History of the Present

The editors of History of the Present are Joan W. Scott, Andrew Aisenberg, Brian Connolly, Ben Kafka, Sylvia Schafer, and Mrinalini Sinha. Congratulations to them all for the journal’s achievement!

To learn more about the journal, visit its web site at www.historyofthepresent.org.

Sikh practice emphasizes reading and meditating on the teachings of the gurus, service to those around us, and sharing our blessings with others. One of the interesting practices with regards to the emphasis on social equality is that following a Sikh religious service a community meal is typically prepared by volunteers and then shared. Everyone, regardless of belief, social status, or gender, eats together. This is particularly significant within the Indian context where taboos around food play an important social role.

Read the full interview here.

Women, Gender, and Families of Color is edited by Jennifer Hamer of the University of Kansas.

The inaugural issue, due out in early 2013, is a collection of articles that explore various elements of Black senior women’s sexuality, including body image; sexual and reproductive health; and the politics of race, class, gender, age, and sexual orientation on Black sexuality. It is guest-edited by Bette Dickerson, Associate Professor of Sociology at American University and past president of the Association of Black Sociologists, and Nicole Rousseau, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kent State University and award-winning author of Black Woman’s Burden; Commodifying Black Reproduction (Palgrave Macmillan)

Visit the journal page for information about submitting and/or subscribing.

Read the full press release.

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.

. . .

The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership,  reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

More.

Link to the NYT article.

Link to Retraction Watch website.

The boycott group is called The Cost of Knowledge, and its Statement of Purpose is well worth checking out. A sample:

Many mathematicians have in recent years lost patience with being involved in a system in which commercial publishers make profits based on the free labor of mathematicians and subscription fees from their institutions’ libraries, for a service that has become largely unnecessary. Among all the commercial publishers, the behavior of Elsevier seemed to many to be the most egregious, and a number of mathematicians had made personal commitments to avoid any involvement with Elsevier journals.

Yesterday, Elsevier issued a response to the boycott, “A Letter to the Mathematics Community,” that lays out promises to lower some of its prices, create open-access plans for older content, and withdraw its support for the Research Works Act (an anti-democratic proposal to prevent U.S. taxpayer-funded research from becoming open-access). Whether these intentions pan out into long-term changes in the way that research is published and disseminated remains to be seen, but at the very least Elsevier has acknowledged problems with the current model of research publishing.

Link to the boycott website.

Link to Elsevier’s response.

Link to a CBC story.

Many humanities journals still select papers for publication in this manner (UIP has several journals that follow this practice), but Aaron J. Barlow, an associate professor of English at the College of Technology of the City University of New York, argues that “blind peer review is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.” On the panel of another session, others such as Illinois State University English professor and Kairos editor Cheryl E. Ball, offered up alternatives to the traditional peer review process. As Ball notes,

Peer reviewers don’t need rubrics. They need good ways to communicate.

It looks like change may come sooner rather than later, and like communication, change is usually a good thing.

Yesterday I had an e-mail from Linda Pershing, and though her article on Carlos Arredondo and his memorial to his son was published in Journal of American Folklore almost two years ago, I remembered the facts of the story central to her research so clearly.

Carlos Arredondo’s son, Alex, was a Marine who was killed while serving in Iraq in 2004. His father’s grief was immense, immediate, and shocking; his reaction made national headlines. Carlos found an outlet in creating a portable memorial to his son and in protesting the war.

Linda Pershing’s message yesterday brought news of Alex’s younger brother’s death this week. Brian Arredondo committed suicide. Peace activist Cindy Sheehan issued a statement with more information.

I’m grateful for Linda’s work, which brought this family’s sad but not uncommon plight to my attention. May peace be with them.

Linda Pershing’s article about Carlos Arredondo and his mobile memorial appeared in Journal of American Folklore vol. 123, no. 488 (Spring 2010) and is available in Project Muse and JSTOR. Carlos Arredondo has been profiled by various media, including New York Times, CNN, and Democracy Now!.

Best wishes to you and yours for a bright and snazzy New Year!

*Please ignore the deflated flamingo in the background. He does not represent the true meaning of the season.

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The Illinois State Historical Society was founded in 1899 to support the Illinois State Historical Library and to encourage research and writing on subjects of Illinois history. Though independent of the State of Illinois and the Historical Library since 1997, the Illinois State Historical Society continues to actively promote the study of Illinois history. The Society encourages everyone from University scholars to local historians to take an active part in Illinois history. The Society is a not-for-profit organization which depends solely on membership dues, gifts, bequests, and foundation grants to support, preserve, and disseminate the story of Illinois and its people.