Alumni Voices: Jessie Swigger releases new book on Greenfield Village

We hope you're enjoying the tail end of your summer, friends of AMS! Some exciting news from one of our alumni: Jessie Swigger, who received her Ph.D. from the program and is now a professor at Western Carolina University, has just published a new book entitled “History Is Bunk": Assembling the Past at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. The book chronicles the historical development of Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The synopsis from the press:

In 1916 a clearly agitated Henry Ford famously proclaimed that “history is more or less bunk.” Thirteen years later, however, he opened the outdoor history museum Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. It was written history’s focus on politicians and military heroes that was bunk, he explained. Greenfield Village would correct this error by celebrating farmers and inventors.The village eventually included a replica of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, the Wright brothers’ cycle shop and home from Dayton, Ohio, and Ford’s own Michigan birthplace. But not all of the structures were associated with famous men. Craft and artisan shops, a Cotswold cottage from England, and two brick slave cabins also populated the village landscape. Ford mixed replicas, preserved buildings, and whole-cloth constructions that together celebrated his personal worldview.Greenfield Village was immediately popular. But that only ensured that the history it portrayed would be interpreted not only by Ford but also by throngs of visitors and the guides and publicity materials they encountered. After Ford’s death in 1947, administrators altered the village in response to shifts in the museum profession at large, demographic changes in the Detroit metropolitan area, and the demands of their customers.Jessie Swigger analyzes the dialogue between museum administrators and their audiences by considering the many contexts that have shaped Greenfield Village. The result is a book that simultaneously provides the most complete extant history of the site and an intimate look at how the past is assembled and constructed at history museums.

Go forth and buy the book here!

Alumni Voices: Mike O'Connor

Since earning his Ph.D. from the UT American studies program, Mike O’Connor has taught U. S. history at universities in New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. He has published articles in the scholarly journals Contemporary Pragmatism and The Sixties. While at UT, Mike’s writing was featured in the Austin American-Statesman and he wrote a weekly column for the Daily Texan. One of the original bloggers on the U.S. Intellectual History site, he later founded (with several others) the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. His book, A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism, will be out later this month.How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?It took me many years to realize that my winding intellectual path was fundamentally focused on one theme: the influence and expression of philosophical liberalism in the United States. Before I came to UT, I took my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy. Since graduating from the American studies program, I have been teaching US history. My book tells the story of the changing debate over the role of government in the national economy, in order to contest the contemporary conservative narrative that suggests that the nation was “founded on” the principles of laissez faire. As such, it engages with economics, politics, history and public affairs. I’ve even published an article on Star Trek. Though these projects might seem unrelated, all of them, I now see, have served as vehicles for my attempt to understand, analyze and explain the influence of liberalism in American thought, culture, politics and economics.In order to get at this question, I needed to synthesize the insights and perspectives of many different disciplinary approaches. That sort of eclecticism is something that I cultivated during my time at the University of Texas. The AMS program gave me both the tools and the confidence to pursue the particular questions that sparked my interest, and to reimagine academic disciplines as inviting resources rather than forbidding boundaries. Without the interdisciplinarity that I learned in the department, I would not have been able to recognize the coherent intellectual program at the root of my various disciplinary forays.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?I have so much advice! Pretty much all of it stems from things that I gradually learned both during and after school, but wish that I had been able to figure out a little earlier in my graduate career. Hopefully, today’s students are more savvy than I was, and don’t need to be told any of those things. But just in case, here are my nuggets of wisdom, such as they are:

• Start thinking about your life after graduate school now. I decided to get my Ph.D. after working as an adjunct for two years. I thought I was getting a better credential so that I could keep doing the same job in a more stable and permanent way. Seven years after graduating, staying in the profession has necessitated three moves (and counting) to different states. That stability and permanence has eluded me. I have lots of friends in the same situation; they are smart, accomplished people who are great writers with good projects. If you decide to pursue academic employment, be aware that the odds are that you will wind up in a similar situation. (The number of people who think that they are talented enough to avoid that fate is much greater than the number of jobs.) Consider doing something else. But since chasing that dream is what I know about, any advice that I have is directed at those who wish to move in that direction.
• If you decide that you do want to pursue a permanent academic position, be aware that such jobs are rare in American studies. If you’re thinking that your interdisciplinary work qualifies you for jobs in another discipline, remember that to get such a position you have to beat out people who actually have a degree in that field. History, for example, might seem pretty similar to American studies, but from the historian’s perspective the two are worlds apart. You cannot assume that the content of your work makes you relevant to those who work in other fields. You need to “talk the talk.” Actively participate in your secondary field or subfield by taking its classes, reading its journals, attending its conferences, and the like.
• It is unfortunate but true that your CV is a scoreboard. If there are not enough points on it—in the form of fellowships, published articles, national conference presentations, strong recommendations from prestigious senior faculty and, increasingly, a book contract—it is unlikely to make the first cut for any job search. (For U.S. history jobs, which is just what I happen to know about, a typical tenure-track job opening will get 200 applicants.) From a very early point in your graduate career, everything that you do needs to be focused on accumulating those points. If your course papers cannot serve as the basis of dissertation chapters or published articles, then take different courses. You should have a dissertation topic before you start reading for oral exams, because a list that you read that doesn’t help you prepare for your dissertation represents a lot of misspent time. Encyclopedia articles and book reviews score very few points but take up a lot of time that you could use on other things. Avoid them. It is, in my opinion, a basic unfairness of academic life that the things that will put points on your scoreboard tend to go to the people who have gotten them in the past. You can’t fix this injustice, so your only hope is to try to be one of the people who benefit from it.
• Network both inside and outside of UT. The American studies program allows you tremendous flexibility to interact with faculty all over campus. Take advantage of it! But interdisciplinary work can sometimes lead to very specific topics, and the best connection you need to make might be someone far away. Don’t be afraid to pursue such connections by reaching out to those you do not know. In my experience, academics are surprisingly receptive to those who share similar interests. I have found that, for example, senior scholars are often willing to join a conference panel proposed by a graduate student, especially if the conference itself is one that they wanted to attend anyway.
• The networking consideration leads to a related point: use the Internet. As a graduate student, I connected over email with eight other people from around the country with an interest in American intellectual history. Lacking institutional support, we started a blog. Within a few years, we were putting on a national conference for 125 people that was written up in the New York Times. Today our little blog has morphed into a legitimate academic organization that mediates the vast majority of my intellectual life. Blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter feeds and other venues can help you meet people and root yourself in a given intellectual community.

I really enjoyed being part of the American studies department at UT. It provided me with a lot of freedom to grow into the scholar that I wanted to become. The department and its faculty offer tremendous opportunities to achieve the same thing for yourself. Good luck!

Alumni Voices: Angie Maxwell, Asst. Prof. of Political Science, University of Arkansas - Fayetteville

We're pleased to share with you this conversation with Dr. Angie Maxwell, who received her Ph.D. from the Department of American Studies in 2008. Dr. Maxwell is the Diane D. Blair Professor of Southern Studies and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her new book is The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness (UNC Press, 2014). How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?I landed in a political science department which, at times, feels very far removed from my training and my natural curiosity. Data sets, hypotheses, and statistics software were not my tools in my days in Garrison Hall. But the questions I ask always percolate from my American Studies background—questions about identity and the imagined space of the South. I’ve just started a new book that considers the impact of what I’m calling “The Long Southern Strategy” on white southern distinctiveness. Whereas political scientists have seem consumed, at least so far, with locating the origin of southern realignment with the Republican Party in the second half of the 20th century, I see the shift as a movement that extends beyond the initial exodus of white male voters from the southern Democratic Party. And like most American Studies scholars, I’m fixated on the long term effects of an effort that was not limited to race-baiting, but rather a broader pitch of us vs. them, with the them being African Americans or working women or religious non-believers, etc. Professor Abzug once told a room of graduate students that American Studies folks circumambulate a question or an idea. They place it in the middle and then they look at it from every possible angle until they have enough perspective to say something useful. I’ve never forgotten that image, and it guides my interdisciplinary reading habit, which is, first and foremost, the most important demand of the discipline. American studies closes no doors, but seeks insight from any and all sources. My UT professors exemplified that in their teaching and their research, and I am still learning from their example.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?Three pieces of advice (solicited but not necessarily wise…) that I wish someone would have given me.

1. Take classes outside of the humanities. I had the extreme good fortune of studying under such legends as Elspeth Rostow (LBJ School of Public Affairs), Roderick Hart (Communications), and Walter Dean Burnham (Government). The reading and the work stretched me intellectually and forced me to confront both methodological strengths and limitations. At their core, each discipline has a different take on proof and on the production of knowledge. The “truth,” as American Studies scholars know well is somewhere in the middle. But that becomes clearer the farther you wander from your intellectual home.
2. Soak up your time with your professors. If they are in the American Studies department at UT, then they are the best in the business. They have put big ideas on paper. And that is not a small thing. Seek their advice, but don’t waste their time. Listen. Be open to criticism. Allow them to pick apart your ideas and then put you and your project back together. The finished project will be better than you could have imagined, and the process itself will sharpen your mind and amplify your scholarly voice. Thank them.
3. Be kind to and supportive of your cohort. Celebrate their successes. Truly interdisciplinary thinkers are not as easy to find as it may seem when you have the luxury of being surrounded by them in graduate school. In fact, you may never “fit in” quite as well anywhere else. So no matter where you end up geographically, they will be your community, and you will rely on them as colleagues and need them as friends.

Alumni Voices: Siva Vaidhyanathan Writes on Academia in the Neoliberal Age

Today, we offer to you a must-read about the value of academia in a neoliberal age. UT American Studies Ph.D. alumnus Siva Vaidhyanathan writes on his entry into higher education and "the calling" of education. We've pasted an excerpt below but be sure to read the whole piece here.

I explained that I was back in school to figure out how I could learn to write books. I had bigger and different questions in my head than my current writing outlet would accommodate. And while I had no interest in being a professor—it was the family business, and I had been running from it for years—I had also spent weeks making use of the office hours of professors who had written books I admired, like Stott. I needed a road map.

“Why don’t you apply to graduate school in American studies?” Stott suggested. I listed all my excuses. But Randy Newman’s piano seemed to taunt my objections as soon as I voiced them, rendering them harmless; what chance did a mundane litany of half-formed career complaints really stand against the day’s unlikely sound track of ordinary American strivers triumphing against formidable odds? I didn’t know it at the moment, but I had answered the calling.