{"id":115,"date":"2017-06-08T15:17:45","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T15:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/?p=115"},"modified":"2017-06-09T20:36:25","modified_gmt":"2017-06-09T20:36:25","slug":"my-autobiograpy-as-a-historian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/uncategorized\/my-autobiograpy-as-a-historian\/","title":{"rendered":"My Autobiograpy as a Historian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twelve<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m twelve years old, on the top deck of a double-decker bus, riding into the city with my younger brother and mum.\u00a0 As we get close to our destination, I see a squat brick building that we\u2019ve passed many times before without me paying it much attention.\u00a0 Today, however, there\u2019s a line of people spilling out its front door and far down the street.\u00a0 I ask my mum what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

\"Newspaper<\/a>
A newspaper reporting the strike<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a soup kitchen for the miners,\u201d she tells me.\u00a0 \u201cThey\u2019re starving.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m appalled.\u00a0 I know the miners\u2019 strike is happening; I know that Margaret Thatcher is trying to break the unions.\u00a0 I\u2019ve watched the news with my parents \u2013 the strike is everywhere, on every channel, in every newspaper.\u00a0 Thatcher knows, I realize, that this is happening.\u00a0 And she doesn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know about class or power or structural inequality when I\u2019m twelve, but I do know that my family is very much like the miners\u2019 families, and that if Thatcher doesn\u2019t care about them then she doesn\u2019t care about me.\u00a0 And I can feel in my bones that she\u2019s wrong not to care; she\u2019s deeply, wholly, thoroughly wrong.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nineteen<\/strong><\/p>\n

An odd thing has been happening in my classes at the university.\u00a0 The professors, who are almost all men, only talk about men in lecture.\u00a0 The books we read are written by men and only talk about men, too.\u00a0 I am utterly baffled by this.\u00a0 Where are the women?\u00a0 Logic tells me they existed, but my history books do not.<\/p>\n

I go to the university bookstore and I browse the shelves.\u00a0 I find In Search Of Our Mothers\u2019 Gardens<\/em><\/a> by Alice Walker and I buy it because it\u2019s clear it\u2019s about women.\u00a0 In those pages I find the history I\u2019ve been looking for, and words for things I\u2019ve experienced but haven\u2019t been able to describe.\u00a0 I share the book with all of my friends, and we pass it around between us in wonder.<\/p>\n

The professor who teaches a course on colonial New England assigns Laurel Thatcher Ulrich\u2019s Good Wives<\/em> for us to read.\u00a0 He opens discussion with, \u201cWell, this is just pots and pans history, isn\u2019t it?\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m a first-year student, so I don\u2019t object.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Twenty<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a>
Newsweek, January 1, 1968<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My friend Charlotte and I discover, hidden away in a rarely-visited corner of the library, a treasure trove of Life and Time and Newsweek magazines from the 1960s.\u00a0 We gather handfuls of them and take them to the table that we\u2019ve mentally claimed as ours for the year, spreading them out in front of us.\u00a0 A lot of them are about Vietnam, and the young men looking out from the pages of the magazine are exactly the same age as us.<\/p>\n

I flip through the pages and I try to imagine what it would be like to be told I was going to war the next day, or the day after that.\u00a0 I can\u2019t take it in except in as much as my heart hurts and I feel for these people, separated from me by thirty years.\u00a0\u00a0 The past isn\u2019t dead to me; the past is vibrant and present in that space between Charlotte and I, the magazines, and the table.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Twenty-One<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m in a class about the African-American Civil Rights Movement.\u00a0 For homework, we\u2019ve all read a document from Eyes on the Prize<\/em> <\/a>in which Martin Luther King, Jr. talks about the needs of young, unemployed, single, black men in Chicago in 1967.\u00a0 I lean over to Charlotte and whisper, \u201cWhat about the young, unemployed, single, black women in Chicago?\u201d<\/p>\n

She gives me a knowing look, and immediately it\u2019s like we\u2019re children in church trying to stifle laughter.\u00a0 The professor notices \u2013 it\u2019s a small seminar with ten other students \u2013 and asks me if there\u2019s anything I\u2019d like to share with the class.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve changed a lot since my first year.\u00a0 I\u2019ve lived abroad for three months; I\u2019ve tracked down more and more books about women and gender; I have the vocabulary to state my case and anger to fuel my words.\u00a0 \u201cWhat about the young, unemployed, black single women in Chicago?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

My professor picks up Eyes on the Prize<\/em> and throws it at my head.\u00a0 I duck and he misses.\u00a0 \u201cI teach one minority group already,\u201d he says.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t have to teach any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Twenty-Three<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a teaching assistant in an American Indian History class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It\u2019s a month since my own graduation with a BA, and now I\u2019m teaching students things that I only really understand because I read the book a week before they do.<\/p>\n

\"Holton<\/a>
Holton Hall, UWM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Someone asks a question.\u00a0 I try to answer, but get something wrong, and another student points this out.\u00a0 I thank them and say, I don\u2019t know about that part of things, but I will find out.<\/p>\n

The student nods, satisfied, and I realize, oh my god, I love this<\/em>.\u00a0 I love teaching.\u00a0 I love college students.\u00a0 I love making complex subjects understandable.\u00a0 I want to do this forever.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

So I do.<\/p>\n

That phrase masks the weight of a multitude of experiences \u2013 GRE exams, financial pressures, students questioning grades, difficult classes, grant proposals, research trips that scare me half to death, the challenges of my own mental health, and four years spent passionately pursuing political activism on the side. I interview for the job I will eventually hold at the AHA in Seattle and can only go because my friends pool their money to pay for my hotel room, and another friend gifts me with enough frequent flyer miles to get there.\u00a0 When the time comes, I struggle to afford the weighted paper on which the graduate college expects me to print my dissertation.<\/p>\n

But I write, and I carry Alice Walker with me.\u00a0 I research, and I look for the women who matter so much but who left so little behind.\u00a0 I teach, and I try to convey what it is to be twenty in 1648, and 1776, and 1830, and all the years between.\u00a0 When my students ask questions I remind myself it is my job to be wholly unlike my own professors, so I say \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d and I find things out.<\/p>\n

I teach my students that there is no such thing as objectivity \u2013 that we are all the sum of the influential events in our lives, and I ask them to write their autobiography<\/a> as a historian, to winnow out the things that shape how they approach the past.<\/p>\n

And then it\u2019s summer, and I write my own autobiography, and I smile to think of the books in my office, weighing down shelves with all the stories my professors never thought to teach.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve replaced those historians now.\u00a0 And it feels so very good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twelve I\u2019m twelve years old, on the top deck of a double-decker bus, riding into the city with my younger brother and mum.\u00a0 As we get close to our destination, I see a squat brick building that we\u2019ve passed many times before without me paying it much attention.\u00a0 Today, however, there\u2019s a line of people spilling out its front door and far down the street.\u00a0 I ask my mum what\u2019s going on. \u201cIt\u2019s a soup kitchen for the miners,\u201d she…<\/p>\n

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