Monthly Archives: November 2022

Essay Writing

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I’m at a rather fun point in my doctoral studies. Today, I get to spend my days working on my dissertation and serving as a Teaching Assistant for a class. In my TA duties here at Binghamton, I’ve been assigned two sections of 25 students each, so when they submit essays, I find myself grading 50 of those in the course of a few days. It’s a lot of work, and in the moment the grading inspires a variety of emotions in me, from joy at a wonderfully written essay to disappointment at one that could’ve done better with just a little more effort.

One of the greatest boons to my work as a teacher is that now, after 12 years in college and 27 years overall as a student, I’ve finally made sense of how to write an essay. This word, used so often in academic writing, never really clicked for me. I knew I was supposed to write a research paper that had a introduction, body, and conclusion, but never really got the structure my teachers and professors were going for beyond that. It took my own transition from student to teacher for me to really understand that an essay is an extended argument. 

It also took for me to start studying Renaissance French Humanism and Natural History for me to really understand the origins of the essay with Michel de Montaigne’s 1580 book of Essays, where the term originated. These were reflections on a variety of topics, from children’s education to cannibalism and everything in between. My own Wednesday Blog is in some ways a nod to Montaigne in format. Montaigne’s essays sought to describe his world as he saw it and understood it, in all its rich detail and complexity.

In the academic essays that I write, from the quick 3 to 5 page papers I used to write for my undergrad history classes at Rockhurst to my dissertation, which in many aspects is itself a long essay, all have the same core structure and spirit. Yes, at its barest bones the essay is made up of an introduction, body, and conclusion, but there’s so much more rich detail to a good essay than just that. 

This semester it really occurred to me that the introduction ought to be made up of three main things: something to catch the reader’s attention, a thesis statement laying out the essay’s argument, and a brief summary of the main points with some context in the existing literature included if you’re writing on a graduate or professional level. Any of my colleagues reading or listening to this will either find their eyes are glazing over here or are instead laughing that I only really figured this out this late in the game as I was writing my dissertation.

The body is more than just the main points of the essay, it’s the real meat of the work, the rich quotes and analyses of the sources, the connections made to other works in all their intricate splendor, the quotable lines that help the essay stick in the reader’s memory and look forward to reading more of your work in the future. I still would say though that the thesis remains more important than the body, after all the body isn’t going to make sense without a strong central argument, a beating heart at the core of the entire work. I often tell my students this and have even begun advising them to underline their thesis statements to help them keep that heart in mind as they continue to flesh out the rest of their written creation.

Finally, there’s the conclusion. It’s a summary of the main points of the essay, a restating of the thesis with the memory of the body fresh in the reader’s mind. The conclusion is a chance to leave your reader with a really strong impact from your essay, something to find them wanting more. 

For a while now I’ve often thought of the essay as a form functioning for scholarship and literature as the symphony functions for music. In both cases there are different styles and methods of elevating the pure form into an art that reflects the writer or composer’s personality and craft, that leaves the audience feeling something different, something that they can best describe as emblematic of that work’s author. In symphonic music there are clear distinctions between the classical composers like Haydn & Mozart and the romantic composers like Beethoven & Brahms. Sometimes, the best way to end an essay is to borrow an idea from the romantic symphonies and even the romantic operas of composers like Gounod and Wagner: let the main themes finish and then have a sigh to really round things off. If you listen to the finale of Wagner’s Götterdammerung, you’ll hear this very sigh, as if all the energy built up in the composition over the last few hours is nearly extinguished but has one last breath. If you can write an essay like that then bravo.

I’m writing this in the midst of an extensive round of edits to my dissertation, going line by line making corrections, clarifications, and all around tightening down my work until it really just elevates the core form of my thesis. In the last year since I started writing this dissertation, I’ve learned a great deal about how to do this job, and I hope I will in future avoid some of the great pitfalls that I’ve caught myself up in time and again in my studies.If you’re a fellow academic, or interested in academic writing, I highly suggest you go listen to my friend Kate Carpenter’s podcast Drafting the Past, which is all about the process of writing history. It’s a wonderful service to the profession that Kate’s doing. Enjoy your week!

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Doctoral Study

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I was 27 when I arrived here in Binghamton at the start of August 2019. I made a big move out here, with immense help from my parents, and set up shop in a good-sized one bedroom apartment that’s remained my sanctuary in this part of the country ever since. I’d wanted to continue my education up to the PhD since my high school days, and it’s a plan I’ve stuck with through thick and thin. After a false start in my first attempt to apply to PhD programs in 2016, which led to two wonderful years working on a second master’s in History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), I applied again, now far better positioned for a PhD program and ended up here through the good graces and friendly insight of several people to whom I’m quite grateful.

Arriving in Binghamton though I found the place very cold and quite lonely. In recent months I’ve begun to think more and more about getting rid of some of my social media accounts only to then remember that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were some of my greatest lines of communication with friends and family back home in Kansas City and elsewhere around the globe throughout these last three years. That first semester was tough, very tough, and while the second semester seemed to get off to a good start it was marked by the sudden arrival of the Coronavirus Pandemic and the end of my expectations for these years in Binghamton. 

I spent about half of 2020 and 2021 at home in Kansas City, surrounded by family and finding more and more things to love about my adopted hometown with each passing day. When I was in Binghamton it was to work, in Fall 2020 to complete my coursework and in Spring 2021 to prepare for my Comprehensive Exam and Dissertation Prospectus defense. I still did a good deal of the prospectus work at home rather than here, though the memories of those snowy early months of 2021 reading for the comps here at this desk where I am now always come to mind when I’m in this room.

As the Pandemic began to lessen in Fall 2021 and into the start of this year, I found myself in Binghamton at a more regular pace. There was something nice about that, sure I wanted to be home with my family, but I also felt like I was getting a part of the college experience of going away for a few years to study that was reminiscent of the year I spent working on my first MA at the University of Westminster in London. I started to venture further afield in the Northeast again, traveling to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington again. When I first decided to come here one of the things, I decided was I’d take the opportunity of being in the Northeast to see as much of this region as possible.

2022 saw another transition, I wasn’t in one of the newer cohorts in my department anymore. Now, in Fall 2022 I’m one of the senior graduate students. It’s a weird thing to consider, seeing as it felt like 2020 and 2021 evaded the usual social life of the history graduate students here, thanks to the ongoing pandemic. I also began to look more seriously at my future, applying for jobs in cities across this country, and even looking again at some professorships, something I doubted for a while would be an option for me. If there’s anything about life that I’ve learned over the past three years spent here, it’s that you always need to have things beyond your work to look forward to. Whether that be a long walk in the woods on the weekends or a day trip to somewhere nearby, or even the latest episode of your favorite show in the evenings. Doing this job without having a life beyond it is draining. 

For me the best times here in Binghamton were in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 when I truly began to feel like I had a place here that I’d made my own. I was confident in my work, happy with how my TA duties were going, and really enjoying my free time as I began to spend my Friday evenings up at the Kopernik Observatory and Sundays at the Newman House, the Catholic chapel just off campus. I was constantly reading for fun as well, something I’d lost in 2020, even falling behind with the monthly issues of my favorite magazines National Geographic and Smithsonian. There were many weeknights I’d spend out having dinner alone reading natural history, science fiction, anthropology, and astronomy books. 

It’s interesting looking back on myself from six years ago when I was in London, the months that summer when I decided I wanted to get back into history after a year studying political science. My motivations were to earn a job working at one of the great museums I’d spent countless hours in during that year in the British capital. While I studied for my MA in International Relations and Democratic Politics, I was still spending my free time looking at Greek and Roman statuary and wandering the halls of Hampton Court or watching the hours of history documentaries on BBC 4 in the evenings. And now that I’m back in History as much as I do appreciate and love what I do, I find my free time taken up by science documentaries and books.

It’s important if you do want to get your PhD in the humanities and social sciences to figure out why it is you want to do this before you start. Have a plan in mind, have a big research question in mind, and focus your attentions onto that question. My own story has many twists and turns from an interest in my early 20s in democratic politics to a brief dalliance with late republican Roman history before settling into the world of English Catholics during the Reformation. I ended up where I am today because of another series of events that led me to moving from the English Reformation to the French Reformation, and from studying education to natural history. So, here I am, a historian of the development of the natural history of Brazil between 1550 and 1590, specifically focusing on three-toed sloths. In a way there are echoes of all the work I’ve done to date in what I’m doing now, thus as particular as this topic is it makes sense in the course of my life as a scholar.

A month from now will be my 30th birthday, a weird thing to write let alone say aloud. My twenties have been a time of exploration of both the world around me and of myself. When I look at my photo on my Binghamton ID card, the best way to describe my appearance would be grumpy yet optimistic. Just as I was a decade ago, a sophomore in college, so now I am today, looking ahead to the next decade with excited anticipation of what it’ll bring, and hopeful that all the work I’ve done in this decade will find its reward in the next.

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Me upon arrival in Binghamton, August 2019.

Winter

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I was born on a snowy day in December 1992 in the Chicago suburbs, and over the past 30 years my life has been marked by the cyclical changes between warm and cold months. The winters often stand out more than the summers, perhaps because winter snow is always more of an event than a really scorching hot day in July. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to wish for snow less and less, certainly the incentive of a snow day is mostly absent now but also snow means I’m responsible for shoveling my sidewalks and driveway, something which I’ll do but don’t wish for.

In the last few days, we haven’t had any accumulation, the ground is still too warm, but the flakes falling on my head have been enough of a warning of things to come. Last year it occurred to me that there’s a pattern to how the seasons change and how the weather gets colder over the fall months. Late Summer here in North America is often stormy with the Atlantic hurricane season at its height and changing temperatures causing seasonal rains and occasionally thunderstorms across the continent. Each successive rain has its own small change on the overall temperature, first it’ll be steamy and hot after a rain in August, then as September progresses there’s a cool spell after each rain, until finally in October there’s that climactic storm that pushes the temperature enough that once the cool spell ends the temperature doesn’t rise again to its summer highs, instead settling now into a much cooler Winter low.

Here in Binghamton that final storm that did the trick was the remnants of Hurricane Nichole which reached this valley on Friday morning bringing moderate to heavy rains from the south that sat over this valley for much of the day. That evening the skies remained too cloudy for stargazing up at my usual Friday haunt, the Kopernik Observatory, and since the clouds have only faintly parted to reveal radiant sunshine. It took until Sunday afternoon for the temperature to fall enough for the steady flickering rain to freeze and become first sleet and then snow. Winter’s arrival is likely to be for the season now, it got this cold a few weeks ago before warm winds blew in from the southwest convincing me to lose my sweaters for a day in favor of my short sleeved shirts, but that last gasp of warmth wasn’t going to last.

There are things about Winter that I admire and look forward to. The conviviality of Summer is replaced by the twinkling celebrations in the long dark nights around Christmas and New Year’s, born from ancient mystery and ritual yet vibrant in its modernity. For the moment I’m still getting used to the Sun setting around 4:30 pm, still grumbling about it. The darkness of our Winter nights is bearable because we always know it’s temporary, the long summer days will eventually return, and with them all the nostalgia fueled memories of the glories of summers now past.

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Natural History, Part 2

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I am a Historian of the History of Natural History, or a Stáir ar Stáir an Nádúir in Irish. This means that I study how animals and plants were understood by naturalists in the past, in my case during the mid-1500s, or what I like to call the Late Renaissance. Central to all of this is the fact that the animals I study are all from the Americas, so they were brand new to the French and Swiss naturalists whom I study. In a sense then, natural history seeks to provide a history on human terms for nature. It seeks to bring something so vast as nature down to our level and make it familiar.

In my research this story focuses on the maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus), a species of three-toed sloth that’s native to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. It was first recorded in a work of natural history by the Frenchman André Thevet in his 1557 book The Singularities of France Antarctique. Thevet has become famous in the history of natural history for using local names for local animals, rather than calling it a “sloth” he called it a “haüt“, his rendering of the local Tupinambá name. To me this is critical to understanding the History of Natural History, for while you could look at an animal and call it a “sloth” because it moves very slowly another option is to turn to the people who’ve lived alongside it for generations and ask them what they call it. This is what Thevet did.

Last week I got the chance to spend a couple days down in New York City, during which time I wanted to pay a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, arguably one of the preeminent institutions dedicated to the study of nature in this country. It’s a nice enough place, though I’ll admit the exhibits tend to be a bit dated now in 2022. Still, the American Museum offers a good foundation for the layout of such museums around the country. Like its Chicago counterpart, the Field Museum, my favorite such museum, the American Museum has sections focusing on Zoology, Paleontology, Botany, Astronomy, and Anthropology. It seeks to be an encyclopedia of nature in one big building on the edge of Central Park, something it does quite well.

What has struck me the most over the last few years of choosing to visit natural history and science museums in every city that I visit is how all of them try to tell the same story, a history of nature from the Big Bang down to the present. The Field Museum does a wonderful job of capturing this in their Deep Time exhibit, the place where you can find the dinosaurs, in that it begins with that first primordial burst of energy that got everything started and it ends with a wall showing all the species that have gone extinct already in our current age alongside a ticker counting the number of species currently going extinct. We model our natural history on our own history, and frankly our own history is one bookended by a lack of life, whether it be before we exist or after we’ve died.

It’s important that we understand the fact that our perspective is born entirely out of our own experiences. So, we understand the course of time as a linear and finite thing. Past generations have thought of trees and plants as animated creatures like us, while today we recognize they are living if perhaps not as sentient as we animals are. Many among us have understood nature through faith, prescribing that energy which drives all creation to a Creator, a Divine Essence as I like to call the most paradoxical and incomprehensible. (One of these days maybe I’ll release an episode all about the idea and promise of God.)

Thevet understood the sloth to be “most deformed” because of its strange shape and notable slowness. To his perspective it wasn’t a normal creature, natural to its own world yes, but not normal as he understood normal. We still today describe things that are “normal” or “ordinary” as things that we find familiar and comforting. I do it just as much as the next person (see the episode two weeks ago about cultural homogenization). In moderation this is a good thing, it allows us to formulate a baseline, a control, against which we can better understand the unusual and extraordinary around us. The beautiful thing about Nature is as much as our science has made great progress in seeking to describe and understand it, there’s always more out there for us to learn about.

I’m going to leave it there this week. If you haven’t noticed, my voice is failing me today. Let me finish with the thing that I myself will eventually want written as my epitaph (however many decades away that is): stay curious.

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Travel

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Over this last weekend I went to the Twin Cities for the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society. Their conference, always held over Halloween Weekend, was referred to by one attendee on Twitter as “history camp” and that’s certainly one feeling I got out of the experience. I attended to present my own research into how three-toed sloths were initially compared to monkeys in how they were described in the works of the sixteenth-century naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), who got his sloth information from the guy at the center of my research, André Thevet (1516–1590). Looking at the world as a sloth historian means there’s always a lot of work to do, but there also always seems to be plenty of time for naps. Not a bad life, eh?

I’ve always been a frequent traveler from my earliest days. Growing up I was very familiar with air travel; I’ve got to say I miss those old phones they used to have in the back of the center seat in each row. So, traveling as an adult is a bit of a continuation of something I’ve enjoyed throughout my life, only more so on my terms. I’ll book a first or business class seat from time to time if I get the chance, as in my trip home a month ago, but perhaps the biggest thing I’ve gotten down is a routine for travel. I don’t have a “go bag” necessarily, but I have gotten the packing down to maximum 30 minutes for most trips. 

These last few years in Binghamton have made travel a bit more complicated than any of my previous trips leaving from Chicago, Kansas City, or London. Binghamton has a local airport, but with only 1 flight per day at the moment to Detroit, a flight that is pretty expensive on most days, so it’s not my first choice. Rather, over the last three years I’ve driven at least an hour to either Scranton, Syracuse, Albany, Newark, or last weekend to LaGuardia to fly to that trip’s destination further afield. I’ve gotten used to the 3 hour drives between Newark and Binghamton, though there are times that I’ll wish I’d flown to a closer airport, especially after my one long haul transatlantic flight that got into Newark after 9 pm, seeing me return to Binghamton at midnight after flying 8 hours from Germany.

I learned early on in the Boy Scouts that what you pack you have to carry, no matter how far that hike will end up being. Because of this, I’ve learned to travel light. My biggest suggestion here is figure out how many clothes and shoes you really need to bring on a given trip. In my own case I’ll usually have the total number of travel days + 1 of underclothes, with a couple shirts, trousers, and sweaters that I can rotate through over a 3 or 4 day trip, and one pair of shoes which I’ve found are better carried in a tote bag separate from the backpack where everything else is, that way when I arrive my clothes don’t smell like my gym shoes. If necessary, as in this conference trip or the family funeral I flew home for last month, I’ll usually wear the suit I intend to wear for the big event (my panel or the ceremony) on the plane, that way it’s not getting wrinkled in my bag. On this trip to the Twin Cities, I did bring a winter coat, folded compactly into my bag alongside all my other clothes and toiletries in that bag. It turned out to be useful to bring that coat, even though it wasn’t ever really cold while I was on the ground in Minnesota (a rare thing), as I was able to put on that coat instead of the suit jacket on several occasions when I wanted to go explore the area, as in my afternoon visit to the Bell Museum’s dioramas across the river from Downtown Minneapolis.

A mammoth at the Bell Museum

The same logic applies to any souvenirs I might want to bring back with me. Anything I buy on the ground has to return in my bag that was already fairly full upon arrival. With this in mind the only new things I returned with were a stack of receipts for funding purposes, some notes from my panel, the conference program, and a printed version of the script for my presentation. I didn’t buy any souvenirs this time around at any of the museums, nor any other knick-knacks while I was there. Again, anything I have with me upon leaving has to either be left behind or carried in my bag for the entire return trip.

That return trip ended up being 15.5 hours long. I was traveling with my good friend Marco Ali’ Spadaccini from the History Department here at Binghamton, and we initially were set to wake up on our return travel day, Halloween, at 3:30 am Central to catch our 7:00 am flight. The first catch appeared when our first flight from MSP to Chicago-Midway was cancelled without any notice as to why. So, at 3:30 am we discovered we were instead leaving Minnesota on an 8:55 am flight to St. Louis. I wasn’t able to go back to sleep, thus starting my own travel clock then at 3:30 am. After getting an Uber to MSP Airport we caught our first flight on time and landed a few minutes early at St. Louis’s busy Lambert Field, where we had a quick hour connection to our flight to LaGuardia. That plane also arrived in New York a few minutes early, which meant in the end after our 3.5 hour drive from LaGuardia back to Binghamton through the Catskills, I returned to my apartment at 7:00 pm instead of 7:30 or 8:00 pm like I had predicted.

At this point I’m used to long travel days, it’s become more of a common thing for me in recent years coming to Binghamton, but even returning to Kansas City can be a taxing experience with the frequent need for connections going into an airport that as of now doesn’t host an airline hub. On this trip Marco and I considered traveling to Minneapolis by train and by car, both would’ve taken longer than flying, though Apple Maps’ estimated drive time was only 90 minutes longer than what it actually took us to fly between MSP and LaGuardia and then drive from Queens up to Binghamton. By train the trip would’ve taken us 30 hours with one connection between the Lake Shore Limited and the Empire Builder in Chicago, but the real kicker to that idea was the $3,000 price tag for two sleeper tickets roundtrip. Flying became the most economical option, and in the end, it was better that I was only fully focused on driving for a good 4 hours getting to LaGuardia rather than a full 17 hours trying to drive the entire route to the conference hotel in Minneapolis.

This was my last fly-away trip from Binghamton, the last in a long line of such trips that I’ve taken since arriving here in August 2019. I think back to one of my first, the trip 3 years ago this weekend to the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in St. Louis, when on the return journey I had a 4 hour connection at O’Hare. That day was the first time that I really felt like a business traveler rather than a guy off on another adventure. It’s a feeling I got throughout this trip too.

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