CFP: Thinking with a River: Housatonic Valley History and Culture

Thinking With a River: Housatonic Valley History and Culture
Edited by Sheila Liming and Jacob A.C. Remes
Abstracts due February 1, 2023
Deadline extended to March 31, 2023

Map of the Housatonic Valley

What might it do to our understanding of American history and culture to take watersheds as units of scholarly analysis, naturally defined regions that should be studied together? Thinking With a River: Housatonic Valley History and Culture will explore this question in the context of the Housatonic River, which drains a watershed of nearly 2,000 square miles in Western Massachusetts, Western Connecticut, and Eastern New York. We seek submissions from scholars in any discipline or field who explore the culture and history of the region, putting into conversation scholarship of the various writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived or spent time in the Berkshires (and the Litchfield Hills) with labor and environmental histories of industry in Pittsfield, Danbury, and the Naugatuck Valley, which is part of the same river system. We want to examine seriously the idea of rivers and their drainage basins as units of analysis, and thus solicit papers about the literary and artistic histories of the region, environmental studies, Indigenous studies, labor history, and other topics. How do our understandings of these disparate topics change when we put them together? 

The goal of this edited volume is twofold. First, it seeks to be useful to students, scholars, and activists who want to understand the Housatonic Valley, its people, its history, and its influence. Second, it serves as a case study of fluvial thinking: in privileging the study of a place over the specifics of a given population, the volume privileges diverse forms of social history and seeks to escape the pitfalls of  populational siloes.

We are interested in any topic from any humanistic or social scientific discipline that involves the Housatonic Valley in any time period. We are especially eager to receive abstracts on the following topics:

  • Environmental history and environmental studies perspectives on the river and its drainage basin, including PCB and mercury pollution, damming and the decline of anadromous fish, or other topics. 
  • The Indigenous peoples, past and present, of the Housatonic Valley, including, among others, the Mohican, Munsee Lenape, Wappinger, Paugussett, Stockbridge-Munsee, Pootatuck, Weantinock, and Schaghticoke peoples.
  • Labor history of the various industries of the Housatonic, including iron, brass, paper, arms, clocks and watches, hats, rubber, hydroelectricity, tourism, and agriculture.
  • Deindustrialization and economic transition in any era—ranging from changes in agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries and the decline of the Salisbury iron industry, to the deindustrialization of Pittsfield and the Naugatuck Valley—including its social, cultural, political, and environmental aspects and questions of what comes after economic transitions.
  • Architecture and urban design in the Housatonic Valley, including adaptive reuse of agricultural and industrial space.
  • Religious, political, and social movements that have been active in the region and organizers, activists, and others with close ties to the region, for instance Jonathan Edwards (Stockbridge, Mass.), Mum Bett Freeman (Sheffield, Mass.), John Brown (Torrington, Conn.), Mary Parsons (Lenox, Mass.), and W.E.B. Du Bois (Great Barrington, Mass.); political spaces like Camp Unity (Wingdale, N.Y.); and events like the Amenia (N.Y.) Conferences of 1916 and 1933 and the Sharon (Conn.) Statement of 1960.
  • Literary, artistic, and musical movements associated with the region, or artists or writers who lived in or are associated with the region, including authors like Herman Melville (Pittsfield, Mass.), Mark Twain (Tyringham, Mass.), Edith Wharton (Lenox, Mass.), singer Marian Anderson (Danbury, Conn.), composer Charles Ives (Danbury, Conn.), painters Jasper Johns (Sharon, Conn.) and Norman Rockwell (Lee, Mass.), and landscape designer Beatrix Farrand (Stockbridge, Mass.), among others. 
  • Popular culture inspired by or associated with the region, for instance Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant” or Amy Sherman-Palladino’s television series “Gilmore Girls.”

 The University of Massachusetts Press has expressed interest in publishing the volume. The editors are currently raising money to support a workshop in the Berkshires; if we are successful in raising funds, we will invite all the authors to come to workshop each other’s papers to prepare them for publication.

Old color postcard of the railroad bridge over the Housatonic at Derby, Conn.

We seek contributions from scholars in any field, and we particularly encourage independent scholars and journalists to propose chapters. While most of the book will be scholarly chapters, we are also open to artistic contributions.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 300 words, along with a CV, to jacob.remes@nyu.edu by February 1, 2023. Abstracts should explain not only the specific topic of the proposed paper but how it will connect and contribute to a joint understanding of the Housatonic Valley.

Editors:
Sheila Liming is associate professor of communication and creative media at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. A scholar of Edith Wharton, she is the author of What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Office (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (Melville House, 2023). Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Public Books, The Point, The Chronicle Review, and elsewhere.

Jacob Remes is clinical associate professor of history at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Trained as a labor and working-class historian of North America, he is the author of Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and the editor, with Andy Horowitz, of Critical Disaster Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). He has written for Time, The Atlantic, Alternet, and The Nation, and he is the co-editor, with Scott Knowles and Kim Fortun, of the University of Pennsylvania Press book series Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster. He serves on the board of the Sharon (Connecticut) Historical Society and Museum.

Spring 2021 Syllabi

Every semester I post my syllabi online for people who aren’t in my classes, whether students,  fellow faculty looking for inspiration, the interested public. Syllabi for my classes this semester are linked below:

CFP: History Approaches to Covid-19

WORKING PAPERS IN CRITICAL DISASTER STUDIES
Series 1: Historical Approaches to Covid-19
Call for Proposals

We seek proposals for brief, 2,000-3,000 word essays on the relationship between history and Covid-19. More specifically, we invite pitches for essays on the following topics: historical approaches to Covid-19; what historical study can offer our analysis of Covid; or what Covid does for our analysis in any field or subfield of history. Our intent is to publish essays that will be of interest to historians and students, with a special interest in essays that can be used in undergraduate courses to add Covid-related content to already existing courses. We seek essays that relate to any field of historical inquiry — any time period, any geography, and any theme — that would be useful to help students think about Covid historically or through historical approaches. They should be footnoted, but they need not contain new, primary-source research.

Please submit a proposal of 100-200 words by August 10, 2020. The editors will be in touch with decisions by August 19. Full essays will be due October 1, and they will then be peer reviewed, with the goal of publishing the essays in November and December. They will be published as a digitized collection, hosted on the website of the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Critical disaster studies is an international field, and we seek contributions from all countries and about any area of the world. We intend to have a bilingual publication process, in which we publish papers in English and the native language of the author, if different. We can accept contributions in English, French, German, and Italian and will endeavor to include abstracts in each of those languages. We may be able to publish in other languages, so please enquire if you would like to submit an essay in a different language. 

Potential themes include but are by no means limited to: 

  • Disasters or pandemics mitigation urban plan in the history of design
  • Oral Histories of Covid-19
  • Update on past and future of the “epidemiological transition” model
  • Historical comparison in the context of Covid-19
  • Disaster, pandemics, and intersecting layers of inequality
  • Politics and social movements in and related to disaster and pandemic
  • Urbanization patterns and forms in relation to disasters and pandemics
  • Segregated neighbourhoods in relation to disasters and pandemics
  • Rural settlements and Covid-19
  • Food accessibility during past disaster and post-disaster events
  • Migration and disasters and pandemics
  • History of disasters and pandemics

This series of working papers is organized under the auspices of the Historical Approaches to Covid-19 Working Group of the National Science Foundation-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) Network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (NSF Award #1841338). 

Please submit your proposals as an email attachment (Word or PDF) to jacob.remes@nyu.edu. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Editorial committee:
Carla Brisotto, University of Florida (c.brisotto@ufl.edu)
Julia Engelschalt, Universität Bielefeld (julia.engelschalt@uni-bielefeld.de)
Julia Irwin, University of South Florida (juliai@usf.edu)
Valerie Marlowe, University of Delaware (marlowev@udel.edu)
Jacob Remes, New York University (jacob.remes@nyu.edu)

The Salem Fire for “The Show Must Go On: American Culture in Times of Crisis”

As part of “The Show Must Go On: American Culture in Times of Crisis,” here is a photo of the Forest River Camp after the Salem Fire of 1914. 

The photograph, in PDF format, is here.

The full citation is: “Photograph by M.E. Robb of Forest River Camp, summer 1914, negative #4606, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.”

For more primary sources about the Salem Fire, see these digitized collections at Salem State University’s Archives and Special Collections.

 

Keep Salem’s history in Salem

In early December, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., announced that it planned to permanently close the Phillips Library and move its storage and reading room to Rowley, Mass., a forty-minute drive away. The Phillips, where I did much of the research on the Salem portions of my book, is the major repository of Salem personal and organizational records. People in Salem are organizing to keep their history in their own city. My concern is how the planned move to Rowley will make Salem’s history not only inaccessible to Salemites but to historians of Salem like me. More details on the Phillips, its move, and the fight against it are at Donna Seger’s blog Streets of Salem herehere, and here.

I wrote a letter to the director of the Peabody Essex urging him to keep the Phillips and its collection in Salem where it belongs. I urge other historians of Salem to write similar letters. (I sent a copy of this letter to the Salem Historical Commission and to Salem’s mayor with a cover letter, and I would urge others to do the same.) You can also sign a petition.


12 December 2017

Dan L. Monroe
Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Director and CEO
Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square
161 Essex Street
Salem MA 01970

Dear Dr. Monroe:

I write to urge you to reconsider your plans, announced at the December 6 meeting of the Salem Historical Commission, to permanently close the Phillips Library in Salem and instead keep its collections in Rowley. I hope that you will maintain access to the library’s collections in Salem both for the public and for researchers like myself. Indeed, I hope that you will use this present controversy to recommit to the Essex Institute’s mission of scholarship about and preservation of Essex County’s and especially Salem’s history.

The Peabody Essex Museum has a special responsibility to the people of Salem. Salem residents and organizations entrusted their collections to the Phillips in the expectation that it would preserve and make accessible their documents to future generations of Salemites. In this way, the Essex Institute and the Phillips Library served as a de facto Salem historical society, and no independent organization ever grew to preserve local history. That the Phillips acted as a local repository and thus crowded out the creation of an independent organization creates for the Essex Institute’s successor a lasting obligation to the people of Salem to preserve their history in their city—not in a collections center 40 minutes away by car.

In fact, though, while I am sympathetic to the concerns of Salemites, they are not my primary concern. I am a professional historian. My book on the Salem Fire of 1914 relied heavily on research I did at the Phillips Library. Indeed, my bibliography lists twelve collections at the Phillips that I consulted. The documents I used are in the Phillips’ collection only because their creators and collectors—Salem residents and groups of residents—trusted that the Essex Institute would preserve and make accessible their papers. I have fond memories of the Phillips and especially of the very helpful staff there. That said, the problems with access I experienced in 2007 (not least charging researchers to use the library) have already significantly worsened, and access to the collections I used has been limited for several years. The proposed permanent move to Rowley will make things even worse.

The proposed permanent relocation to Rowley will affect researchers like me in several ways. First and most importantly, it is crucially important that local history research be embedded in the community. As a historian, I much better understood Salem’s history and geography from walking its streets and spending time there while I did my archival research. The research I did at the Phillips would have been much shallower and less rich had it not be literally embedded in Salem and its historic geography. Moreover, while it might not be the PEM’s concern, doing my research in Rowley would also have separated me from the stores and restaurants in Salem where I spent money while I was working at the Phillips, which should be seen as a further blow to the museum’s home city.

Second, moving the reading room to Rowley will make research substantially less convenient not only for Salem residents but for everyone. Rowley is, to be obvious about it, much farther away from Boston than Salem, which makes getting there harder if one is staying in Boston. I understand that the Collection Center will be off Route 1, inaccessible except by private automobile. This is drastically different from the Phillips, which is within walking distance of the MBTA train station. Even if the center were near the train station (or if researchers try to take the train and then call a cab from the train station), trains between Boston to Rowley are half as frequent as trains between Boston and Salem, and the trip is much longer.

Third, abandoning the Phillips Library’s legacy and responsibility to preserve and make accessible Salem’s history will have lasting implications on its ability to collect, and thus on the ability of historians and other researchers to learn about Salem. In the course of my research, I came across several collections that were not yet in institutional repositories. If Salem residents cannot trust the PEM to maintain the Essex Institute’s commitments, they will not donate their collections to the Phillips Library. Some of this material may go to Salem State University’s special collections, but other items will surely be lost. This will mean that Salem’s history will be less collected, less preserved, and more scattered. This will be a loss to all of us, including to future generations of historians like myself.

In short, I fear that your plans to move the Phillips collection to Rowley will make research like mine substantially harder and less rich. I strongly urge you to maintain the Essex Institute’s historical commitment to the people of Salem and their history and keep the collection accessible in Salem.

Sincerely,

Jacob A.C. Remes
Clinical assistant professor

cc: John D. Childs, Ann C. Pingree Library Director, Phillips Library
Professor Donna Seger, Salem State University
Ms. Jessica Herbert, Salem Historical Commission
Mayor Kimberley Driscoll, City of Salem

Disaster Citizenship press and reviews

My book Disaster Citizenship has garnered some press attention and reviews in scholarly journals. I list the articles and reviews below:

 

Disaster Paper Sessions at the World Congress of Sociology

I’m organizing two sessions at the World Congress of Sociology in Toronto in the summer of 2018.  Don’t be put off that it’s a sociology conference; the International Research Committee on Disasters is for all disaster scholars regardless of discipline. (Hence my being a part of things despite being a card-carrying historian.) Submissions are due September 30, 2017.

At the last ISA World Congress of Sociology in Yokohama (2014), the late Joseph Scanlon (a pre-eminent Canadian disaster scholar) organized a session called “Learning from the Past: Research into Past Disasters.” With this paper session, we propose to pick up where Dr. Scanlon left off. In the past 15 to 20 years, there has been a renaissance of historical and historicist studies of disaster. This paper session presents recent research in the histories of disaster and disasters; that is, research into how the category of disaster was built, understood, and deployed, and how specific disasters were experienced, responded to, and remembered. These historical studies, as Dr. Scanlon well understood, are useful not only in their own right, but as ways of “learning from the past” for the sake of contemporary sociological and DRR questions. This session will also highlight research on past disasters and examine what we can learn from these historic events while also focusing on knowledge that can help protect us in the future.

I am especially eager for historians to submit to this panel. Please do!

Diaspora, Removal, and Migration: Disasters and the Movement of People

In 2016, the UN General Assembly adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants which noted that today’s “growing global phenomenon of large movements of refugees and migrants” and “unprecedented level of human mobility” are driven in part by “the adverse effects of climate change, natural disasters (some of which may be linked to climate change), or other environmental factors.” What is the relationship between disaster and the movement of people? As the declaration suggests, many disasters force or encourage the migration of people either internally or across international borders. After a disaster or in preparation for a coming disaster, governments, planners, or others sometimes move communities, either willingly or not, as part of rebuilding or mitigation strategy. Disasters also exist in the context of already-occurring migration. Pre-existing diasporic communities may raise funds or encourage international attention to disaster in the home region, or they may shape the political and diplomatic response to disaster in their host country. This session seeks to understand the multifaceted and complex connection between disaster and the movement of people.

I intentionally wrote this to be as broad as possible. If you work on disasters and the movement of people in any form, please submit an abstract.

Other disaster panels are listed here; all are now accepting abstracts as well.

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