Second Presentation

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Life and Work

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a very interesting woman. Her life was unique and her work influential. Her views on life and society were extreme and rather progressive. Gilman was born on July 3, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut and she spent most of her life in Rhode Island. In 1884 she married Charles Walter Stetson and they had a daughter but Gilman was not up to living the life of housewife. Her attempt at doing so sent her into a deep depression of which she only started to come out of when she left her husband. Gilman moved to California with her daughter. Here Gilman became active in several feminist and reformist organizations such as The Pacific Coast Woman's Press Association, the Woman's Alliance, the Economic Club, the Ebell Society, the Parents Association, and the State Council of Women. Gilman’s husband later remarried with a friend of hers, with Gilman’s blessing of course. She sent her daughter to live with them which brought on her characterization as “an unnatural mother.” She continued her work and later remarried.
Gilman wrote a series of utopian works that were originally published in the journal The Forerunner (1909-1916), which she wrote, edited, and published all by herself. Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland are works that show Gilman’s feelings about the condition of women and her proposed solution. In all three works Gilman continuously mentions that the new advanced societies were a result of the awakening of women. Women can reach their full human potential and make the world a better place only if they are allowed to fend for themselves. The works were personal on different levels. They expressed her beliefs and there are some instances where little events in the works parallel Gilman’s. Perhaps these were mere coincidences but her works were her outlet so its possible she thought her way of life was ideal.

In reading several of her works of fiction I found that Gilman had some very interesting views on the world and she was very successful in her intent to get people thinking about the world. It was strange to read a utopian work where one of the new radical ideas was that a woman was able to have a career and a family, but one has to remember that they were written a very long time ago.

It is easy for us to understand and accept all these accomplishments of a woman, but they are so much more meaningful because Gilman accomplished all of this at a time when women were not even allowed to vote. Women were just empowering themselves and Gilman is an example of all that women were capable of and more.

Second Presentation

My paper will be about the Washington Public Power Supply System. Richard White mentions it in the latter stages of The Organic Machine. The WPPSS was part of a plan by the Bonneville Power Administration to construct 5 nuclear power plants in the Pacific Northwest. The project was believed to be necessary in the late 1960's because of the expected increase in demand and the fact that the Columbia had been used to its maximum potential. As the 70's passed however, it became clear that the power demands predicted would not come to pass but the project continued anyway. Costs spiralled out of control and the project defaulted on 2.2 billion dollars worth of bonds in 1983.



The lawsuits to settle the disputes between the investors and the WPPSS as well as the State of Washington lasted throughout the 80's and were only settled in 1995. The failure of the WPPSS which began with a voter referendum in 1981 that prohibited the WPPSS from seeking more bonds in the name of the people of the State of Washington. The story of the WPPSS is a good example of the conflict that can arise from public utilities operating in a market based industry. The public mission of the the BPA and the WPPSS required that it Continually develop both the capacity and use of electric power in the Pacific Northwest. The BPA's hydroelectric dams were funded by the Federal Government and thus the cost per kilowatt for electricty in the Northwest was the lowest in the country. As rates rose to fund the new WPPSS plants, demand dropped dramatically almost completely eliminating the need for the new capacity the WPPSS sought to build.

The early 1980's were the beginnings of the Deregulation movement and the WPPSS was an easy target for pundits and politicians as an example of big government intervening in an industry that it should have never taken part in.

Second Presentation

Morality and science is a never ending issue. Along with progress comes a deeper discussion of ethics surrounding the issue. Nuclear bombs yielding the power to exterminate the human race in a matter a seconds pushes the ethics of science to a breaking point. Morality is not absent from Copenhagen, in fact, it is one of the central issues surrounding the wartime meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. One possible reason why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen in the first place was to ask Bohr if a scientist had the moral right to work on a nuclear a bomb. There are no absolutes about the controversial meeting during that September night in Copenhagen. The only certainty is that the meeting took place. What was said, and the reasons for the visit are still as bleak as they were fifty years ago. This aspect of Fryan’s play proves to be the most interesting. How is it that we know what we know?
Werner Heisenberg states in the beginning of Act One, “Everyone understands uncertainty. Or thinks he does. No one understands my trip to Copenhagen…the more I’ve explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become” (4). Uncertainty is at the core of the play and Heisenberg’s actual life. His own principle of uncertainty asserted that the more precisely one measures one variable, the less precise the measurement of the second variable may be. (98) Bohr’s idea of complementarity says that light might be either a wave or a photon depending on perception. History is deeply rooted in these ideas of uncertainty and complementarity. How we know what we know is not as concrete as one thinks. In Copenhagen, Bohr asserts that, “Particles are things, complete in themselves. Waves are disturbances in something else. We must choose one of the two ways of seeing, but as soon as we do we can’t know everything about them.” Historians have spent countless hours examining documents, reading transcripts, and conducting interviews attempting to reach hard facts. Just like the principle of uncertainty history involves multiple variables, and like the idea of complementarity history can be viewed differently through different eyes, making it hard to know the full scale of information. People might not have been truthful in interviews, historians may interpret documents completely differently, and previously unreleased evidence may surface. Overtime facts can become distorted and skewed, loosing substance after each generation. What starts out as clear and concise may become garbled and foreign over time like a game of telephone.
As historians we are certain of some things, but these certainties do not always lead to absolutes. It is near impossible to be sure of things we believe are true because just like Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty there are too many variables to focus on at once. This is what caused Max Born to call Heisenberg and Bohr’s story not so much “a straight staircase upwards, but a tangle of interconnected alleys” (96). Frayn’s attempt to look down each one of the alleys yields bigger questions than simply why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen. Manifestly, Copenhagen is a play that tries to uncover truths about a little known meeting between two of the worlds greatest physicists during the Second World War. On a bigger scale Copenhagen raises questions surrounding historical certainty and morality in science. As a work of fiction Copenhagen attempts to fuse historical records about a fuzzy subject and speculate further what might have happened on that September night in Copenhagen, 1941.

Presentation - In Defense of History

Richard Evans begins his defense of history by giving the reader a history of history. Above all, Leopold von Ranke – the German historian – shifted history from a religious based endeavor to a more scientific approach. Ranke’s influence was three-fold. First, he established history as an independent discipline, separate from philosophy or literature. Second, he wanted people to understand the past through the people who lived in it and understood it. Third, he introduced a method to extrapolate texts in order to get usable facts. Through Ranke, Evans defense of an objective approach to history takes form. The author fairly and conservatively examines other historical outlooks including postmodernist, revisionist, and deconstructionalist, yet views all of them inadequate in one way or another to an objective viewpoint. His defense and objective approach are not totally original. Evans draws heavily from E.H. Carr’s book What is history? to formulate his thesis and bring about relevant examples.
Evans leaves little to the reader to ponder addressing morality, factual evidence, primary and secondary sources, and causation in a historical context. In general, Evans views the rise of postmodernism as a subjective approach that does not give enough credit to the past and the documents that define it. For example; morality, postmodernists say, are central to understanding history and giving the past a more colorful and definitive viewpoint. Evans believes a more successful way of accessing the past is to leave morality out of the equation, instead giving the reader examples of a situation. Explaining how slave ownership came to be, its effects on slaves, and the country is the true task of the historian, as opposed to a lesson of morality.
In chapter six, Society and the Individual, Evans examines the movement of political dominated history to that of more diverse disciples including social history, cultural history, and psychohistory to name a few. There is no such thing as a definitive history anymore and the ideas of a complete synthesis of historical knowledge are dwindling. Evans sees the result of this as two-fold. History is becoming more eclectic and less Eurocentric,but also allows specialists through modern communication to interact and trade ideas. Economic, Social, and Intellectual historians might differ on methodology, yet agree that postmodernisms linguistic turn is for the worse. Evans takes this postmodern critique of social history as being dead and pointless and helps to reinforce his own point. He concludes though that postmodernisms emphasis on the individual in history actually is a positive thing for historical research restoring a much needed balance between society and the individual.
For most of the book Evans uses Carr on his side, but at times disagrees with his views. For example, in chapter seven E.H. Carr states that those who had contributed little or nothing to creation of historical change as he saw it were not really deserving of historian’s attention. Evans gives a lengthy defense of the losers, conquered, and minorities who do in fact leave their mark on history and deserve the attention of the historians as much as the winners that allegedly write history.
By the final chapter, Evans has given his reader a thorough explanation of not only the objective history that he is defending, but a concise history of other historical disciplines that are attacking the former viewpoint. Evans concludes by the end, and proves through his examples, that “ when postmodernist principles are applied to itself many of its arguments begin to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.” This may be the case but Evans is quick to assert that along with the negative aspects of postmodernism, positive ones have risen. “One thing the postmodernist treatment of history as a form of literature has done is to reinstate good writing as legitimate historical practice.” In defense of history may be dense and wordy at times making Evan’s claims difficult to follow. It is important to remember that his main point is that postmodernism might have boomed in recent years, but eventually it will fall into a sub discipline of history such as cultural history, social history, or political history.

2nd Presentation

The German invasion of Poland is often viewed as the beginning of World War II, but long before Germany’s transgression, the imbalance between Japan’s growing militarism and China’s internal weaknesses arguably sparked the series of events that turned a regional conflict into an international war. The northern China region of Manchuria had been a traditionally contested territory both for its strategic location and for its natural resources. Although Japan had gained the essential railroad rights from the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, it was forced to give up much of its territorial gains; concessions that Japan deemed necessary to support its growing militarism and colonial expansion. The Mukden railroad incident, then, was the Japanese government’s justification to the war, no matter how blatantly fictitious it was. According to the Japanese, the Chinese bandits’ success was reason enough to invade Manchuria in the following year and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo. The incident extended beyond a territorial conflict between Japan and China, however, because of the international response that seemed to dismiss the obvious conclusion that Japan had provoked the incident. Tension over Manchuria continued to dominate the East Asian front of the Pacific War and was reflective of a number of cultural and political relations of the period.

 

In The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Jonathon D. Spence provides a comprehensive history of Chinese domestic life during this period. Through the characters of Kang Youwei and Lu Xun, Spence specifically reflects the growing tension in Japanese-Chinese relations and the internal division within China over regaining even the most limited degree of autonomy. Both Lu Xun and Kang Youwei shared a frustrated outlook on China’s development since the late 19^th century. China had radically changed by 1931, but as Kang reflected earlier before his own death in 1927, China needed to transform entirely: it was “necessary to dismantle the building and build anew if we want something strong and dependable.” (49). Spence repeatedly cites Lu Xun’s contempt for the trajectory of government reform. Although these are only two voices, they reflect China’s struggle to adapt to Western and Japanese imperialism that by 1931 and through the War period radically altered the lives of Chinese in the Manchurian region.

 

Hergé created the Adventures of Tintin comic book series as an international perspective on world events. The Blue Lotus is about Tintin’s, the main character, adventures in pre-war Manchuria through the Manchurian railroad incident, and the Japanese decision to leave the League of Nations. As a satirical commentary on war-hungry Japan, Hergé’s cartoon provides a good example of Japanese-Chinese relations as well as the cultural context of contemporary China.

 

Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist, is another primary source that reflects the important social and political conflicts within Japan. Her memoir begins before the War but best portrays what life was like for Japanese colonists in Manchuria immediately after Japan’s surrender. Kuramoto remembers living in Dairen, a port city north of Port Arthur, where Japanese pre-war ideas of ultimate sacrifice and national supremacy became “a big joke, where Japanese privileges no longer existed.” (71). The Russian military, Chinese nationalists, and other oppressed minorities under Japanese colonial rule relished in punishing the defeated Japanese.

 

As viewed through the lens of a world history, these documents demonstrate the views of so many conflicted parties whose concerns over Manchuria testified to the historical importance of the region in the development of World War II. 

Second presentation

Richard White’s The Organic Machine breaks from traditional approaches to Environmental history, providing the reader with a unique account of the interdependent relationships that affect the Columbia River. White organizes his work into the four key elements that coincide to shape the lives of the people who have interacted with the river for centuries. Labor, work, power and salmon are these elements but they are not distinct in their roles. Rather they intersect and overlap in their relationships to each other. The Organic Machine provides an extensive history of the river from its thriving salmon population and native American inhabitants, to the dwindling numbers of salmon that exist today and the many technological advances that indirectly led to their demise. White explores the Columbia from social, cultural, political and scientific standpoints offering an extremely thorough look at its history. The author does not seek to glorify the past like many declensionist environmentalists before him, instead he offers an objective and value-neutral history. In doing so, White maintains credibility allowing him to change his tone and take a subjective and passionate stance in the final chapter.
The interdependent relationships between human history and nature as well as those between the rivers major elements illustrate the central thesis of the book. While White reinforces his thesis through out the work, one need not look further than the title itself. The title, The Organic Machine, speaks of the correlation between energy and work or nature and machines. The chapters themselves are organized as labor, power, work and
salmon, but each element is discussed in the other chapters showing a sort of dependency. White establishes that work is dependent on energy, which in turn dictates the organization of labor. The author later goes on to define labor through its relationship to energy and work; that of energy to the power of the river, work to the salmon through solar energy and labor to the humans who catch and eat the salmon and construct fisheries.
To further strengthen his thesis, the author introduces Ralph Waldo Emerson’s approach to the relationship between humans and technology. Emerson called for people to see technology and nature not as being parasitic to one another, but instead sharing a favorable relationship in which each benefits from dependency. Emerson argued that new technology such as steamboats and railroads would not destroy nature, instead they would provide new opportunities for labor in building machines and doing manual labor.
Steamships would also be the first technology that had the power to counter the river and in conjunction with the construction of canneries, salmon would be preserved for extended periods of time and could be shipped around the world. Emerson’s argument fit in a world dominated by capitalism stressing the dependency of nature on technology and vice versa. White thesis is made stronger through his providing the reader with the Emersonian view of the relationships between nature and human labor.
In the final chapter, White’s analytical lens is discarded in exchange for a moral lens. The reader trusts and may be persuaded by the author because he has been so value-neutral and is so well-informed on the subject. Because White has gained this credibility, it gives much more weight to the argument he now makes in the final chapter. Although White has proven that salmon play an instrumental role in labor, work and power, he devotes an entire chapter to them. The tone in this chapter is very different; the author lists possible threats, failures of humans and technologies, and seeks to make the reader more aware of the seriousness of the situation. White’s tone is powerful and appeals to the reader on an emotional level when he demands that the situation is seen not from an economic standpoint but rather from a moral standpoint. salmon face in the future. What the reader thought was a completely neutral history book, is in reality a discussion of the consequences of human actions and an appeal to the audiences conscience on a moral level. The Organic Machine explores the full scope of the forces acting on the Columbia. The author’s extremely thorough thesis in addition to the persuasiveness of his argument work together to shape his research methodology and contribute to its success.