The book I want to write

I read a fantastic book this week called Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America by Thomas Hietala. I’ll have a review up for it soon, but what I want to talk about here is how inspiring this particular book was for my own writing. About halfway through the book I started thinking to myself “this is the book I want to write.” If I could communicate half as clearly as Hietala, I would be a happy writer. And it’s not just style that impressed me. Hietala successfully challenges the idea of manifest destiny, one of the major American national stories (or myths, as it turns out), and in the process overturns a number of prominent interpretations. Hietala’s conclusions seem inescapable, as if they were simply lying on the ground waiting to be picked up like placer gold at Sutter’s Mill,  but formulating them no doubt required an enormous amount of legwork and an intimate familiarity with his subject.

It is obvious from his footnotes and quotations that Hietala read widely in both primary and secondary sources, but what really struck me is how he manages to engage the political and diplomatic culture so effectively. We’re not just told that the expansionists desired more land for farms. This desire is itself motivated by a particular conception of the ideal society – a thoroughly Jeffersonian understanding of political economy – that infuses especially Democratic action in the period. The Democrats wanted more land to make sure that the perils of British industrialization, like rampant pauperism and deplorable working conditions, didn’t migrate to American shores. Though this yeoman farmer ideal was substantially undermined by chattel slavery and the aristocratic nature of Southern landholders, it remained a powerful ideological trope. What excites me so much about this is the fact that his deep engagement with the literature allows Hietala to construct a cohesive conceptual worldview in which to set his narrative.

Hietala also manages to integrate the story of domestic racism, both Northern and Southern, into his narrative in such a way as that it takes on a crucial explanatory power. Hietala traces the consequences of this racism thusly: Democrats played on Northern racism to convince them to support the annexation of Texas, with the theoretical consequence that African Americans would be drawn to the new territory and eventually emigrate to Mexico. While this theory was ludicrous and had no predictive power, it did help President Tyler annex Texas, and foregrounds the power of Northern racism.

In short, this book facilitated a watershed moment for me, a moment that quickly and thoroughly changed my impression of a major chapter in American history, and will likely influence how I think and write about the period for the rest of my academic career.

Reading, Reading, Reading

Last semester I only took two classes. Granted, one of them was a seminar for which I devoted an enormous amount of time to primary research, but I still only took two. This semester I decided to take three courses. None of them are research-based courses, but each of them have assigned one or two books per week. I did the math. Total books for this semester: 46.

I feel a little silly. Not only did I choose to come to graduate school, but I chose to take these three courses. I knew that if I wanted to finish my degree on time, I would have to take three courses during at least one semester. But I didn’t anticipate this. I’m no speed reader, so each week’s reading takes me between twenty and thirty-five hours to accomplish. I remember writing on this blog last semester that I felt slightly anxious when I wasn’t reading. This feeling is now so pervasive that I have taken to just carrying around a book with me at all times in case I have a few minutes to read. My weekends are essentially one-book-per-day marathons. Practically all I do is read.

And then I remember that I did choose this. As I was preparing to complain about all of my reading the other day, I realized that I get to read some of the best scholarly literature covering some of the most interesting events in our nation’s history. My job is something that other people can only afford to do in bits and pieces, in their spare time. And I get to interact with like-minded people and talk about these books. Even though it is true that grad school in history (especially this semester) is like drinking out of a fire hose, I’m still glad to be doing it.

What I learned this semester, part 2

Reflection is a funny thing. I don’t have any idea how our minds decide what to hold onto and what to forget (though I’m sure there’s some good psych/neuro research on salience that I should probably read), but at a certain level all reflections are inaccurate. In the past seventeen days, which coincides with the time between this post and part 1, I have probably forgotten important details that would help me reflect more accurately on the semester. Oh well. I’ll continue the numbering from the previous post:

4. Big projects are just little projects in disguise. I think feeling overwhelmed is a normal and necessary part of graduate school. The sheer volume of reading required on a weekly basis seems staggering at first. The idea of writing several twenty-page papers feels like a smooth, steep rock you’re being asked to climb. But the key to beating the feeling of being overwhelmed is to look at big projects as a bunch of small projects. For my big research paper this semester, I knew there were going to be three phases: research, writing, and revision. Each of these were further subdivided into tasks that needed to be completed, because the research I was doing was pretty intense and required a lot of work. So I further subdivided into primary and secondary sources, and then made tasks by source. Rather than say to myself, “I need to get my secondary source reading done in two weeks,” I would say, “I need to get Samuel Flagg Bemis read in the next three days.” I know this is far from unique, but the approach of breaking projects into discrete amounts of work saved me from feeling like a totally unfit grad student this first semester. 

5. Days off, though infrequent, are mind-saving. I didn’t plan to take many days off this semester, and for the most part that was true. I worked over the Thanksgiving break and passed up lots of opportunities to hang out with people in order to study. But at certain points, after fairly intense weeks of studying, my mind told me that I needed a break. It wasn’t a conscious thing, where I looked over the work I needed to do and decided that I could survive a night without working. It was sheer mental exhaustion. When I stopped being able to decipher words on pages, it was time to give it up and sleep or watch a movie. I almost always came back the next day with increased focus and drive, and most of the time made up any ground I had lost to taking time off.

6. Sleep is absolutely, fundamentally crucial. I was good at sleeping this semester. I know enough about myself to realize that my productivity takes a sharp, sharp turn for the worse when I am not properly rested. No amount of caffeine can turn my sleepy self into a productive student. So I decided from the outset that I was going to resist the urge to run all-nighters in a pinch or work late into the night and wake up groggy the next morning. I was successful in this endeavor, not pulling a single all-nighter, and only working past midnight on one occasion when I was really in the zone while writing a paper. The key to this was planning – how much work can I reasonably get done before 10pm on a given day? How long will it take me to read this book given its density and page count? How effectively can I use my commute to study? Getting at least eight hours helped me to have lots and lots of productive days in a row, and probably helped me keep from getting sick (at least until the semester was over – I’m just getting over a pretty nasty cold that started the day after I turned in my last paper). 

I have more to reflect on, so see part three of this post for the rest of the list.

What I learned this semester, part 1

I learned a lot this semester. It’s not quite over yet, but I thought it might be a good idea to reflect on it before December turned into January and I was right back in the thick of things again. I want to be organized, so I’m going to use the finely-tuned method of numbering. As the title of this post suggests, this is the first of at least two posts about what I learned this semester.

1. Discussion is the best way to learn. Both of my classes this semester contained a strong discussion/critique component, and both classes pushed me to conceptualize material in new ways because of these discussions. Not only do various people have different ways of approaching material, but they also glean different insights and have different critical frameworks. In practice, this means that reading a book by myself and not discussing it leads to a much less thorough understanding than reading a book and discussing it with others. This is also true in my research-based class, where my own work was read and critiqued by my professor and classmates. They picked out things in my writing that I said poorly, did not fully explain, or needed to clarify, in a way I never would have been capable of seeing my own work. They pushed me to think deeply about the impact of my thesis and connect it with broader themes in American history. In short, their critical feedback and discussion made my paper much, much better than it would have been on its own.

2. Discussion can be painful. Even though #1 above is true, this doesn’t mean the process was always comfortable or enjoyable. When I received the first round of feedback on my paper, in seminar, and listened to my classmates and professor intelligently dismantle key parts of my painstaking labor, it hurt. As I mentioned in another blog post, I couldn’t really look at the paper for the better part of a week after that day in class. But after “getting back up on the horse,” so to speak, I found that their comments and criticism had the potential to take my work beyond normal “schoolwork” and into the realm of “scholarship.” That was (and is) an exciting possibility. The same is true for my colloquium. I have taken positions in that class which reflected my ignorance or perhaps my naiivete. Some of these positions have been firmly challenged by my classmates, causing me to rethink my ideas about history and historical actors. This process can be incredibly unpleasant at times, leading me to come home from this class feeling totally disenchanted and embarrased for my grade-school views. A few days later I try to think through the issues again and find that I have either internalized the critiques or created a decently rational defense for my original position. Either way this is a positive thing, and could only happen through the discussion process.

3. Using available resources is crucial. One of my favorite things about being a graduate student is the fantastic level of institutional support I receive. I’m not talking about money, but rather the dedication of people all over the university to make sure my endeavors are successful. Case in point: the library. I met with the “History Librarian” in the early stages of my paper to talk about sources and go over the library’s holdings. Not only was this guy (Elliot Brandow) a great source of information about the library, but he was genuinely committed to the success of my project. He helped me get setup with the microfilm machine (which I might talk about in another post – I spent many, many hours in front of it) even though it wasn’t his area of the library, and kept his eye out for sources even after our meeting was over. In a different vein, Boston College also provides an entire house for graduate students, including several study rooms, free coffee, and some recreation activities. I studied there quite often and availed myself of the pool table with other grad students. 

Stay tuned for part two of this post, coming soon. 

Procrastination

There are few things more fulfilling in life than getting good work done. I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes from turning in an assignment or getting to the end of a book. It’s almost as if there’s a built-in self-congratulatory mechanism hard-wired into our brains or something (I’ll have to ask my wife, the bad-ass neuroscientist, if this is true). I feel a sense of accomplishment in even writing that sentence, as it had not three but four hyphenated words in it. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that before.

On the other hand, I also find an immense pleasure in procrastinating. I have two very large papers due in the next couple of weeks, only one of which is anywhere near completion (full disclosure: I haven’t even started the second one yet). And yet I’m sitting here typing away, apparently impervious to the demands on my time that only a week ago seemed like a crushing burden. To be fair, the due date for one of my papers was pushed back by a week, so I do actually have quite a bit more time to complete it. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be pushing myself just as hard as I did near the beginning of the semester, where any down time was reading time, where deadlines were actually life-threatening, and where anxiety constantly spurred me to work straight through weekends.

It could be that getting this close to the end of the semester I find myself comparing what I have left to do with the overwhelming amount of work I have already done. I haven’t actually counted my “pages read” for the semester, but as I have now read a total of 15 books averaging 200 pages, 3000 pages for the semester isn’t a terrible estimate. 3000 pages! That’s both insane and impressive, far beyond what I imagined I could handle. The “measly” 250 pages I have left to read for the semester seems like a drop in the bucket, like a non-entity, like an afternoon’s respite. This isn’t true, of course, but it’s a nice little flight of fancy to indulge in on a Friday afternoon near the end of the semester. Writing 20 pages, on the other hand, is no small feat, and I should be scared about that. But I’m not. Why? I have no idea. Maybe because it’s a historiography paper (a review of current historical trends and opinions rather than in-depth research). Maybe because it’s not due for two weeks. Or maybe because I’m anxiety-ied out.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to the semester being over, but I’m also enjoying these few, stolen moments of respite from a very busy (and scarily short-feeling) semester. I never thought reading the news could feel like such a treat.

Impostor Syndrome

At one point or another I am sure Impostor Syndrome strikes just about every single person in graduate school. For me, it really hit this week during a class discussion about the lead-up to the Vietnam War. First, the book wasn’t really even in my particular century of specialization. Secondly, I know very little about Vietnam (aside from what I learned in the cursor American History survey I took in college). I could follow the book pretty well, but it was a rather in-depth study of cultural attitudes of Americans toward Vietnam and vice versa from 1919-1950 and assumed quite a bit of knowledge on the part of the reader. That’s fairly standard with scholarly monographs, especially research studies like this, but it can still be intimidating for someone who is not very well versed in the period or geographic area of the work.

Add to this the fact that at least two, if not three of my five classmates were currently enrolled in a class on Vietnam and had been discussing things quite similar to this book for the past ten weeks of the semester. They obviously knew more than me about the actual conflict, about its causes, and about the general scholarly interpretations generally ascribed to the war. I realized this before the class began, thankfully, and so was determined to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and let them uncover the mysteries that I had missed in the book. 

By now I’m sure you know that is, in fact, the opposite of what happened. I started off okay – I had a few good points about the author’s particular aims in the book – but then I started musing on a question posed by another student about whether the influence of communism in the region was more important than the author portrayed it. About ten words in I realized I was out of my depth, but, lacking the urge to just give up, I plowed ahead. My somewhat nonsensical ravings (about differences between the various communist movements in Russia, China, and Vietnam), probably reflected my undergrad-level understanding of the topic. My classmates showed significant restraint by not shoving the interpretation right back in my face, preferring instead to pretend like I hadn’t spoken and continuing on with their higher-level discourse.

I contined to feel like a dope through the rest of the class. I would think about opening my mouth when I had some pithy statement, but did not for fear that I would come across as hopelessly stupid and would actually get called out on this occasion. It was stressful, and uncomfortable, to sit there and feel like I didn’t belong there – like I was an impostor. My only consolation is that everyone I know in grad school has felt like this at one time or another. So, just like everyone else, I’ll keep going and hope that the instances get fewer and further between.

Dealing with criticism

A little more than a week ago I mentioned that I had turned in a big paper and was anxiously anticipating the feedback I would receive about it. If I’m being honest with myself, I was pretty pleased by what I had written – twenty-five pages of text with exhaustive footnotes and a decently cogent argument. In less than two months. And then it got ripped apart – politely – by my professor and the five other members of my class in some sadistic ritual called the “workshop method.” I sat and scribbled furiously, trying to take in their criticisms while disallowed to utter any words of defense for my paper. My professor went last, and his criticisms were certainly not least. When it was finally my turn to speak, I prattled nonsensically for a few minutes about a minor point my professor made, and then demurely allowed the conversation to drift to the next paper under discussion. I was crushed. All of my hundreds of hours of work on this paper seemed to be totally swept aside in the space of forty minutes. I seriously considered burning a copy of it in effigy that night. One of my fellow students, perhaps realizing that I had taken the criticism a little more personally than I should have, sent me a very complimentary email and assured me that the changes he and others had suggested to my paper were surface issues – the core of the paper remained strong. I struggle to articulate how important this gesture was to me.

To be fair, their feedback was excellent. There were parts of my paper that either didn’t make sense in relation to the whole or were simply confusing. I did not articulate my thesis forcefully enough or elucidate why my conclusions really mattered in the grand scheme of Early U.S. history. I apparently took on the authorial voice with such facility that my professor was unable to tell whether the subject of my paper (John Quicy Adams) or myself were speaking at certain points. This was particularly problematic when JQA was in an anti-Catholic or semi-racist frame of mind – was I saying these bigoted things, or was I presenting JQA’s thoughts? Of course it was the latter, but the confusion of authorial voice is kind of a big deal in those situations.

Two days after the seminar session, I tried to look at my paper. I tried to read the five single-spaced pages of feedback my professor prepared for me. I tried to see the structural issues and brainstorm solutions to a recurring phrasing problem. But I could not. I was still too close to it. I was still shell-shocked. So I put it aside and worked on something else. Reading about middlebrow Americans’ conceptions of Asia (which inspired the two-part series on my grandfather) occupied my attention instead. I tried to pull it out again two days later and get to work revising it. I still couldn’t do it. Looking at my professor’s notes still stung. 

I’m now just one day further on – approaching a week since the “workshop” – and I think I might be getting close to what I’m going to call “emotional readiness.” The sting is subsiding, replaced by a nagging desire to dig into the revision process. I was afraid I might not get here, that the sting would stay and the revision process would be a total chore. It’s still going to be a lot of work. But I’m almost at the point where I can throw myself at it wholeheartedly. When that happens, I’m sure the critique process it going to appear more like a collaborative exercise. My fellow students and my professor have essentially provided a map of improvements that will elevate my work from a middling term paper to something of hopefully publishable quality. We can work together, so to speak, to create something much better than I would have been able to create on my own. And I think that’s the whole point.

On writing

I’d like to say that I have been working non-stop, with full attention, for the past seven-plus weeks. Of course this isn’t true, but it would be nice. I read all the time, and just about anywhere. I regularly get good reading done on the train. This isn’t terribly surprising to me. I practically came out of the womb reading. Watching too much TV wasn’t an issue for me as a kid; the problem was staying up all night finishing the book I was reading. But writing is a different story. I feel like my capacity for writing ebbs and flows, such that it sometimes feels really fickle. Some people apparently think this has to do with “finding your muse,” but somehow this rings false to me. Maybe this reflects the difference between creative writing and academic non-fiction writing. I do almost exclusively the latter. Waiting for inspiration to come down from on high seems like a pretty poor way to plan, and when I’ve got a looming deadline for a twenty-five page paper (today, in fact), this waiting turns into worrying, which then descends into panic.

When “the muse” does arrive, however, writing often flows so naturally you’d think you were born to be a writer. Words begin to effortlessly populate the page, and before you know it you’ve got five more pages than you did two hours ago. This happened for me last night. I started writing at 9pm. Before I knew what had happened, it was past midnight and my paper was complete. By 1:45 I finished my first complete editing pass and crawled into bed. It was a kind of trance experience, when almost nothing entered my consciousness other than the work at hand.

There are three lessons here, I think. One is to be diligent about research. Hammering out twenty-five pages is much less daunting when I can refer to a detailed outline I prepared for myself beforehand and have all of my sources well organized. Another is to take full advantage of the times when I’m “on.” I seriously considered going to bed early last night, as I had a long day and felt pretty tired. But once the words started pouring forth, I decided to stick with it as long as I could. I wasn’t disappointed with the results. A third lesson is to write often, even if it is non-academic. One of the reasons I have started blogging again is simply to write on a regular basis, so that when the Blank Page yawns before me I can more easily begin to fill it. Like any skill, the more you practice the better you get. Hopefully this practice will increase the frequency of “on-ness,” or, put another way, will help me make friends with my muse.

To PhD or not to PhD

I have always valued the power of writing to clarify ideas. I don’t mean clarifying them to a reader, but clarifying them to myself. Whether I’m using a vintage fountain pen or a keyboard, the simple act of stringing words together to explain my thoughts and feelings often provides illumination. Such illumination would be very helpful right now.

I’m a pretty practical guy. When I was deciding whether or not to matriculate in grad school, I thought about the potential upsides and downsides. Because my degree is only partly funded (by a generous offer of tuition remission from my employer at BC), I had to consider the financial strain of losing a pretty decent salary as well as the physical and emotional strain of working while in grad school. So far these stresses haven’t been too bad. I have taken three lessons from this: 1) I’m able to be honest with myself concerning my own capacities; 2) I am decent at anticipating my levels of stress; 3) I have relatively frugal tastes. From these three things comes a host of other questions that I won’t get into, but the important part for me right now is how they apply to my next big decision: whether to pursue the PhD or not.

There are probably dozens of reasons, both pro and con, to consider in this decision. I might make a chart at some point illustrating the various risks and rewards of various scenarios, but not today. Today is for one and only one question: “Why do I want a PhD?” The answer this question should be highly circumscribed, and should not rely on estimations of post-grad employment, geography, or feasibility. It could be stated as “What intrinsic motivations do I have for pursuing this degree?”

If I’m being honest with myself, I think the first reason that comes to mind is having the letters after my name, to be able to introduce myself as Dr. Blakeley. This is vain, and I know it. I want people to know that I am capable of attaining the pinnacle of academic achievement. I want to be known as a scholar. 

Other reasons that probably should follow (like wanting to be a college professor), don’t seem nearly as salient. Having known plenty of college professors and observing their lives, I’m not sure I would be happy as a professor. I enjoy research, which I think would make me happy doing my dissertation, and I like reading history, which will help me with coursework and comps. But I think the PhD is a professional degree, just like a JD or an MD – they certify one for a particular type of work. For history PhDs, this almost always means academia, with the somewhat rare exception of government or archival work. 

I’m starting to ramble, so I’ll finish this post with a simplistic but, I think, realistic statement: unless I can find a better motivation for obtaining a PhD, I probably should not aspire to one.

First dispatch from graduate school

Graduate school is a lot of work. I know this is true because I am now a grad student in history, but I had heard it many times before entering grad school myself. Various advice websites cautioned potential students to be aware of the differences between undergrad and grad school – especially the reading load – and to expect both more freedom and more responsibility. I can attest that all of these things are true. I would estimate that between my on-campus job (20 hours per week) and my studies, I work approximately 70 hours per week. I have taken exactly one (1) entire day off since I started, and I anticipate my next day completely free of work will probably be after the sememster has ended. I have read seven books cover-to-cover and an additional two or three thousand pages of skimming for a research project in the seven weeks of the semester that have elapsed so far. I have spent hours upon hours in front of a microfilm machine trying to decipher florid handwriting from the 1820s. While all of these things are “true” in the sense that they comprise the surface reality of my life, their simple enumeration is very misleading. The sheer volme of work involved seems to function as a warning, like the advice websites that caution students who simply think grad school is the logical next step to beware of the onerous demands it places on students.

What these various givers of advice rarely mention, however, is just how rewarding doing all of this work can be. Yes, deciphering handwriting takes concentration and patience, but when I found the “smoking gun” document for my project in an unpublished manuscript collection buried in thousands of pages of microfilm, I was esctatic. I gushed to whomever would listen to me. “Guess what I found! A letter that proves I wasn’t just making up my hypothesis! Want to see the PDF copy I scanned?” Something similar has been true of the books I have read thus far. I constantly find myself enriched by thoughtful analysis of historical questions and the knowledge that my conceptions are being continually broadened through these works. Class discussions might be the absolute best part of grad school. While there is an aspect of terror involved – sitting in a room with six other very intelligent people, including the professor, and trying to make insightful comments about the reading is not for the faint of heart – the contributions that each of these scholars or scholars-in-training make to my own understanding of the work can hardly be measured. I walk out of just about every class with the sense that I now actually understand a book and can at least semi-intelligently discuss concepts that I had never encountered even a week before. The empowerment of the discussion course – the back and forth of taking positions and having them critiqued, of trying to elucidate just exactly what one is trying to say, of jointly arriving at a superior understanding of a book – is unlike anything I have ever experienced before, and is certainly one of the most rewarding.

So while I may be working from when I wake up in the morning until when I go to bed, neglecting my family and friends, and generally ensconced in a cocoon of words and concepts, I am probably more fulfilled – and thus happier – than I have ever been.