The American Immigrant Experience

The American Immigrant Experience (audio feed, video feed) is a new American history survey course with a novel slant.

UC Berkeley demographer Carl Mason emphasizes the role of immigration and population pressure in American history, although he also covers the key events and ideologies of each period.

The course starts out with a speedy overview of human history, including the earliest immigrations to America some 20,000 years ago. By lecture 6, Mason gets to British colonization of Virginia and the beginnings of the slave trade.

Masons has a calm lecturing style, punctuated with occasional moments of wry humor. It’s a style well suited to the serious student who wants an overview of the key themes of American history, and has an interest in demographic questions, like the role of the slave trade, and the influence of population pressure in Britain to the colonization of North America.

Here are a few tidbits from the first 3 weeks of classes:

• To lure prospective settlers to the struggling colony of Virginia, the colony’s proprietor offered a number of inducements, including representative government.
• Virginia planters began to import slaves to work their tobacco plantations, when they saw that poor British laborers were beginning to form a disaffected (and armed) proletariat.
• In the early colonial period, the Virginia government was famously inept and corrupt.

The syllabus is here. (Links to most of the readings require a student log-in id.) I recommend the video feed if you have a video-capable device because you can see Mason’s lecture slides, which include a number of interesting maps and graphs.

Time for a stretch

If your aching back and shoulders are telling you that you’ve been staring at your computer too long, help is at hand from UCLA’s Recreation Department, via iTunes U.

I’ve already tried out 15 stretches that will change your life (iTunes), 15 minutes of pleasantly invigorating stretches, taught in a downloadable video by a cheery female instructor. Another enjoyable 15 minute workout is SitRx (iTunes), a set of exercises you can do at your desk.

UCLA also has free videos for individual exercises (iTunes) and several series showing how to build strength with an exercise tube.

Ebook readers for iphone: updated reviews

Since my last look at ebook software, the three leading ebook readers for the iPhone/iPod Touch have been updated, so here’s a new look at how they stack up.

Lexcycle Stanza (website) still leads the pack, even though its two competitors are closing the distance. Stanza remains my favorite because it is easily customized (font, type size etc.) and has the easiest interface for downloading free, public domain books from Project Gutenberg. And, unlike Amazon’s Kindle software (see below), Stanza lets you easily search the text of a book.

Barnes and Noble eReader (website) is now running a close second to Stanza, having moved up from dead last. It is no longer prone to frequent crashes, and best of all, it now has search! The interface for getting books from Barnes & Noble is still clunky and it is not always easy to find free public domain books. For example, if you search for the author Charles Dickens, you have to scroll through a number of offerings to get to the free versions of his works.

Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone (website) despite its recent upgrade, still lacks search. How can this be? I guess if you’re number one, you don’t have to try very hard. The main reason to try this e-book reader is its access to Amazon’s discounted Kindle books ($9.99 for most bestsellers), although the New York Times reports that this price advantage may soon be gone.

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The Peculiar Modernity of Britain

How did Britain manage to reform its institutions and move into the modern world without a major upheaval like the French Revolution?

Houses of Parliament, London. Image credit*

The answer, according to UC Berkeley historian James Vernon, is that the British were able to cling to elements of the old feudal order, even as they pioneered representative government, the theories of liberalism and the Industrial Revolution.

Vernon promises to flesh all of this out in his new course, The Peculiar Modernity of Britain, 1848-2000 (audio feed). Vernon is a lot of fun to listen to because of his wry sense of humor. (Example from the first lecture: “I’m obviously British, so you can’t complain about my accent which half of you in your evaluations will do. And it also means that everything I say is obviously true [pause for laughter] because I’m authentic.”)

Lecture 2, although it suffers from poor audio, is a fascinating discussion of how the British royal family keeps on reinventing itself to play new roles in British society. In its most recent incarnation, Vernon contends, the Royals are cashing in on celebrity culture to make themselves relevant. As an example, he points out that the funeral of Princess Diana was attended by many Hollywood celebrities, something that would have been unthinkable in earlier eras.

The syllabus is here with links to many of the course readings which are available online.

*Image credit.  Wikipedia. Public domain.

Close relationships: the importance of disclosures

Question: What do you do if someone gives you a gift?

Answer: You open it.

That simple dynamic turns out to be an important key in developing successful relationships, according to psychologist Thomas Bradbury, who teaches the UCLA course Close Relationships (website).

Bradbury makes this point in the second lecture of the course when the class sees a video of a newly married couple discussing their attitudes towards religion. The wife wants the husband to become a regular church goer, and the husband is resisting and attacking the benefits of religion. But at one point in the conversation, the husband says, “It’s hard for me to believe in stuff I can’t see.”

Woodcut of couple from Denmark in 1872. Image credit*

Bradbury stops the tape, and comments, “If your partner says it’s hard, you say ‘tell me how that’s hard for you. Help me understand that from you point of view.’” A disclosure like this is, in Bradbury’s view “a gift, a disclosure of vulnerability.” So, Bradbury asks, as he resumes the tape, “will she open the gift?”

The audio at this point is a bit hard to follow, but it’s clear that she ignores this moment of vulnerability and charges on as if it hadn’t been there. She failed the test.

Bradbury comes back to the topic in lecture 5, when he talks about mate selection. He says that intimacy grows on a ladder of greater and greater disclosures, and for this process to continue, the disclosure has to feel good. In particular, the partner has to feel validated and understood.

Imagine that you tell your partner, “I did something really stupid today. I can’t believe I did this. I sent an e-mail to my sister and I thought it was my friend and I was criticizing my sister in the e-mail. ” Then your partner has a choice. Your partner can say, “Yeah that was stupid. That was really a bad idea. What were you thinking, for God sakes.” Or does the partner say, “that can happen to anybody. I’m sure it’ll be okay. Your sister will laugh it off. Why don’t you give her a call? You want me to give her a call?”

It’s the back and forth of this kind of disclosure, Bradbury says, that leads to the growth of a close relationship.

There are lots more pearls in this class, which is one of UCLA’s podcast offerings for the current quarter.  Bradbury’s goal is to show what recent psychological research can teach us about how relationships develop and change over time.

*Image credit: Wikimedia. Public domain.

The History and Practice of Human Rights

The History and Practice of Human Rights (audio feed, video feed, website) is an intriguing new course from UC Berkeley, taught by historian Thomas Laqueur.

This course, which is the product of several years of work by seminar participants, including graduate and undergraduate students, will explore how people came to care for other people suffering in faraway disasters (e.g. the Haitian earthquake) or from oppressive regimes (e.g. Sudan), and how the language and laws of human rights developed.

Laqueur is an engaging lecturer, who speaks with self-deprecating humor and is attentive to student questions. Although one listener at the Podcast Parlor dislikes his style, saying that he is hard to listen to because he speaks with a stammer, I have to say that the stammer doesn’t bother me — I even like it because it makes him sound like he is conversing rather than lecturing.

Still, he does sometimes lapse into academic-speak, using words like “discourse” and “constituative,” but he is usually careful to translate the thoughts into plain English as well.

To give you the flavor of the course, here are some of the main points in lecture 2, entitled Why care: the history of the humanitarian narrative.

1. Laqueur devotes a lot of time to “The Sentimentalist Thesis” proposed by philosopher Richard Rorty, which argues that we have come to care for strangers, because we are conditioned to do so by sad sentimental stories that we encounter in novels and in paintings of suffering people.
2. These sentimental stories contributed to an emerging “humanitarian narrative” which influenced the first human rights movement, the antislavery movement in Britain in the 19th century. This narrative rejects the idea that suffering is an inevitable fact of nature, and insists that ordinary citizens can help distant suffering people, by doing things like boycotting sugar which would make slavery in the Carribean less profitable.
3. Laqueur then goes on to critique this thesis, questioning whether human beings have made real moral progress since the 19th century, given the terrible atrocities of the 20 century.

In my own mind, the thesis is also troubling in that it attributes great influence to narratives and works of art in changing fundamental aspects of the culture, without mentioning other influential factors such as industrialization, religious movements, and so forth. Furthermore, how do we know that the causal chain isn’t the reverse, namely that social change gives rise to new art forms?

Listening to Music at Yale

I’ve taken violin lessons and guitar lessons and listened to music all my life, but I’ve still found lots to learn from Listening to Music (website, audio feed, video feed), an introduction to music course taught by Yale musicologist Craig Wright.

While Wright considers himself a WASP with “every reason in the world to be repressed,” he brings plenty of enthusiasm and verve to his lectures, along with a lot of spirited piano playing.

With a course like this, good audio quality is crucial, and the Open Yale Courses program is up to the task. You can hear most of the music quite clearly, whether it’s Wright playing the piano or a recording of a Mozart symphony.

Even better, this course has a video option, which I highly recommend. While most online courses are fine in audio-only, this course really gives extra value in the video, where you can see the music notation on the blackboard, and watch Wright’s hand motions when he demonstrates how to conduct an orchestra, or how “your body signals where the downbeat is.”

If you want to follow along with the excellent text book, Wright’s Listening to Music, you can find lots of used copies available online.  Although most of the used copies don’t come with the accompanying CD,  I’ve found most of the musical pieces are available for free listing on Youtube.

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A great anthropology class returns

If you missed UCSD anthropologist Tara Carter’s great fall 2009 class Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed), you’re still in luck. University of California, San Diego removes most of its course podcasts at the end of each academic term, but a few professors authorize re-posting of their material. And Carter’s course just reappeared on the UCSD podcast website.

Since this class is back, I have added it to my top 10 courses of 2009.

For more on Carter’s class, see: Reading Homer as an anthropologist, and Why we stopped foraging and started farming.

American politics decoded and explained

For an interesting look at how political scientists analyze and explain American politics, check out this new course from UCLA: Public opinion, mass media, parties, and elections (audio feed) taught by John Zaller. (Video links are available at the course website.)

In the first two lectures, Zaller tackles some of the enduring puzzles of American political life. For example, why is American politics growing more and more polarized, so that compromise between the Democrats and Republicans in Congress seems all but impossible?

Zaller notes that it was not always this way. Up until the late 1960s, there were plenty of moderate Democrats and Republicans in Congress who could make compromises to get legislation passed. And political theory predicts that because the majority of the electorate is moderate, a majority of representatives will also be moderate. So why has this polarization happened?

Zaller admits that political scientists have yet to provide a definitive answer, but he has a few suggestions.

1) While most of the electorate is moderate, the people who work for candidates and contribute money to political campaigns (about 2% of the population) tend to be on the ideological extremes, so they tend to promote candidates with similar views.

2) The vast majority of Americans, who describe themselves as either moderate or unsure about political affiliation, do not pay attention to politics. Thus while they could have an enormous moderating influence on political zealots, they do not exercise this potential power. “The median voter ought to be able to force the parties to the center but it doesn’t seem to be happening,” he says.

3) Most voters, who describe themselves as conservative or liberal, will reliably vote for one of the two major parties in presidential elections.  But the swing voters, those who decide elections, tend to be influenced more by external circumstances such as the state of the economy, than by the issues.  Thus, party activists understand that the factors that decide elections are mostly beyond their control, and they gain no electoral advantage by offering centrist candidates.

Another puzzle, of special interest to people in California, is our never-ending state budget crisis. How is it, Zaller asks, that a rich state can have $100 billion in budget obligations and only $62 billion worth of money?

The answer, he believes, goes back to the tech bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which created a huge increase in state revenues. That allowed Republicans to do what Republicans love to do, that is cut taxes. And Democrats could do what Democrats love to do, which is increase spending. Democrats in the Legislature increased the formulas for how much would be spent on medical care, and they increased salaries for teachers and retirement benefits for government workers. All of this created new permanent spending obligations for the state. Meanwhile, as their price for going along with the spending increases, the Republicans were able to legislate tax cuts.

Then, when the economy crashed, the California state budget lost the windfall tax revenue , but now had a smaller tax base and a larger set of obligations. Voila: a budget crisis.

The rise of monasticism

According to historian Matthew Herbst, the rise of monasticism can be seen as an answer to this question: how do you perform heroic self-sacrifice when the age of martyrs is past?

In lecture four of Herbst’s excellent course History of the Byzantine Empire (feed), Herbst says that because the early Christian church was persecuted by the Roman authorities, early Christians had many opportunities for martyrdom and sainthood. But how do you achieve extraordinary sanctity when persecution is a distant memory and Christianity is the official religion of the empire? The answer, as it emerged in the fifth century was: become a monk.

A Coptic Icon of Saint Anthony, the first monk. Image credit*

He relates the fascinating story of how monasticism grew from a few isolated hermits to a powerful movement that produced bishops and patriarchs and in later centuries was even seen as a threat by the Byzantine Emperor himself.

The first hermit we know about is St. Anthony who gained fame by isolating himself in the desert and seeking holiness. Other early monks began monastic communities in which they renounced the pleasures of the flesh in order to train their souls and achieve sanctity.

Here are a few tidbits from the lecture.

• While western monasticism developed monastic orders like the Benedictine and Franciscan orders, Eastern Orthodoxy had no monastic orders. Monks are just monks.
• Ordinary people began to seek out monks to act as arbitrators in disputes as well as provide the power of their prayers to help with problems like illness.
• Monks viewed their cells as places of freedom rather than imprisonment. They sought freedom from temptation so they could become entirely holy beings.

It then becomes doubly ironic that in later centuries monastic communities became centers of worldly power with great wealth and influence.

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain.