The Impact of a Monograph: Overlapping Memories of Vietnam and Apollo

April 28th, 2020

Scholarly books have long been the backbone of academia, but too often these books do not get the attention they deserve. In this series, we ask our authors which academic works have had a lasting influence on them. Follow this link to see the rest of the series.

This post was written by Jennifer Levasseur, PhD, a Museum Curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and author of Through Astronaut Eyes: Photographing Early Human Spaceflight.

As a high school student, I thought it terribly unfair that my history classes never reached the historical moments of interest to me—and my teachers were sympathetic to my concerns. Events just outside of my living memory, the majority of the Cold War, really, eluded me in school, but were referenced on television and in my home. As a substitute for school lessons, I watched John Wayne movies and PBS documentaries with my dad. Unless I skipped ahead in the textbooks when the teacher wasn’t looking, I felt cheated without some grounding in a period clearly influential on my daily life as child of the late Cold War. As an undergrad and then a graduate student, I vowed to learn those stories, and to understand why the 1960s held such weight in the hearts of my parents and their friends. I took what courses I could, catching myself up on the basics of the US side of the story and finally taking a Vietnam War class with Dr. Meredith Lair during my PhD coursework at George Mason University. It was a fulfillment of that craving I’d had since the fall of the Berlin Wall (when I was twelve).

My curiosity did not end with a single class. I wanted to see these places, to know the story from another side. If I had learned anything in my training as a historian, it was the complicated and subjective nature of narratives about the recent past. By the early 2000s, my scholarly attention was on this same period, only in terms of human spaceflight. The war in Vietnam obviously overlapped with my thinking about how photography plays a role in developing shared cultural memories. I felt the best way to reconcile memory-making of the two connected—but vastly dissimilar—events was to go there, see their museums, and read about Vietnam and memory from a Vietnamese perspective. During a three-week cruise in November 2018 from Hong Kong to Singapore, which included three stops in Vietnam, I read a book Dr. Lair suggested, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016). My own manuscript was in process, so this had some symmetry with how I was considering the same period from a completely different perspective.

Nguyen, just a few years older than me but a child refugee born in Vietnam and raised in the United States, presents his story as one of confusion, complication, inconsistency, and the real messiness of the era. His presentation of ethics, industries, aesthetics, and memory felt familiar to me while incredibly complicated to decipher—not as grounded in textual evidence as most scholars of this era. His story and my own are of the intangible emotions and memories, fleeting things grounded in the material and visual culture that surrounds us. It is those ethereal qualities of perception that most certainly delayed my education on Vietnam, but thanks to Nguyen, it all makes more sense now.

The Impact of a Monograph: The Origin of the Expression the “Human-Animal Bond” and the Importance of Compassion

February 11th, 2020

Scholarly books have long been the backbone of academia, but too often these books do not get the attention they deserve. In this series, we ask our authors which academic works have had a lasting influence on them. Follow this link to see the rest of the series.

This post is written by Alan M. Beck, a series editor for our New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond series.

I first met Leo Bustad around 1978, when he was the dean of Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, where he served from 1973–1983. His varied experiences as an accomplished scientist and educator, fifteen months in a German prison camp, and his long-lasting marriage gave him a wonderful perspective on life. He passed away in 1998 at age 78.

As an academic leader with a wonderful sense of humor, he was a sought after event speaker. His speeches were not just appropriate little talks, but thoughtful, well-referenced essays exploring major issues worthy of discussion and further contemplation. There were many reasons that they should be available for further reading and so were compiled in books, the last of which was published in 1996, Compassion: Our Last Great Hope.

The speeches in Bustad’s Compassion address such issues as the college curriculum (compared to the saber-toothed tiger for its unchanging character), nurturing children, the Holocaust, the art of listening, freedom and responsibility, grief, writing your own eulogy, and the importance of animals to the well-being of people. Humans’ relationship with animals was a major part of his life, and his writings triggered a movement in both veterinary and human medicine.

Together with psychiatrist Michael McCulloch, they developed the Delta Society, which is now Pet Partners, to foster research on the value of our relationship with animals; indeed, Bustad coined the expression the human-animal bond. He shamelessly borrowed the wording from the often-discussed mother-infant bond. Both bonds indicated a relationship that is essential and mutual. It took a strong collaboration of a leading veterinarian and a respected physician for society to look past the biases in both fields. This was long before the present concept of One Health. The chapter on animals in Bustad’s Compassion ends with a quote from McCulloch: “If pet therapy offers hope for relief of human suffering, it is our professional obligation to explore every available arena for its use.”

In the last chapter Bustad discusses the scholars who believe the world’s greatest resource is compassion. As he notes, “Compassion is not merely feeling or sentiment, but actively helping to relieve pain and suffering in others.” He shares his sadness that this great source of energy remains relatively unused, unexplored, and unwanted. He argues that we should make compassion not a religion, but a way of life. We are reminded that Hebrew Scriptures note that God chose Moses to lead his people only when he observed how much compassion Moses had for his animals.

Bustad’s writings are well worth the read and the fresh considerations the text will promote. The life’s work of the author illustrates the importance of humans and animals to one another, as does this book—the indelible bond we share, the opportunities presented by these connections, and the empathy that unites all creatures. Bustad ends the chapter with “Everyone who is in need of help is my brother and my sister. That’s compassion.”

The Impact of a Monograph: “A Woman without a Husband Is Like a Fish without a Bicycle”

November 4th, 2019

Scholarly books have long been the backbone of academia, but too often these books do not get the attention they deserve. In this series, we ask our authors which academic works have had a lasting influence on them. Follow this link to see the rest of the series.

This post is written by Nancy Wingfield, a series editor for our Central European Studies series.

“A Woman without a Husband Is Like a Fish without a Bicycle”

When Justin Race, the director at Purdue University Press, asked if I would like to blog about a monograph that has had an impact on me, I agreed with alacrity, before I’d thought through quite what kind of impact I might address. It didn’t take long, however, for me settle on Elizabeth D. Heineman’s What Difference Does a Husband Make?: Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (University of California Press, 1999). The first part of the title always makes me snicker, while the subtitle precisely explains the topic.

What Difference Does a Husband Make? is the providential combination of a book that impressed me greatly and that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It taught me to think broadly about gender. I’ve regularly cited it in my own work, recommended it to other scholars, and assigned it to students in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. Indeed, I pride myself that my letter to the University of California Press about this book’s popularity among my students, many of whom couldn’t afford to buy it in hardback, helped get it published in paper. This pathbreaking book has a clear thesis, a well-written narrative, useful arguments, and interesting examples based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. The chapter titles, like “Marriage Rubble: The Crisis in the Family, Public and Private,” are enticing. Evocative images, often of Heineman’s female subjects, are incorporated into the text. In my opinion, it’s the very model of a monograph, from the elegant dustjacket (monochromatic; no red and no swastikas) to the comprehensive index. I even like the typeface. Every monograph should be as attractive to the eye and to the intellect as this one.

For those of you who don’t know Heineman’s book, it is a gender and social history of a long neglected, but crucial, element of the Third Reich: women. In her impressive work, Heineman doesn’t employ the standard political-historical divisions, but, rather like a social-history superwoman, she leaps over chronological barriers in a single bound. The wide sweep of her narrative arc includes analysis of women—unwed, married, divorced, and/or widowed—at work and at home across three German political regimes. The categories of women Heineman analyzes are not hard and fast, and women standing alone, from those the Nazis refused to permit to marry to those who looked at imploding families in the postwar era, and chose not to, populate the narrative. In her exploration of the construction of marital status, Heineman traces transitions in the relationships between women and the state from the prewar National Socialism of the 1930s through World War II and to the postwar consolidation of liberal democracy—and the reconstruction of the family—in West Germany and of communism in East Germany. As Heinemann writes, she attempts to untangle a web of comparative and interlocking histories: those of three German states and a period of statelessness.

I found Heineman’s book and the rest of her work, which I have voraciously consumed, useful in my own research, an excellent source for lecture material (above all the variety of behaviors the Nazis considered asocial), a popular reading assignment with undergraduates, and an enthusiastically dissected book in graduate seminars. It seems to me that a monograph can’t really be expected to do more.