will share it in a later post (please try to contain your excitement and/or morbid hoarders-style curiosity). It's a place that has impacted me in the best and worst of ways, and maybe that's why I feel oddly ambivalent about it. I knew it wouldn't feel like home anymore, and not just because on this trip I was surrounded by lawyers (it turned out to be a bonding experience) and communicating in mostly starkly legal terms. ("Yes, I do see that intensive environmental remediation work is needed at Assessor's Parcel No. 081-270-020. Can this be accomplished without threatening the designated Conservation Easement Area recorded as Document No. 2004220330 in the Official Records of the County?"*)

After two full days there it's still not really clear what I accomplished, but it did affirm for me that sometimes you really can't go home. Sometimes the place you came from just isn't home anymore, and it's a done deal. It's a place that you walk around with your lawyer and in between other people fighting about things, you point out the field where you remember riding on a tractor with grandpa and great uncle what feels like a hundred years or another life ago. Or it's a place where you unexpectedly find something that reminds you of something else, a memory you'd stored away, and it makes you cry. (If your lawyer is super nice he will tell you it's okay to be sad at this juncture. If he isn't...find another lawyer**). It's a feeling you won't be able to explain, but whatever it is, it definitely isn't something you're going to come back to except in pictures. It will be okay that you feel relieved knowing that isn't the worst thing.


(*Those are real numbers and things but none of that is actually correct. My lawyer might be amused, but definitely not impressed. Sorry, Sullivan).

(**Sullivan qualifies as a "super nice lawyer").

I will just go ahead and confess here that it has taken me a shamefully long time to convince myself that it was time to start blogging again. Partly because life gets busy, and when you're a baby assistant professor (in the first three years of a new position) and heading toward the jump toward reappointment (and an upgrade to toddler assistant professor) it always seems like there's something else you could be doing. Also....life is hard, and it just gets in the way sometimes. But after a 2 year hiatus and multiple self-promises to resume, here I am, wondering what to write about. Baby assistant professors, I think, often feel a certain compulsion to always have something profound and interesting to say, but for most of us this is not a realistic expectation. It's also really subjective, which I guess is sort of the point. At some point the realization hits you that if you wait to have the perfect fit of inspiration, the blog (or article, or book, or whatever) is going to go unwritten forever. This is not the way to approach projects or life in general.

So...I'm here to admit failure at giving in to that impulse, and commit to filling this space with whatever pointless, random, imperfect, and decidedly not profound things come to mind.

As part of the Digital History class I'm currently teaching (hi guys!) I've encouraged my students to make simple bullet lists of topics they might like to blog about during the semester. It's actually kind of impressive how inspirational a simple list can be, and this was by far the most enthusiastically received topic of discussion. It got me thinking about my own list, and in a broader sense the kinds of things that we deeply and personally connect with when we write about the topics that most closely speak to us. What do you choose when you're staring at a blank screen / page / typewriter (if you're a hipster)? The list I initially jotted down includes some things from summer travels and research (fear not, enlightening commentary about my recent trip to Paris and that one time when I jumped out of an airplane are in the works), but looking back over it I found myself a little surprised at how many things I feel like writing about connect back to places I thought I'd left in the past long ago.

Admittedly, I've been feeling pretty nostalgic lately. My father died in March, and it forced me to face up to the family past in some ways I wasn't totally expecting. I grew up on a ranch in California, and while the process of settling the estate it belongs to has been kind of a nightmare, it has also pushed me to look back on where I came from in some different ways. The historian in me is always in search of personal connections that bring the past into the present. It's easy enough to do this for my students, but surprisingly more difficult to process when it forces me to consider my own experiences. The enormity of the challenge sank in a few days ago as I walked a California dirt road for the first time in well over a decade, trying to come to grips with why it hurt so much to let go of a place that never felt like home to begin with. I have wrestled with whether or not and how much to post about things like this (how many feels are appropriate for this format?) but I figure that if I'm going to encourage my students to actively seek personal connections and incorporate them into their blogs because that makes good story telling, then it's only fair that I endeavor to do the same. Leading by example...the struggle is real.

Reality of the struggle aside, it's worth it, as most (even imperfect) things are.

I woke up this morning feeling rested and encouraged. It's Saturday, the start of a three day weekend, and I have successfully survived my first two weeks as an assistant professor at a research university. I opened my email to find a recently-sent message from my department chair bearing the somewhat ominous subject line "Teachable Moment at Today's Football Game." Coffee in hand, I moved on to Facebook, where my news feed was already filling with indignant and horrified comments. Shortly after, my Twitter feed exploded. Then my boyfriend texted to ask if I was watching the news.

Today marks the first football game of the season for many colleges, including Oklahoma State University. I moved to Oklahoma with the expectation that football was going to be a way of life here. I actually have a ticket (big thanks here to the colleague who generously bequeathed it to me - I am not yet to a stage in my professional career where I can justify the expense of season tickets) to next weekend's home game. If that wasn't reminder enough, at least a dozen students were missing from my survey American history class on Friday because they are members of the marching band or were traveling to the game.

And in preparation for the game this morning...this happened.

I'm not even sure who to credit for this. I'm borrowing the version posted on www.ocolly.com, but it has since gone viral. Seriously. It's everywhere.

I understand the outrage, and the desire to make clear to these students the magnitude of the situation. I think Catherine Sweeny, OColly Editor-in-Chief, sums up the feeling behind the backlash quite well in this response:

"Is this still funny?
Maybe if you are completely ignorant of the past. But guess what? These fans are students. In Oklahoma, American history is required in elementary school, in middle school, in high school and in college.
Oklahoma State’s American history classes are packed with hundreds of students at a time. Professors lift the veil and let students know how despicably Americans treated the Indians.
These people, smiling and holding up their pistols, don’t get to claim ignorance. No students at this school get to claim ignorance.
They are knowingly making fun of victims of genocide. Who is laughing?"

Of course it's not funny. And of course the response to it has included every reaction from disbelief to confusion to anger. That's both understandable and justified. If nothing else, these students should certainly learn from the situation. I don't think, however, that this is their responsibility alone. It speaks to a bigger culture of passivity regarding history as a general subject of study and within our society as a whole, and at least to some extent to the glorification of sports rivalries as both expected and desirable. I'll probably get hate mail for this, but for me, as problematic as the picture is, it raises a more fundamental question - when have most of our students been shown the importance of caring that the past is relevant to their own lives?

Let me preface this by saying that I love my job and I'm pretty fiercely loyal to this university. No system or school is perfect, and making a career in academia also means being comfortable accepting this fact. As a very young historian in a very competitive and saturated job market brimming with talent, I feel incredibly fortunate to have any job in my field, let alone this one, which is extremely desirable and a great fit for me. It was a bit of a discovery to learn that upon arrival here, I was expected to teach American history--all of it--in a single semester. And not just "United States" history--pre-contact to the present. I have sixteen weeks (15 factoring in holidays). With three 50-minute lecture periods a week, that gives me 150 minutes--2.5 hours--a week to convey to students not only that some pretty important things happened in the past, but also what I think is the more salient and more frequently missing piece in their previous history education--that it matters. It matters to each of them individually, and it matters a lot.

I usually ask my students on the first day of class if they think history matters. Most of them half-heartedly agree that it probably does, in part because it's the first day and they're scared to indicate anything they think will incur my displeasure. Dig a little further and a few will generally admit that they think history is "boring," and they don't understand why dates matter. To an extent, I see their point. Pick a date in history, and it's a safe bet something happened then. Probably multiple things, that held different kinds of significance for lots of different people. Is it realistic to expect our students to learn, understand, and recall everything that ever happened? Probably not, and no history professor realistically expects that. The more pressing issue, I think, is that we struggle with finding effective ways to show our students that "history" isn't just "in the past" - it is and has always been lived and experienced by very real, and often very ordinary people just like them. This is a laudable goal - and a formidable one.

It's true that every professor teaching American history (not just at OSU) attempts to, as Sweeny writes, "lift the veil" and show students what happened in the past. And she is absolutely correct - they should absolutely not "get to claim ignorance. But I also don't think it's fair to attack these students, as a short overview of my Twitter feed suggests, as "racist," "stupid," "ignorant," or "uninformed upper middle class white kids." I won't even touch the last one. But I will go out on a limb here and say that I don't think any of these students rushed out of the local crafts store earlier this week with cans of orange and black paint contemplating what a great day it was to be an insensitive racist or piss off the overwhelming majority of those tuning into college football this morning. Were they horribly insensitive, grossly uninformed, and should they deal with the consequences? Yes, yes, and yes. And yes, they should take responsibility for their participation, and they should probably acknowledge its very real, very negative impact. But I would argue there is more responsibility to go around here.

In my American history survey class, by the end of the semester students will have read (assuming the quizzes, tests, and assignments I give are enough incentive to actually make them do the reading, which is of course another story entirely) somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 pages worth of textbooks. They will have listened to me talk about various topics three days a week in 45-50 minute blocks. I will show them dozens of pictures, maps, documents, and historical artifacts, and I will have stressed to them as much as I am able that the past still impacts us. And yes, they should have come into this class with some understanding that history is a thing and that it matters. I'm not excusing their conduct, or minimizing my own responsibility in making sure I do everything in my power to assure to help them learn effectively. But in many ways, as this situation demonstrates, it goes far beyond that.

Let's be realistic for a moment. My students' assigned textbook, in well over 1,200 pages, contains exactly 7 paragraphs--about 2 pages--covering Indian removal. The Trail of Tears (though it does bear the distinction of getting bold font, meaning it's a "key term" that they should pay attention to because it will probably make it onto a test), gets 1 paragraph. Though the book does clarify what happened in numbers - the "trek," as the book calls it, "was made under such harsh conditions that almost four thousand of approximately sixteen thousand marchers died on the way," this is the extent of the coverage it gets. How much do we really expect this to mean to students who often have little interest in such things, their complicated causes, and in understanding how they relate to other, equally complicated things and their causes? I'd like to think my additional lecture on the subject will fill in some of those blanks, but ultimately it's one topic in one lecture in one course that occupies a relatively small space a college career that will be punctuated by a hundred other (maybe more memorable) moments and experiences. I won't claim to know how much of what I tell my students actually sticks. I give them the best I have, but I can't force it to matter to them. I can't make them care any more than I can be made to care about football rivalries.

Since this story broke, I've seen a lot of suggestions for how the matter should be handled. Among the most common is individual identification and shaming. "Are any of them in your class?" a friend wants to know. "You should find out who they are," another suggested. I agree that these students should be held accountable, but I don't know that shaming them is a productive response. At the end of the day, they applied their understanding of history - misguided, insensitive, and inappropriate as it was - to what they felt was a symbolically relevant situation. Should they be corrected? Yes. Should they come away from this better educated? I hope so. But this is symptomatic also of their feeling lost in a much larger system that takes complicated views towards their education in the first place. Every professor knows the frustration of having large portions of their classes absent for sporting events. On Friday, I delivered what I like to think of as a very successful lecture on perceptions of race and identity in Jamestown, and a lot of my students simply weren't there to hear it. Those who are motivated enough to get the lecture notes will be collecting them along with a slew of other facts, figures, and assignments they need to catch up on next week. I can't just tell them my class is most important because realistically, that's not my decision to make for them. And, at the end of the day, their entire college experience, including school spirit and football games, is important. In some ways we can't blame them for being confused - the school itself first "liked" and then condemned their actions, and administrators admitted they simply "missed" the offensive reference at a first glance.

This is a bigger matter to consider than some overly-enthusiastic and grossly under-informed students making (hopefully) the most glaring (and public) misstep of their college careers. It wasn't so long ago that a prominent, well-respected university-trained and employed historian suggested (seriously) eliminating history classes for high school students altogether because "the facts possess no meaning for them,"  and instead teaching history only at the college level, where "students who are bright enough to be admitted to college would be able to see the relevance of the facts, and by implication history, to the world around them."* The truth of the matter is that universities value a lot of things in addition to education - and for better or worse, football is one of them. Our students (even those who don't care about football), inhabit a world where vicious (I don't think it's much of a leap to get to outright hateful in some cases) school rivalries are praised and expected. These students expressed themselves in extremely poor taste, but they are far from alone. They are not the first to take to heart that school rivalries are to be cultivated and celebrated. In a very bad way, they were expressing enthusiasm and pride. Unfortunately, these rivalries have little or nothing to do with academics. I have never seen an angry hashtag suggesting students at a rival school were learning more, or celebrating that they were learning less. Nor is this limited to college football - for instance, the open hostility between the Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers has it's own Facebook page. These students are getting attention for making the unfortunate choice to publicize their extremely poor selection of a reference - their attempt at humor failed epically, but I would hesitate to call them the most hateful fans in college football.

As educators, we cannot expect our students to care more about "the facts" than we do, and we cannot force them to find history relevant to their own lives. What we can do is be both passionate and compassionate in our teaching, recognize that our students are individuals with their own experiences and goals, and hope some of our attempts at connection rise to the top of what they take away from the much larger experience of a college education.


* See Patricia Mooney-Melvin, "Professional Historians and the Challenge of Redefinition" in James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, eds., Public History: Essays from the Field, Revised edition, (Malabar: Krieger Publishing Company, 2006), 10 - 12.