HIST 104 News

I have a Tocqueville text picked up in Minard 138 after class on Tuesday. Will bring it to class on Thursday.

It comes time I have to figure out just what we can get done, and what we can't done, in the remaining time. Today we have the quiz for Lecture 11, and we'll start on the next lecture. That will NOT be Lecture 12, however. We're going to skip that lecture on the Cold War. I'll give you a little information filling in, so that you can move on to later topics without problems, I think. This means that in the days remaining we will have lectures and quizzes 13, 14, and 15.

For the particular benefit of those in the guard, let me recap on adjustments to course content since mid-March. We were on schedule into the week of 10 & 12 March, completing Lecture 8, on the Great War. After that we skipped Lecture 9 and went into Lecture 10, on the Great Depression, and Lecture 11, on WW II. Next we will skip Lecture 12. We will complete lectures 12, 13, and 14. I'll put the same information into list:

Lecture 8 - completed
Lecture 9 - skipped
Lecture 10 - completed
Lecture 11 - completed
Lecture 12 - skipping
Lecture 13 - will complete
Lecture 14 - will complete
Lecture 15 - will complete

National Guard personnel:

1. Pick up lecture CDs from Mr. Jackson in Minard 412C.

2. Let me know when you are ready to take any quiz you have missed. I'll give you a pencil-and-paper quiz. Email me, or call 701-799-2942.

(The following notice went out to national guard personnel who have contacted me. If you are on active duty and I'm not yet aware of your situation, please email me [isern@plainsfolk.com] or call me [701-799-2942].)

This note goes out to national guard personnel who are enrolled in my section of HIST 104 and who may, for obvious reasons, need to make special arrangements to complete the course.

First of all, thank you for your service during this time of need. National guard personnel have provided the skeleton that has helped the body of volunteers stand up in trying times. Again, thanks. I will personally watch over the case of every one of you to see that everything that should be done is done. Your work and grade in this course will not suffer for lack of accommodation to the extraordinary circumstances.

Second, I hope you know that NDSU stands behind you in this matter. The following notice has gone out from the office of the provost (chief academic offer of the university):

"NDSU has recently been notified that a number of our students in the National Guard have been ordered by the Governor to provide assistance to our communities and citizens affected by the severe flooding conditions. At this time, it is unknown the length of activation but National Guard members have been told it could be up to five weeks.

"NDSU is encouraging its faculty to accommodate students who have been called to active duty due to the Flood 2009. We want to help these students complete their spring semester studies and exams. Guard students have been instructed to provide a copy of their orders to verify their activation. Please feel free to request a copy of this document or contact the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs for assistance in obtaining verification.

"In November 2002, the SBHE approved Policy 510 "Rights of Students Called to Active Military Service." This policy is intended to enable campus officials and faculty to do what they can to minimize disruption to a student's educational program and financial impact that might otherwise result when a student is ordered to active duty, as well as to make it easier for these students to devote full attention to family matters and other concerns.

"The complete policy can be found at http://www.ndus.edu/policies/sbhe-policies/policy.asp?ref=2528

"Your help in assisting our students will be greatly appreciated."

Your email notice to me is sufficient verification to me of your service and need for accommodation.

Here, then, is the general plan. As you probably know, I have made changes in the course schedule, deleting some material on account of lost time. I posted a discussion of this in the weblog framed into the home page of the course, here - www.ndsu.edu/instruct/isern/104

I will be making additional cuts and plans tomorrow and posting these also to the weblog. In addition, I will reconstruct the calendar of the past few weeks so that you can tell just what material was covered and what quizzes you may have missed, or will miss.

Then, in general, here is how you can take care of missed work. I have CDs containing the lectures of the course. These contain talking PowerPoint files, self-contained, that you can work through at your own pace. I will give you whatever CDs you need in order to fill in missed work. You can review then as you have time and are able. When you are ready to take a particular quiz or quizzes, you only need let me know by email, telephone, or in-person contact, and I will give you a pencil-and-paper quiz (drawn from the same question bank as those administered in class).

It is because I teach the same course for distance learning that I have these canned lectures and quiz banks available to roll out to serve individual needs. I'm glad that I do.

I have told several of you that we can huddle right after class on Thursday to size up individual situations. Check the weblog for further announcements and schedules. If you need to telephone me, call 701-799-2942, day or night.

And as you continue or complete your sevice, please stay safe.

More good stuff that could be used to fulfill the cultural currents assignment.

Friday 17 April, 3:00pm, MU Arikara Room: Dru McGill, Indiana University, Presents "Looting, Repatriation, Ethnic Violence, and Development: A Discussion of Ethics in American Archeology," for the colloquium in History, Philosophy, & Religious Studies

Saturday 18 April, Bison Sports Arena: Tri-College Woodlands and High Plains Powwow, Lakota Thunder host drum group, grand entries at 1:00pm and 7:00pm

29 April through 3 May, When the Bird Takes Flight, Little Country Theater - details here

The following online chapters of Tocqueville will be referred to in class in reference to recent volunteer efforts in the Red River Valley.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch2_04.htm
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch2_05.htm
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch2_08.htm

(Cross-posting here my recent Plains Folk essay recorded for Prairie Public Radio.)

As a native Kansan living in Fargo, North Dakota, with family and friends in far-flung places, I've been acutely aware of how recent developments in the Red River Valley of the North have appeared to people elsewhere. I suspect that people in Greensburg, Kansas, or the many other parts of the plains visited by natural disaster in this era of instant media may have some similar impressions.

To begin with, the national media really don't get it, do they? Everything is always a little bit off, a little bit haphazard, sometimes seriously misleading. Symbolic of all this is that when Fargo police caught CNN personnel climbing on the flood dikes, they arrested them, and people cheered.

External commentators, too, do not distinguish themselves when they try to impose their own agendas on the narrative of events. Late-night talk show jockeys, comparing the hardy and orderly response of prairie folk in crisis to that of people in New Orleans, lapsed into lamentable racism. At the other end of the spectrum, I can tell you that when President Obama took the opportunity to lecture us that on account of global warming, we should expect more such disasters as this, the response around here was rather profane.

On the other hand, crisis offers opportunity for local media to shine. A local commercial radio station that I frequently criticize on account of the mean-spirited manner of parts of its talk-radio schedule transformed itself into the most valuable player among media. It became a 24-hour billboard, commons, and unofficial coordinating agency for flood response and relief. The better angels of talk radio carried the day.

Via that means, and by popular acclamation, a legend was born. The current mayor of Fargo, Dennis Walaker, had established a profile of competence and straight talk as director of public works during the flood of 1997. Now, as mayor, his personality and performance, along with the coming together of circumstances, have produced a virtual canonization of the man. He and other city officials dismissed the counsel of Homeland Security representatives who said to evacuate the city. At one point he vowed the city, if it should go under, would "go down swinging."

Then, as at a crucial point National Weather Service and Corps of Engineers experts delivered a warning that flood waters might crest as high as 43 feet, Walaker had his people do their own assessment and concluded that cold temperatures and the freezing of overland water would produce a somewhat lower crest. He and the city commission directed that dikes should be strengthened and people should carry on the fight—a dicey decision that proved correct. In this part of the country, of course, people love hear about a leader who stands up on his hind feet (6'5" tall, in Walaker’s case) and tells the feds to mind their own business. Let me say as a folklorist, this is truly the stuff of legend.

And finally, let me say this to my own students, who were the heroic infantry of this whole campaign—you wonder why I make you read that stuffy old book, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, right? You sure complain about it. But think, now, about what you have accomplished, and about what Tocqueville said: "Among democratic nations . . . all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another."

The following is a notice about a special summer offering I'm cooking up; it's been distributed nationally via various electronic media already. For undergraduate credit, you can do 3 hours, or 6 hours with addition of a research paper.

"Prairie Earth, Prairie Homes: A Field School" will be offered by North Dakota State University, in collaboration with Preservation North Dakota, 12-19 July 2009. Billed as "experiential learning in an unforgettable landscape," the course promises tours of little-known earth building sites on the prairies of western North Dakota and hands-on restoration activities at the historic Hutmacher farmstead. Options for graduate credit, undergraduate credit, teacher professional development, and non-credit learning vacation. Go here – www.ndsu.edu/instruct/isern/earth