historying

Over the past three weeks or so, I’ve received a trickle of graduate school rejections and, thankfully, acceptances. Once the initial euphoria of that first acceptance wore off, the sheer strangeness of the entire process began to sink in. Applicants spend months and months working, researching, and worrying. There are the inane hoops to jump through – mountains of paperwork, re-answering the same application questions, altering document formats for different schools, and my personal favorite hoop of inanity: the GRE’s. They spend hours and hours drafting emails to potential advisors, delicately harassing their recommenders to get their letters turned in, and editing and proofreading countless personal statements or writing samples. And the entire time, they are constantly reminded of the similarities between graduate school admissions and rolling dice at a craps table in Vegas. If that weren’t enough, the most common advice an applicant usually receives about getting a PhD in history is: don’t. Unless you enjoy being unemployed.

By the end of January, the last of the applications are submitted, and applicants are left to wait. There are no other forms left to fill out, boxes to check, or essays to upload. For a day or two, I didn’t really know what to do with myself. It took me a solid week before I could watch a football game without feeling guilty that I wasn’t working on applications. This is the stage of admissions purgatory, with applicants wishing they could be a fly on the wall of a graduate admissions committee meeting. I’m sure the process varies from school to school, but I’ve always wondered just how random it is – how much depends on the order in which your application is read? Whether or not someone spilled coffee on your writing sample? Did a committee member used to date someone who graduated from your school? And would that be a good or a bad thing? These are some of the questions that skitter through your mind while sitting in admissions purgatory.

With any luck, purgatory is lifted with a magical acceptance note. With any greater luck, more than one arrives. And like flipping a switch, the lowly graduate applicant is suddenly the valued commodity. Once you finally get past “I am pleased to inform you…” you suddenly feel that switch flipped. It is liberating, joyous, and utterly surreal – to go from the position of seller, peddling yourself to various schools, to the position of buyer, as schools offer you their wares. All of that hard work, from those hours of studying in the library during college right up until you clicked SUBMIT on the last application, has finally paid off. I’m sure the stress will come later: of making a (the right) decision, of weighing financial support and programmatic or geographical fit, of accepting the reality that you are truly committed to spending the next 5-7 years  at one school laboring to obtain an elusive degree that you will uselessly cling to like a life preserver as you tumble into the deep end of an over-saturated job market.

But for now? I’m just enjoying the ride.

[As a less rambling coda, I would point anyone else in my position to Jeremy Young's extremely helpful post at Progressive Historians, "So You've Gotten Into Grad School. What Do You Do Now?" ]

With my academic blogging hat firmly in place, I joined Twitter’s ranks several weeks ago. I’d been using Twitter for several months for my own personal use, as a way to connect with a small and close circle of friends, but finally decided to open a history-ing account in order to expand into the most explosively popular social networking platform of the past year. My initial reactions?

It’s fascinating. At first, there was the frenzied rush to follow and receive updates from others in order to carve out a toe-hold in the digital humanities/digital history Twitter community. That was followed by the mildly addictive positive-feedback loop of other users subscribing to your updates as well, with each new follower adding to my chimerical sense of legitimacy. Once a base level of following/followers was established, I settled in and absorbed the distinctive pulse of the Twitter community I had joined – its customs, conventions, and patterns. I felt a lot like I was learning a new sport, (mostly) watching from the sidelines for awhile until I felt more and more comfortable with tweeting.

The patterns became clear. Tweets could be broken into several different categories (at least among those users that I follow): serious thoughts/observations/questions, links to other tweets or external items, dialogue with other users, or personal asides. The last bit (personal updates) took some getting used to, and can be somewhat off-putting to many people. Do my followers really want to know that I had a crazy metro ride home from work today, or if it’s unusually warm outside? For those users interested in the “value-add” side of Twitter as an academic tool, probably not. But it is remarkable how personal tweets can lend an engagingly human dimension to the entire process. Especially for someone in my position, who has never met the majority of the people I follow, personal tweets (in moderation) can really add to a sense of community. And given its status a social networking platform, this is obviously an important aspect of Twitter.

One of the greatest advantages for academia that I can see from Twitter is that it plugs you into a rapid-fire, real-time platform for ideas and thoughts. While this can quickly turn into a deluge of information overload, it also keeps you up to date on contemporary events, issues, and trends in a distinctively social manner. If four people you follow start talking about the same issue (for instance, Facebook’s recent Terms of Service controversy), it prompts you to learn about the issue and participate in the conversation. Instead of simply reading an article, blog post, or op-ed, you can benefit from and participate in a series of snapshot reactions. In this manner, Twitter is another development that continues to chip away at the persistent notion of an individual scholar toiling in isolation. For instance, a historian conducting research might tweet a link to a particular photograph they uncovered in the archives. Perhaps one of their followers notices something of interest in the photograph and alerts the original researcher, or ends up using that photograph for their own project. Even if you don’t have enough of a follower base to engage in this kind of crowd-sourcing, it is still an ideal platform to casually bounce around ideas, thoughts, or questions with a community of like-minded individuals.

The hardcover version of David Henkin’s The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America catches your eye immediately, as a tall and slim volume that looks not unlike a slightly oversized envelope from another century. Likely by design, the physical layout of the book certainly primes the reader for it contents. As an examination of the rise of the American postal system in the middle decades of the 19th century (roughly the 1840′s-1860′s), The Postal Age offers up a fascinating blend of intellectual, cultural, and thematic history.

Henkin lays out his book in two sections. “Joining a Network” focuses on a more nuts-and-bolts examination of the spread of the postal system, how and what people mailed, and mail in a rising urban environment. The second section, “Postal Intimacy,” takes a more cultural approach towards common letter-writing styles and cliches, the post as a lens for growing geographic mobility, and the rise of mass mailings.

As someone who often struggles with writing introductions, I was absolutely blown away at how Henkin handled his own introduction. He used the story of Anthony Burns, a captured fugitive slave who somehow managed to write several letters from his jail cell in Virginia in 1854: “[Burns] managed to use the facilities of the federal postal system, including those housed in Virginia, to engage in confidential correspondence with his abolitionist lawyer in Boston.” Of course, Henkin used the Burns anecdote as a particularly powerful springboard to launch into the introduction to the meat of his book: the “cultural transformation” over the past decades that made the story possible. If I ever manage to write such a clever introduction, I’d consider myself satisfied.

I also particularly enjoyed his second chapter, “Mailable Matters,” which discussed what people mailed and how it evolved during his timeframe of study. In particular, the history of “transient newspapers,” (periodicals sent along through the post by someone other than the publisher) was fascinating. People used newspapers to anchor the recipient in a far-off place, provide information, and even work as a covert means of relaying personal messages. Due to its lower cost compared to letters, senders would mail newspapers with “‘Cabalistic concealment,” such as making certain marks or drawing pictures in the margins in order to convey basic information.

The postal bureaucracy of course cracked down on this practice, and by 1845 Congress had passed a postal price reduction that lowered the price of letters and reduced the appeal of transient newspapers. Interestingly, Henkin chooses to glide through much of the political legislation or campaigns behind critical postal reforms (such as the 1845 reduction). At times I wanted more background beyond the passing references to political history that Henkin often uses as distant backdrop for the center stage of cultural inquiry. Who spearheaded these campaigns? Was there a regional divide in lobbying efforts (coastal states vs. frontier regions)? Economic divides (merchant vs. agrarian classes)? I’m not sure if a lengthier discussion of these issues would have bogged down the writing pace, but at times it might have been helpful.

Henkin also discusses the growing transitory movements during the middle of the century, and in particular how letters and familial correspondence played a role in morally anchoring migrant men during the Gold Rush and the Civil War. Surrounded by the debauchery of mining or army camps, personal letters from wives, sisters, and mothers became mythologized as virtual placeholders of domesticity and moral influence. In fact, contemporaries often referred to letters from home in near-religious terms, whose effects on otherwise rough and tumble forty-niners “eerily resembles a conversion experience.” Even men who had spent the previous night gambling, drinking, and carousing with prostitutes could open a letter from his far-away home and be swept up in a fit of repentance and (presumed) absolution.

Finally, the last chapter I found to be the most fascinating: “Mass Mailings: Valentines, Junk Mail, and Dead Letters.” The information presented by Henkin took me by surprise, as I had no idea the sheer scale and reach of such mass mailings. For instance, the rise of the postal system went hand-in-hand with the rise of Valentine’s Day, as a new culture of exchange grew up surrounding the day (including cruel/hilarious V-Day pranks and mock valentines). Meanwhile, I loved Henkin’s discussion of the phenomenon of “dead letters,” those pieces of post that never reached their intended recipient (due to faulty address-writing, not being picked up at the post office, etc.) These letters would sit for three months in local post offices before being sent to the Dead Letter Office in Washington, D.C. – in 1866 alone, almost 5.2 million letters ended up at this office.

Henkin wryly notes that these letters “were not quite dead, but they were certainly in critical condition.” Dead letters fascinated an American populace, and for good reason: their contents offered an incredibly intimate, almost voyeuristic, glimpse into the lives of everyday Americans. The list of items that were lost in the mail is a staggering array of oddities, including sewing machines, rattlesnake skin, and of course money of all denominations. Dead letters also revealed the inherent tension that accompanied the rapidly-expanding social worlds of everyday Americans. A letter addressed “To the big-faced Butcher, with a big wart on his nose – Cleveland, Ohio” may have worked for close-knit communities, but by the middle of the century these familiar addresses proved inadequate to meet the requirements of a national postal network. In a beautifully crafted piece of writing, Henkin writes, “Dead letters floated in the intermediate space between names and people, and between the personal recognition marked by an individually addressed letter and the impresonality of a large, mobile, and uprooted society.”

David Henkin writes engagingly, without relying on a traditional narrative format to tell his story. The volume is, to use a cliche of reviewers, exhaustively researched. The pages are teeming with specific examples and tidbits of primary research, yet it does not get bogged down by offering up footnoted research notes for their own sake. Henkin utilizes the full toolkit of the cultural and intellectual historian in order to craft a unique perspective on the growth-filled adolescent years of American history.