Land Travels: Camping, Caves, and Crazy Times

We are having a grand time trekking through the Eastern side of Australia. Billabong is safely docked in Mooloolaba and as of the 20th of February we have been putting on the kilometers in our rented “campette” campervan. As of today we have made it just past Sydney, less than 1,000 km if driven straight … however we have driven over 2,500km! We have explored the coast and the neighboring hinterlands; traveling flat coastal breath-taking views to mouth-gaping dramatic mountain roads. Australia is yet another beautiful country, and we are yet again thankful for the opportunity to be here.

One thing we have learned about the Australian’s is that they sure do know how to camp … and they don’t go skimpy! More than once on our cruising journey, I have found that I’ve had boat envy … sometimes a wee-bit jealous of the big, more luxurious boats (more properly called yachts). I still remember the day I stepped aboard a beautiful 70 foot sailboat and was handed a chilled glass of white wine in a REAL wine glass! I never thought such envious thoughts could be found in camping too. We look quite pathetic in our tiny ‘campette’ (basically a small van with a bed and camp-stove) when we pull into a campground and are surrounded by HUMONGOUS camping setups … some of these tents are bigger than the average home! We’ve even had more than one local comment on how small our little guy is! And so, as we drink our barely cool white wine from lovely blue plastic cups, I can’t help but stare longingly at the campsite next to us as they drink their fully chilled wine, in the protection of their net enclosed social area, in, of course, a real wine glass!!!

But of course for us life is grand, and even if we tend to be a bit envious here and there, there is no time to dwell on it as the sites are just to numerous and wonderful to care about how one got there to see them in the first place!

Our favorite Australian site to date is the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains National Park (just west of Sydney). Honestly, I can’t even begin to describe the wonder and amazement of this magical place. I never would’ve guessed that caves could be so interesting and beautiful. Both of us have tried to come up with expressions and descriptions, but it is useless … they were (are) just amazing and no words or photographs will ever do them justice!

Besides great hiking and walking, superb views and lookouts, and exploration of towns and cities, we have also experienced one of the highlights (according to Lonely Planet) of Sydney … the Mardi Gras. Now this isn’t to be compared to the New Orleans Mardi Gras … this is the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras and boy oh boy is it the most unique and, er’, interesting parade I’ve ever seen! We were lucky enough to be in Sydney for this great festivity, and even luckier to meet up with our friends on Island Sonata. There are some things that just can’t be written about this parade, less I’m kicked off this BLOG site for pornographic material!!! About half a million folks attended and it was quite a scene to take in, especially some of the ‘outfits’ or lack there of. If you can handle the crowds it’s something not to be missed should you be in town during the event.

Next up we’ll continue our travels south, to Melbourne, where we’ll board a plane to fly over to Tasmania, spending nine days on the island before returning to Sydney, and eventually Billabong back in Mooloolaba.

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Road Trip Brisbane to Sydney Photos

2/20/07 - 3/4/07

2/20 - 2/23:  Brisbane to Coff's Harbour

Mt Warning National Park, Tenterfield & Bald Rock NP, Washpool / Gibralter Range, Yamba, Coff's Harbour, Sawtell



2/23 - 2/27:  Dorrigo to Broken Bay

Dorrigo National Park, Nambucca Heads, Trial Bay / Southwest Rocks, Crowdy Bay, Port Stephens, New Castle, Pittwater/Broken Bay, Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park



2/28 - 3/01:  Blue Mountains

Wentworth Falls, Leura - Katoomba, Blackheath, Three Sister's, Jenolan Caves

3/2 - 3/4:  Sydney

Including the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

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Marian Sims and Reconstruction in S.C.

In response to a posting yesterday where I noted that I'm working on a conference paper and need to finish it during our spring break, a reader asks what the paper is about.

The paper is for the annual meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians and is titled, rather boringly, "Beyond Surrender: Marian Sims, Francis B. Simkins, and Revisionism in Reconstruction South Carolina."

Marian Sims (1899-1961) was a writer born in Dalton, Georgia. In the mid-1930s, Sims, who had been a school teacher (history and French) and copy writer for an advertising firm, began writing novels and short stories. Much of her fiction dealt ("with notable honesty and intelligence," according to a reviewer in the New York Times) with the lives of middle-class southerners facing such issues as divorce and small-town religious and moral bigotry.

In 1941, Sims turned her hand to historical fiction with Beyond Surrender, a novel of Reconstruction in South Carolina. In the book's acknowledgements, she thanked Francis Butler Simkins, who was the author (with Robert Woody) of one of the first of the so-called "revisionist" histories of Reconstruction (South Carolina during Reconstruction, [1932]).

Earlier historians (and people in general) had looked at Reconstruction as a dismal failure, where vindictive northern Radical Republicans imposed horrible "reforms" on the southern states. This interpretation features scalawags and carpetbaggers, uppity and incompetent blacks, and whites being humiliated and, in general, unfairly imposed upon. William Archibald Dunning and his students (the "Dunning school") at Columbia a century ago turned out a number of studies that "proved" this interpretation. (Perhaps the most popular "history" was Claude Bowers's The Tragic Era [1929]). Think of Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and you'll understand how widespread this view was.

Historian Francis B. Simkins was no Eric Foner, but his view of Reconstruction was quite different from Dunning's. In Simkins's view, not all Yankees were bad, not all southern whites were good, and the former slaves were treated with a sympathy that even W.E.B. DuBois pronounced "fair."

A reading of the Sims-Simkins correspondence and the two books (Sims's novel and Simkins's history) shows that Sims was heavily influenced by Simkins's work, producing what might well be the first "revisionist" fiction of the Reconstruction era, a much improved version (from a historical standpoint, anyway) of Margaret Mitchell's more famous novel.

Sims has been almost completely ignored by historians, and I think that's a shame, hence the paper.

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Who do people say I am?

This past week in my History of American Religion class, we discussed Patrick Allitt's "The American Christ," from American Heritage (Nov. 1988). It's a great article that makes several good points I want my students to learn. (At the end of the semester, they're going to read Stephen Prothero's American Jesus.)

Since Jesus was in the news last week, the timing worked out well.

A few years ago, I used Allitt's article as the basis for a column (I used to write a weekly column--or, as someone said, I wrote a column, weakly--for the local newspaper). Jesus himself provided the title (or the "headline," as the editor insisted on calling it): "Whom Do Men Say That I Am?" That's the King James Version. I wish now that I had used the more politically- and grammatically-correct New International Version: "Who do people say I am?" (Mark 8:27)

Anyway, here it is:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Several years ago, Patrick Allitt, a historian of American religion at Emory University, published an article called “The American Christ.” He showed how Americans in the last two centuries have interpreted Jesus--his life and his teachings--from their own perspectives. You might say that we have made Jesus in our own image.

In Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880), Jesus and the title character were strong and masculine. Wallace himself was a manly man, a major general in the Union army.

On the other hand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was a woman. Her story of Jesus, titled Footsteps of the Master (1877), stressed the feminine side of Christ, calling him at one point a “loving, saintly mother.” Stowe noted that Jesus had more compassion for women than any other famous man in history.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps took things a bit further with her Story of Jesus Christ (1897). Jesus “boldly took the stand that men and women stood before God upon the same moral plane, and that they ought so to stand before human society.”

Whom do men say that I am: Charles Atlas or Phil Donahue?

Eugene Debs, labor leader and Socialist party presidential candidate, said that Jesus “organized a working class movement for no other reason than to destroy class rule and set up the common people as the sole and rightful inheritors of the earth.”

Bruce Barton, an advertising executive in the 1920s, described Jesus as the founder of modern business principles, the world’s greatest salesman.

Jesus: labor leader or businessman?

Mary Austin’s biography of Jesus was titled A Small Town Man (1915). Big cities were wicked, but Jesus came from the small town of Nazareth. Fulton Oursler echoed this theme in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1949). “Oh yes, Joseph knew that sophisticates in Jerusalem looked down on the countrified Nazarenes, yokels with a ridiculous northern accent,” Oursler wrote. “But Joseph, with all his fellow townsmen, felt that the people of Jerusalem were unnatural and overcivilized. Anyway, he was proud of his home town.”

In the 1960s, Karl Burke, a prison chaplain, thought young people raised in the inner city had trouble understanding the Bible’s language and identifying with its agricultural setting. So Burke, in God Is for Real, Man, rewrote a number of Bible stories from a more contemporary, urban perspective. “After Jesus busted outa the grave, He met two of his gang on the road. Man! Were they ever spooked and surprised. Thomas’s eyes almost bugged out when he saw Jesus.”

Jesus: country boy or urban dude?

Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896) told how citizens of a Midwestern town were suddenly made aware of the suffering in their midst. They became interested in a number of social reforms as they decided to live by the simple creed, “What Would Jesus Do?” One of the characters was a young woman from a prominent and well-off family who gave up everything to live with and help the poor. “It was not a new idea,” said Sheldon. “It was an idea started by Jesus Christ when he left His Father’s house and forsook the riches that were His in order to get nearer humanity.”

William Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago (1893) took a more moralistic stance. Stead had scandalized the city by publishing a list of the businessmen and local officials who visited the city’s prostitutes. Stead said in his novel that if Jesus came to Chicago, he would do the same thing.

Robert Ingersoll, the most famous atheist in the nation a hundred years ago, found much to admire in the life of Christ. “He was a reformer in his time,” Ingersoll said, noting that both he and Christ had worked to save the world from the tyranny of organized religion. “Had I lived at that time, I would have been his friend, and should he come again he will not find a better friend than I will be.”

Jesus: social reformer, scandal monger, friend of the atheist.

I was thinking of Allitt’s article this week, after I read about a new Catholic church in Los Angeles. The church, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, contains a large statue of the Virgin Mary, a Mary with definite Latino features. “I think she has to be one of us,” said the artist. The statue has raised a few eyebrows, but has apparently been accepted fairly well.

How do we see Mary? Lew Wallace said: “Her complexion was more pale than fair, the eyes blue and large, and shaded by drooping lips and long lashes; and, in harmony with all, a flood of golden hair.” Elizabeth Stuart Phelps described Mary as having “a fair complexion, blonde hair and bright hazel eyes. Here eyebrows were arched and dark, her lips ruddy.”

When I was a child, I had a book that told the life of Jesus, as illustrated by a number of artists through the ages. Jesus was always light skinned, sometimes even blond, often surrounded by Caucasian children, smiling brightly. According to Albert Cleage, in Black Messiah, “For nearly 500 years the illusion that Jesus was white dominated the world only because white Europeans dominated the earth.”

Jesus: white man, or person of color?

In the recent primary, one candidate criticized his opponent’s liberal religious views, especially his alleged tolerance of homosexuals. This candidate promised that, if he were elected, he would support Christian [i.e., anti-homosexual] principles.

We continue to create Jesus in our own image.

This piece was first published in the Cartersville Daily Tribune News in 2002. All literary references are from the Allitt article cited above.

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good stuff for the weekend

For your reading pleasure this weekend:

Dr. Homeslice has the 108th Carnival of Education.

The 55th Skeptics' Circle is up at Second Sight (with numerology!).

The 5th edition of the Georgia Carnival is at Got Bible?.

History Is Elementary is hosting the 49th History Carnival.

Everything Ed Darrell writes at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub is worth reading.

Me, I'm going to finish the above, watch Jesus Camp, and begin spring break week by finishing a conference paper. I hope.

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Winthrop Jordan, my (potential) co-author, and the Great North West Scam

Winthrop Jordan, professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Mississippi, died last week. He was author of the prize-winning White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968) and other scholarly works. He also wrote, with Leon Litwack, a popular textbook, The United States. It was on this last project that he and I could have been co-authors.

The textbook, published by Prentice Hall, went out of print some years ago. A new publishing firm, North West, picked up the rights to it and offered professors $2,500 (that’s what my letter said; I later learned that some were offered considerably more) to adopt the book for their classes. Well, it wasn’t quite that blatant; the letter offered that huge amount in return for reviewing the book. The publisher’s web site is no longer up, but I cut and pasted parts of it at the time:

“Q: Is adopting the textbook required for this review program?

“A: No, absolutely not. There are many reviewers who are not using the textbook in their classes. However, the application process is competitive and it is often the case that the reviews that come from spending an entire semester using the textbook in class contains more in depth detail and familiarity with the content which best serves our editorial team.”

hmmmm…

Well, out of curiosity, I sent in my name as a potential reviewer and received an exam copy of the textbook. It was very cheaply produced. Most of the illustrations--maybe all of them, I don’t recall, and I no longer have the books--were black-and-white illustrations from the Library of Congress, which means, again, cheap. According to the publisher’s web site, the book was $55 for the bookstore, so the price to students would have perhaps $75--a lot of money (this was about five years ago) for what was likely the cheapest-produced textbook around.

Another thing: With other textbooks, the campus bookstore can return unpurchased copies of books and receive a full refund. But North West’s policy said:

“Returns are subject to a 20% restocking fee. Credit will be issued upon receipt of returned books--credit only, no cash refunds.” Neither of these provisions--the restocking fee or the credit instead of cash refund--is typical of reputable publishers.

I realized this was a terrible scam, but I filled out the form to “review” the book for $2,500. To one of their questions (yes, they actually asked this), I honestly replied I would not use the book in my class. I wasn’t surprised when I wasn’t chosen for the review process.

But that’s not the end of the story.

I then received another letter from North West, this time offering me the opportunity to co-author a U.S. History textbook! My co-authors would be Jordan and Litwack.

Here was the deal. I could change up to 20% of the Jordan/Litwack textbook, tailoring it to my approach, leaving out what I didn’t want, switching chapters to fit my syllabus, even adding some of my own material. I would be listed as co-author on the title page! For every copy sold to my students, I would receive $15.

Since it might take a while to do my revisions of the textbook, North West offered me a two year “research and development” period to write my share of the book. During that time, I would use the current edition of the book and receive $15 per copy sold to students. And if, after that two year research and development period, I still hadn’t completed the volume, well, they would just put the contract on an indefinite hold, no problem.

I didn’t take them up on this, hence missing the chance to co-author a book with Winthrop Jordan and Leon Litwack.

Jordan and Litwack had nothing to do with this. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (reproduced here), they were dismayed by the whole affair.

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Helen Keller and "subversive verses"

I was chatting with a couple of folks about how Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land morphed from a song that was critical of certain aspects of American society to one of our great patriotic standards through the omission of a couple of subversive verses. Suddenly Helen Keller came to mind.

Helen Keller was the blind and deaf girl who overcame adversity through the devotion of her teacher, Ann Sullivan. The story is told very movingly in The Miracle Worker. Who can forget that scene at the water pump--the patience of the teacher spelling "water" in her hand over and over, the look of wonder on Helen’s face when she suddenly understood?

What a story! And what a lesson for us all.

But Helen Keller's life didn't end there. As an adult, she became a socialist, disenchanted with much of American life. She toured slums and sweatshops, talked to the poor, and came to an understanding as profound as the one she learned at the water pump. "I had once believed that we were the masters of our fate," she wrote in her memoirs, "that we could mold our lives into any form we pleased. I had overcome blindness and deafness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life's struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to my birth and environment. I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone."

Helen Keller's childhood is a success story, a wonderful example of the American Dream, the idea that anyone, even a blind and deaf girl, can make it. It's a story we want to believe. But it's the opposite of the lesson she wanted us to draw from her life, and so the adult Helen Keller has disappeared from our national mythology--the "subversive verses" again forgotten.

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Bad history!

The 13th Carnival of Bad History is up at Rob MacDougall's Old Is the New New, and it's a good one. I'm only halfway through it (papers to grade), but so far my favorite is Will Chen's posting on how the FBI viewed It's a Wonderful Life as commie propaganda. Wow. Oh, and check out Rob's comments for even more.

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And Then It Was Over

So I ran the half marathon. Now what?

For the last twelve weeks I have had a goal, a so called "light at the end of the tunnel". Now I have reached the end, I have seen the light. So what do I do now?

Options:

1. Another half marathon - I saw an awesome looking one in Salt Lake City... or there are dozens more, all over the US and abroad.
2. Sprint Triathlon - shorter than a hard core normal triathlon - usually about a .5-1 mi swim, 3-4 mi run and 12-16 mi bike. This is what I am leaning towards. I even bought a new swimsuit.
or 3. Aids bike ride - from San Francisco to L.A. in a week in June- average of about 100 miles a day. I could do this but to do so you have to raise money...5000 dollars, I think. Hmmm. Not my cup of tea.

I think my June turnaround will be activity based. So...if anyone has any good suggestions of places to go/activities to participate in...Let me know!

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...And I'm Spent!

Its over. We are done. We finished in just over two hours, which was my goal. We didnt quite make it as fast as I wanted, but we were only 2 minutes slower. If we hadn't stopped to pee, we would have been fine. Actually, out of some 900+ people, we were about 300. Not too bad; I think on a bell curve that would be a B.

It was a beautiful day, 65 degrees, not a cloud in the sky... We ran the first few miles pretty easily, then Kaylen joined us around mile 5 and ran with us to about mile 10. Those miles flew by; I don't know if it was becuase Kaylen was there or what, but we seemed to reach mile 10 very quickly. It was more difficult to get from 10 to 11 and even more so from 11 to 12. When we reached the 12 mile marker, we tried to speed up a little, but by that time I could not feel my legs and my feet felt like they had been trapped in my shoes for weeks. Mira was having leg trouble; I was having foot trouble. We limped along until the last little bit where Dad joined us and ran with us to the finish. We sprinted the last 100 yards and made it across the finish line at 2:13.

Not bad for someone who could barely run two miles without having a coronary three months ago.

So - what is next, you ask. That has yet to be determined. Possibly another half (it is a good excuse to travel around and see new places) or maybe a sprint triathlon (3-4 mile run, 12-16 mile bike, roughly a half mile swim).

The world is my oyster!

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