Camping in the Jungle Online Exhibit

The Panama Canal Museum Collection at UF

One of the PCMC interns, Lauren O’Neill, created an online exhibit based on a past physical exhibit titled Camping in the Jungle: Scouting Stories from the Panama Canal Zone. This exhibit delves into how scouting in the Panama Canal Zone was both similar to and different from the scouting experience in the United States mainland. Camping in the Jungle was made possible by contributions from PCMC members who shared their experiences and objects with us. We hope that this online version of the exhibit will be useful and enjoyable to all.

See the exhibit here: http://exhibits.uflib.ufl.edu/scouting/.

Camping in the Jungle: Scouting Stories from the Panama Canal Zone was curated by Sarah Marek with assistance from Jessica Marcetti and Lourdes Santamaría-Wheeler.

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Vybz Kartel is loved more than Bob Marley in Jamaica, according to new poll.

Kate Lynch, Annie Lennox & A CMU Education

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Probably the professor that most approximated a teacher in my courses at Carnegie Mellon University (called “CMU” by folks there, in the ‘Burgh) was Katherine Lynch (she usually went by Kate). I took her for two classes in my transfer year to Carnegie Mellon in ’93-’94.

I had Lynch for Historical Methods my first semester because, you know, a student with a master’s degree and a year of doctoral work at the University of Pittsburgh in history would have no idea about historical methodology by his third year of coursework. But the department insisted that I needed to take courses like that in order to earn their stamp of approval — that I was properly prepared for my comprehensive exams and the dissertation stage once this year of hoop-jumping ended (but that’s a blog post for another time). I also took a course with Lynch in Comparative Urban History (read…

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“Je ne suis pas marxiste”: Michael Heinrich

Quien quiera que visite la tumba de Karl Marx en el cementerio de Highgate en Londres se encuentra con un gigantesco pedestal sobre el que es entronizado un busto gigante de Marx. Hay que verlo. Directamente debajo del busto está escrito en letras de oro “¡Proletarios de todos los países uníos!”, y más abajo, también en oro, “Karl Marx”. Justo más abajo, una simple y pequeña lápida está colocada dentro del pedestal, que menciona sin pompa ni boato a aquellos enterrados ahí: además de Karl Marx, está su esposa Jenny, su nieto Harry Longuet,su hija Eleonor y Helene Demuth, quien se ocupó de la casa de la familia Marx durante décadas.

Fue el mismo Marx quien seleccionó la sencilla lápida después de la muerte de su esposa. Exhibirse no era lo suyo. Pidió explícitamente un funeral sobrio, restringido a un pequeño círculo, de hecho sólo once personas estuvieron presentes. Friedrich…

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Marshall Sahlins & David Graeber, On Kings – open access e-book

Progressive Geographies

On Kings by Marshall Sahlins & David Graeber (Hau Press, distributed University of Chicago Press, 2017, 534 pp.) is available as open access pdf in this link; physical copy to buy here.

In anthropology as much as in popular imagination, kings are figures of fascination and intrigue, heroes or tyrants in ways presidents and prime ministers can never be. This collection of essays by two of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists—David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins—explores what kingship actually is, historically and anthropologically. As they show, kings are symbols for more than just sovereignty: indeed, the study of kingship offers a unique window into fundamental dilemmas concerning the very nature of power, meaning, and the human condition.
Reflecting on issues such as temporality, alterity, piracy, and utopia—not to mention the divine, the strange, the numinous, and the bestial—Graeber and Sahlins explore the role of kings as they have existed around the world…

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Rivers of the Anthropocene: new (Free!) book now available

the anthropo.scene

This is a great looking new title, available here for free by the University of California Press. Regular UC Press site here.

Rivers of the Anthropocene

Jason M. Kelly, Philip Scarpino , Helen Berry, James Syvitski , Michel Meybeck (Eds)

This exciting volume presents the work and research of the Rivers of the Anthropocene Network, an international collaborative group of scientists, social scientists, humanists, artists, policymakers, and community organizers working to produce innovative transdisciplinary research on global freshwater systems. In an attempt to bridge disciplinary divides, the essays in this volume address the challenge in studying the intersection of biophysical and human sociocultural systems in the age of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch of humans’ own making. Featuring contributions from authors in a rich diversity of disciplines—from toxicology to archaeology to philosophy— this book is an excellent resource for students and scholars studying both freshwater systems and…

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Fucking Idiot Doesn’t Understand Relationship Between Surplus Value and Profit

Worker's Spatula

NEW YORK – Anwar Shaikh found himself confronted by a rival Marxist economist at a conference earlier this week over his approach to the transformation problem. Despite Shaikh’s obviously superior understanding of economics at large and Marxism in particular, he found it quite difficult to convince his idiotic shithead rival that the transformation problem was little more than a simple accounting issue that anyone whose brain isn’t entirely filled with shit should immediately be able to grasp:

“Are you actually fucking stupid?” enquired Shaikh of the upstart bastard who dared question his theoretical approach, “How can you not understand the transfer of value between the circuits of capital and revenue? Profit is mainly derived from surplus value, but not exclusively! Go read the first pages of ‘Theories of Surplus Value’, and learn what profit upon alienation is.

“You dumb fuck,” concluded the Economics professor from the New School for Social…

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Why Society Needs Historians

The Social Historian

‘Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian. It needs a 21-year-old who really understands how to analyse things, understands the tenets of leadership and contributing to society, who is a thinker and someone who has the potential to help society drive forward.’

Thus spake Patrick Johnston, Vice Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast, in a newspaper interview on 30 May this year.

In doing so, he not only proved the old adage that ‘To err is human, but to really foul things up requires Management’, but he also singlehandedly alienated half of his staff, and pretty much the whole historical profession.

Johnston, it must be remembered, was an oncologist before going into university leadership, so he’s one of the Good Guys. He deserves our respect.

But this doesn’t stop this being stupid, philistine, nonsense. A university VC who doesn’t understand what the humanities do would be…

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Value Theory and the Schism in Eco-Marxism

Source: Value Theory and the Schism in Eco-Marxism

Making Boring Things Unboring: ASEH 2017

Erstwhile: A History Blog

Erstwhile guest contributor Kerri Clement (PhD student, CU Boulder) gives us her report on the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History that took place last week in Chicago.

After attending last week’s American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) conference, I struggled with how to recap my experience at the 2017 meeting. This writer’s block was due in part to the fact I don’t know how to distill the experience of what was a diverse and wide-ranging program into something that would not just be a chaotic celebration of scholarship. From topics on space junk, winds, capitalism, dogs, horses, mining, and education, to presidential roundtables on diversity and poetry slams, the list went on for pages. Looking at the program, I could not decide and was frequently torn with making the excruciating decision about which panel to attend. Over the course of the conference and…

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