Making of a Historian Making of a Historian

Show notes and more at historian.live!

I recorded this way back in September when I had ambitious dreams of doing a whole series on the history of British social clubs, but I’ve been unfortunately wiped with work and with the emotional toll of American politics lately, so I was never able to get the series off the ground. But what we have is a fantastic conversation with my colleague, Seth Thévoz, talking about his research on clubs in 19th Century Britain. Seth is the author of a really wonderful book on how London gentlemen’s clubs had a massive impact on 19th century politicians and politics. At the height, probably over 19 out of every 20 Members of Parliament were a member of at least one club. We talk about Seth’s book and then talk about the differences we see between clubs in the 18th and the 19th century.

You really need to check out show notes at historian.live for this episode. We have so many videos, images and book recommendations for this one. Also check out the mailing list at makingofahistorian.substack.com and you can get an email whenever I make a thing.

This week I’m joined by my colleague, Dr. Andrea Horbinski, a PhD from Berkeley who now works for Netflix. We talk about a part of her dissertation. First I should say that her dissertation is fantastic, and in the next few years it’s likely to be a book, tentatively titled Manga’s Global Century. You need to keep a watch for it when it does because it’s an eye-opening history that traces the origins of manga from the late 19th century up to the present. We can’t talk about that whole scope in this podcast, so we talk about the story of the Astro Boy TV show. The creator of Astro Boy, Tezuka Osamu, really really wanted to make an animation. But animations were really expensive. He stumbled onto a method that would mark the entire genre of anime. First, he made the animation on the cheap, borrowing from the street performance style of kamishibai. Second, he sold the animation to TV studios at HALF the cost it took to produce, hoping to recoup costs from sales of comics and branded merchandise. It was a gamble, but it paid off. It became the model for future animes. Expensive productions would be bankrolled by merchandise sales. The entire industry was built on people LOVING anime. The people who drew the animation were apprentices who were hoping one day to become masters with their own manga and anime. The consumers were fans who supported the shows and comics they liked by buying merchandise and attending conventions. Dr. Horbinski traces this story through to the fan conventions, and to new ‘circles’ of amateur and professional creators, many of whom made genres for new audiences, like women. We end by talking about the development of Shoujo and particularly Boy’s Love comics, comics oriented towards women, that circumvented the trap of the boredom of traditional heterosexual romantic tropes by exploring same-sex relationships.

It’s a fascinating discussion, and I hope you enjoy it.

Show notes at historian.live

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So this episode is an absolute blast. I talk with my old friend Brendan McElmeel—yes, another Brendan M—about his dissertation research on love during the thaw years of the USSR. But before I gush to you about how good the interview is, I have to offer a bit of a mea culpa. I ended the interview too soon! Brendan’s research delves into the limits of the Soviet sexual revolution as well—and how there were a lot of groups left out of the process he’s talking about. But we never get there. Because I ended the interview too soon. I’m a bit worried you’re going to get too rosy a view of what we’re talking about—and take Brendan as being too uncritical or accepting of the people he studies. We’ll have to have him back on the show to talk more about his research when he gets another chapter done so he can correct the record. Now time to gush. Brendan has done such great research into the everyday life of a time period I don’t think we often hear about—that of Soviet Russia. You’ll learn about the horny balconies of group homes, dances, and a brief history of the Soviet Union. And you’ll learn about two Brendans stumbling through the study of history together.

This week I talk with Susan Lanzoni who talks about her book tracing the history of empathy. Empathy has, over the past 100 years, changed a lot in meaning. It started out as one of these untranslatable weird German words that art historians would throw around to discuss the mystical depths of aesthetic experience: einfühlung. This was the ability to literally feel into a thing—usually an object—when you were moved by it. When you were aesthetically moved by a painting of a mountain, you imagined that there was a kind of embodied feeling in the mountain itself. This was translated to empathy—in-feeling. But the term migrated from being applied to things, slowly, to being applied to people. After the Second World War, big professional groups of psychologists and social scientists were struggling with the twin problems of a population brutalized by the Second World War, firebombing and the holocaust, and the prospect of nuclear armageddon. One of the solutions was this human capacity to literally feel for other people—empathy. And slowly this arcane technical word migrated into common usage. It’s a wild conversation that will make you pause every time you use the word in daily speech!

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So if you’re like me, you’ve used the phrase ‘object lesson’ to mean some kind of telling real-world example of something. The new parent waking up at 4:30 in the morning to get work done, for example, is an object lesson about the current childcare crisis. But the phrase used to mean something concrete itself: a particular kind of educational practice that put at its center a student's concrete and systematized appreciation of a physical object. A teacher would present an object—be it something everyday, like a window or a ladder, or something special like ginger, or a little classroom museum of interesting things—and then lead the students through a number of practices that allowed them to appreciate the object, first as an object, and then later, as a representative of abstract ideas. This shows a really distinctive way that 19th century Americans thought about objects, and thought WITH objects. When they saw, say, a piece of coal, they had been taught not only to appreciate the coal as an object, and describe it, but to understand it as a process of production, trade, and the economy.