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Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe British North America developed from a landscape of religions into a nation of races over the course of the eighteenth century.This process culminated in a hot, locked Philadelphia hall in 1787, but the lessons upon which the drafters drew reached back to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and earlier to Rome. Americans had, after all, just rejected their inclusion in the British variant. If they failed to grasp the significance of their success, Edward Gibbon’s  Decline and Fall of Rome,  David Hume’s History of England,  and the tales of Robin Hood 1   served to remind them of the dangers of remote rule. Early Modern Europe possessed two empires with established Protestant populations inhabiting borders under perpetual threat. The Holy Roman Empire’s borderland Protestants included the Southwestern Germans of Wuerttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate, for whom “ cuius regio, eius religio ” offered precious little protection fro...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe I found my way to this topic via a peculiar trajectory that began along the Cam under the tutelage of Quentin Skinner, where the distinction between classical republican virtù and protestant Christian virtue first entered my consciousness.  The hybridized virtù (e) that filled the political treatises of the American Revolution/War for Independence fascinated me but were not the centerpiece of my doctoral research.  When I returned to Jane Austen as my entertainment while my second son nursed, I realized that the hybridization process took place on the pages of Miss Austen’s novels. The historiography of the American Revolution nearly drowns in examinations of Republican motherhood and patricidal rage. Austen’s heroines need not kill their fathers. They are already dead ( Sense & Sensibility ) or emasculated by poverty ( Pride & Prejudice , Northanger Abbey , Mansfield Park ), frailty ( Emma ), and vanity ( Persuasion ).  It takes little ima...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe I am as giddy as a child at the prospect of a snow day. Others fret about climate change when they see -40 windchills on the weather and can’t push the door open into a snowdrift. I think about Laura Ingalls Laura Ingalls Wilder Wilder’s memoirs and relish the prospect of stoking the fires of memory and imagination. Wilder’s books sparked my early interest in the past. Some of Wilder’s tales seemed similar to my own grandmother’s recollections of learning and teaching in a one room school house. My grandmother had a comparatively stable life on a comparatively prosperous farm in Illinois.  Laura followed Pa Ingalls from Wisconsin West in a series of tentative land claims. My mother read the stories aloud at bedtime. My father would pass through and groan every time Pa uprooted his family and chased further west in pursuit of a half-baked dream. I didn’t need the New Yorker to tell me Pa Ingalls was not the saint his daughter imagined him to be.  Even as...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe Thanks to a series of Teagle Teaching Workshops at Northwestern, the executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman , gave a lecture on “Historical Thinking and Public Culture.” Much of what he said hearkened to conversations I had at the Historical Society’s 2012 conference "Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils." As Jim said, we know people like history. The History Channel , thousands of reenactors, and millions of genealogists indicate a thirst for knowledge of the past. Derision of such historical fancy keeps doctoral candidates clothed in a veil of superiority while their bank balances dwindle. Grossman suggested a revolutionary shift in academic historical thought: dispense with the patronizing judgment and listen to what people want to learn. The lesson holds for the undergraduate classroom. Faculty ask one another, “what are you teaching?” Grossman suggests we end the obsession with ou...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe In my job as a fellowships advisor I stress to applicants that a strong application demonstrates three things: depth of expertise in a given field; breadth of interests and experiences; and the applicant’s change over time, i.e. history. The third pillar of the triad constitutes the all-important biographical element. Americans' hunger for personal history makes  Ancestry.com ’s stockholders rich and guarantees the flood of genealogists to the shores of Salt Lake. The Ball family of Lompoc, California, ca. 1894.  My sons started high school and middle school at the end of August. As I delivered my nearly­ men to the doors of their new institutions, my desire to make history from memory overwhelmed me. The hundreds of digital images stored on the family computer cried out for a chronology with which to capture the evolution of my chubby-­cheeked chappies into the skinny tweens who seek escape from their mother’s needy embrace. My compulsion has since...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe As I struggle to find the energy, focus, and drive to complete my summer writing deadlines, the opening lines of Thomas Paine’s The Crisis take on new meaning: THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. For those of us “Alternative Academics,” marked by #altac hashtags on Twitter, the summer IS the season that tries our souls.  Our tenure-line colleagues disappear into the archives and post to Facebook from glamorous destinations around the globe. At the same time we work full time and wonder whether or not to attempt CPR on the scholarly commitments we left flailing for breath during the academic year.  The difference appears less acute from September to June.  I may advise while others teach, but the strain on scholarship seems less stark then.  In the summer,...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe "Length of the average dissertation," from FlowData . This chart initiated a round of chest thumping by academic historians. Apparently we historians write the longest dissertations. Now, according to this chart, philosophers and classicists do not write dissertations, when in fact they do. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the chart is correct. What does it tell us about historians? Either we do more research than scholars in any other field (unlikely from my interdisciplinary vantage point), or we are less able to articulate our findings in a pithy manner than our colleagues in other departments on campus. When I made a snide remark about length on Facebook, my historian friends jumped to the defense of 325 page dissertations as the necessary length for a monograph. Other fields publish articles rather than books. Thus, the argument went, they can get away with less. This perplexed me. A doctoral dissertation no matter the field shoul...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation.  This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar. The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Con...