Teaching Thursday: More on the Opposite of Teaching

Over the weekend, I finished Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger, The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. (2025). It’s a fine little book that belongs to a very specific genre of literature focused on college level instruction. These books tend to offer very sound, if rather hackneyed advice: focus on student learning, be humane, communicate your course goals, design your classes with those goals in mind, and don’t be afraid to innovate or experiment. There must be dozens of books that make these general recommendations (in various flavors, nuances, and contexts) annually. They offer the combined advantage of being “recent” which appeals to early career faculty attentive to the latest jargon, practices, and approaches and approachable for faculty across many disciplines. In general, they are harmless.  

The strongest part of this book is that it serves as a useful reminder that many examples of academic dishonesty stem not from student laziness or a willful disregard for academic standards or fairness. Instead, they stem from ambiguous instructions (e.g. can they work with other students to do the assignment?), questionable pedagogical goals (e.g. classes with a disproportionate emphasis on rote memorization and content reproduction) misunderstanding disciplinary standards (e.g. what needs to be cited and how?), exhaustion and desperation (e.g. poor decision making when faced with the relentless stress of college life), or the failure of faculty to make clear the pedagogical goal of the assignment (e.g. the use of generative AI to write when the goal of the assignment is actually writing). Gallant and Rettinger offer some useful advice on communicating expectations to students and argued that by explaining the pedagogical goals of work and disciplinary (and community) expectations, faculty can create an environment where students have a clearer understanding of what constitutes cheating. This is good advice and is consistent with the message that books concerned with faculty teaching have been offering for the last 20 odd years (if not more). Unsurprisingly, faculty who communicated better with their students and recognized their struggles and temptations, created more effective learning environments which, in turn, minimized the risk of cheating. This is a good reminder, but hardly a revolutionary insight.

If anything, I hoped that the book might speak to the growing awareness that generative AI may well change how we teach. There have been a constant flow of blog posts, newsletter think pieces, Chronicle articles, and workshops on using AI, preventing the use of AI, or even just understanding AI. Hecks, The Digital Press even got into the act with Shawn Graham’s remarkable little book Practical Necromancy for Beginners. Social media is an enormously amusing war zone with otherwise thoughtful faculty making ill considered statements about AI and equally incredulous responses by other commentators. At its absolute best, it devolves into people blocking one another amid various social media insults. In other words, it’s the kind of fun that only social media can bring where stakes are low and emotion is high.

Gallant and Rettinger bring a different perspective to the conversation. They began their book — which I imagine originally focused on cheating and pedagogy in higher education — before the explosion in generative AI. Responsibly, they pivoted and not only folded AI into their text at some key junctures, but also make some recommendation for how to use generative AI to create and refine assignments, to produce rubrics, and to randomize test banks.

The most interesting aspect of their argument is that good pedagogy not only mitigates against cheating by making it less appealing (and more difficult) for students, but also engages with student behavior on an ethical level. It is in this latter area where their work is most interesting, but also the most frustrating. They encourage us to embrace an ethically informed pedagogy and who can reasonably disagree with that. At the same time, they are a bit vague on what these ethics should be. They acknowledge that disciplinary standards, social assumptions and expectations, and even institutional policies can contribute to an ethical environment, but such pluralistic view of ethics offers a pretty soft foundation especially at institutions that don’t have honor councils or honor codes and in classes filled with students from a range of backgrounds, majors, and attitudes. Indeed, the latter environment is exactly where cheating is most likely to occur. 

More curiously still, is that the authors themselves don’t necessarily consider the ethical issues surrounding the use of AI at all. One of the more authentic aspects of the online outrage factory is people’s genuine concern for the use of intellectual property to train AIs. It is possible to quibble that once one has published a work, one cannot necessarily control how it is used (especially once one has assigned copyright to a third party). At the same time, this isn’t to suggest that authors can’t have serious and sincere ethical concerns if they feel intellectual property that they developed is being used in ways that they find questionable. Others observe the environmental cost of the use of AI makes any purported gains in private efficiency come with a planetary price tag. By framing the use of AI as a decision of global consequence, we have the opportunity to decenter our own practices and to decouple our discussions of ethics in the classroom from the teacher-learner dyad.   

It is easy to critique the book’s casual attitude toward AI use by faculty especially in light of its insistence on ethically informed approaches to teaching (that form what the authors’ call “the opposite of cheating”) because it exposes the unsettled present concerning AI. The unsettled character of the discussions surrounding AI reflect (to me at least) the ambiguity present in many contemporary ethical conversations in the classroom, in politics, and in our communities. This does not make having ethical conversations in the classroom less valuable. In fact, it likely make them all the more important, but it also exposes a gap in this book. If talking about ethics is fundamental to teaching, the ethics of AI need to stand more clearly in this book. 

Writing Wednesday: NDQ in its Regional Context

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been offering glimpses of an article that I’m preparing for the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. My piece is a case study of North Dakota Quarterly and my post last week involved outlining its early history (from 1910/11-1933); previously, I offered an introduction.

This week, I’m trying to put the Quarterly in some regional and national context.

The Little Magazine and Regionalism

Placing the Quarterly Journal in its regional and historical context offers some key perspectives not only on the history of the regional magazine in the U.S., but also the development of distinctive strands of American regionalism in the first third of the 20th century. It is important to stress that despite some ebb and flow of regional content, the magazine remained profoundly regional in its emphasis, its authors, and its audience. Over 90% of the contributors to the Quarterly are UND faculty and the rest are from the region. Most of the non-UND contributors hailed from the University of Manitoba, often while these faculty are on exchanged at UND, and the Agricultural College (which becomes North Dakota State University) in Fargo. Members of the state board of higher education contributed, former faculty occasional wrote for the magazine, as did students and in rare instances regional authors with no clear affiliation with the university or the magazine.  

The regional character of the Quarterly goes beyond its content and authors, however, and is bound up with the history of printing and the history of newspaper publishing in the state. At the time of statehood of North Dakota had well over 100 newspapers. These newspapers provided the infrastructure for regional publishing. The Bismarck Tribune, the Fargo Forum, and the Grand Forks Herald provided key infrastructure for publishing in the state in the 19th and early 20th century. The Bismarck Tribune, for example, printed the annual publication of the Collections of the State Historical Society, edited by O.G. Libby, starting in 1906. They served as both printers and publishers for many of the notable works of local history as well as books and pamphlets promoting the economic potential of the region. These printers supported the occasional publication of books, such as Lewis Crawford’s 1922 book of anecdotes about the badlands, Badlands and Bronco Trails, released by the Capital Book Company in Bismarck, but printed and bound by the Bismarck Tribune. It is plausible to assume that this same infrastructure supported the printing and publication of early magazines in the state. Prominent among these was Sam Clark and C.H. Crockard whose two magazines of political satire: Jim Jam Jems (1912-1929) and Red Ink! (1934) relied upon printers in Bismarck, perhaps associated with Sam Clark’s time with the Minot Reporter. It is possible that the same Bismarck printers also published the Red Flame (1919-1920) a short-lived and stridently anti-NPL magazine. 

In Grand Forks, the Grand Forks Evening Times, Grand Forks Herald, Normandy Publishing Company, and The Page Printerie Inc. all spent time as printers of the Quarterly. In 1910, the owner to the Grand Forks Herald sold his paper to his rival, the Grand Forks Evening Times and the merged concern (going by the name Times-Herald and finally Herald) printed the Quarterly through 1917. In 1918 the magazine moved its printing to the The Page Printerie Inc. which published another newspaper, the short-lived Grand Forks Independent. From 1920-1922, the Quarterly was printed by the Normanden Publishing Co. which published the long-lived Norwegian language newspaper, Normanden as well as the magazine Scandinavia starting in 1924 and edited by Georg Strandvold, a sometime contributor to the Quarterly. It is worth noting that when the NPL-backed Grand Forks American folded in 1921, it sold its new printing equipment at foreclosure prices suggesting that printing presses were not in demand in the region (Mader 1937: 331). Considering the number of printers and newspapers in the state at this time, this is hardly surprising.

Newspapers formed part of a thriving print-media culture on the Dakota prairie dating to the 19th century (Lindell 2004). The Quarterly Journal contributed to a tradition cultivated by commercial magazines published in Minneapolis at the turn of the 20th century (Flanagan 1945). Many of these magazines had a regional focus. This includes publications such as The Literary Northwest (1892), which explicitly focused on regional voices and literature. After only one volume, the editors of The Literary Northwest celebrated how the “pages of this magazine, throughout its brief existence, have furnished the convincing proof that there are those among us who are qualified to shine in the higher walks of literature” (The Literary Northwest 2 (1893): 348). Kennedy’s Own (1896), was another similarly regional magazine of essays and literature dedicated to progressive politics, education, and Catholicism. De Lestry’s Western Magazine (later Western Magazine), featured articles on history, business, and society. The most prominent among these commercial regional magazines was William Stanley Braithwaite’s The Bellman (1906-1919) which enjoyed a wide circulation and renown in part as a result of its regularly anthologized collections of fiction, essays, and poetry. It featured a fair number of regional authors, such as the poet Arthur Upson, and the professor and critic Richard Burton, who taught at the University of Minnesota and along with his colleagues contributed numerous book reviews (Flanagan 1945: 307). When The Bellman ceased publication, Western Magazine morned the loss of a conservative voice in the Minnesota magazine world and noted that “at this writing, the Magazine field in Minnesota belongs solely to Western Magazine” (Western Magazine 13 (1919): 112). 

Understanding the relationship between these early 20th century regional magazines, their authors, and readers is a challenging task. Unsurprisingly, no authors from the Quarterly appear in The Bellman over its first ten years of publication (The Bellman 21 (1916): 91-93). Moreover, The Bellman and Western Magazine do not appear to specifically reference the Quarterly Journal or even the University of North Dakota in their pages. The Midland magazine, which we will discuss below, is an exception. The Midland included a “Chronicle” (in volume 1) and “Library” feature (in subsequent volumes) which offered a window into the reading habits of its editor and anticipated those of its readers. The Bellman appears occasionally in those pages (Midland 1 (1915); 3 (1917)) and in volume 1 it appears alongside  references to the Quarterly Journal and the newly inaugurated and short-lived, Mid-West Quarterly published at the University of Nebraska. In the first issues, The Midland editors also pay particular attention to work done by regional historical magazines such as The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and Missouri Historical Review as well as less formal publications such as the ethnographic magazine The Teepee Book, which focused on stories of Native American life in the west.  Later issues reveal the editor as a reader of midwestern literary magazines such as Prairie Schooner and The Frontier. 

 

In issue 16.4 (November/December 1930) of The Midland, its editor John T. Frederick lamented “Among non-commercial magazines THE MIDLAND is old, rather than young. It has outlived The Dial, The Seven Arts, The Little Review, transition, The Forge, The Bellman, Reedy’s Mirror, and a host besides: a melancholy and perhaps ominous distinction.” This list of so-called “little magazines” represented a sample of the new constellation of periodicals published across the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. These magazines often catered to small audiences, were not commercially viable, and often reflected the changing attitudes, tastes, and politics of their editors and founders. Like The Midland (1915-1933), contemporary magazines such as Poetry (1912-), The Little Review (1914-1929), Frontier (1920-1939), The Dial (1920-1929), and The Fugitive (1922-1925) platformed a new generation of American authors who sought independence from commercial publishers and venues where they could publish more experimental and avant-garde works under sympathetic editors. These periodicals often embraced the complex currents of modernist and regional literature. Harriet Monroe’s Poetry and Jame Heap’s and Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, for example, found themselves under the modernist influence of Ezra Pound and published important work by such luminaries as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. In the 1920s, Scofield Thayer and James Watson transformed the hoary old 19th-century magazine, The Dial into a key venue for William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore (who also served as an editor), as well as publishing Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Scholars have documented the rise, fall, and influence of these little magazines in tremendous detail.  

Frederick’s magazine The Midland represented a distinctly regional approach to the little magazine tradition. Frederick founded The Midland in 1915 in Iowa City as “a modest attempt to encourage the making of literature in the Middle West”  with the idea that “the region between the mountains would gain in variety at least if it retained more of its makers of literature, music, pictures, and other expressions of civilization.” Similar sentiments gave rise to the Fugitive group of poets at Vanderbilt University in Nashville whose little magazine The Fugitive (1922-1925) declared a new phase of Southern writing and “a literary phase known rather euphemistically as Southern Literature has expired, like any other stream whose source is stopped up.”  showcased regional writers from the midwest, the west, and the south respectively. Further west, H. G. Merriam began The Frontier, in Missoula, Montana began as a university magazine for students in creative writing at the University of Montana with particular interest in outputs that “breathes of the spirit of the State in which it is published.” In 1927, the Frontier pivots from being limited to university authors and the state of Montana to becoming a literary magazine of the Northwest where it hoped to expose “the ranch, the mine; the lumber camp, the range; the city, the village, these have not yielded their treasure of the comedy and tragedy of human life.” Frederick in The Midland responds to this new direction enthusiastically saying: “The Frontier seems very clearly destined to immediate and permanent usefulness in the development of American literature along regional lines.” 

Magazines like The Midland and The Frontier offer distinct parallels to the Quarterly Journal. The former’s commitment to regional voices, which including being published at a “real frontier” in Moorhead, Minnesota (Midland 16.6 (1930): 371) some 75 miles south of the home of the Quarterly in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The Frontier, some 1200 miles to the west of Grand Forks, shared the Quarterly’s grounding at a major state university. 

Two Article Tuesday: Medieval Mines and Modern Pipelines

I had the time to read two article this weekend that produced a pretty intriguing juxtaposition that I’d like to share.

First, I read Paweł Cembrzyński’s “Towards an ecology of medieval mining towns: linking social and environmental changes” in Archaeological Dialogues (2026), 1-18. This article does what it says on the box: it interprets the Medieval mining town of Kutná Hora in Czechia through the lens of socio-ecological systems.

In doing so, Cembrzyński argues that a mining town manifests a densely interrelated network of ecological process. Some of them are natural: the presence of minerals near the surface, the availability of fuel for smelting, and accessibility of the topography to the town. Some were “social” including the location of an existing monastery, the tradition of royal mine ownership and the existence of capital to extract the resources. The roles of technology, population, and historical contingency “intertwined with the environment via flows of matter.”  The key agent in this particular ecological reading was the existence of a feedback loop where the deposits of silver stimulate population growth, which, in turn, increases the need for capital, which — for the authors at least — stimulates technological innovation. This loop, however, did not operate outside of the myriad contingencies of history including the various wars that wracked Central Europe in the 15th century. 

The paper’s conclusions are relatively modest arguing that by understanding the major components of the system, it becomes possible to scale this analysis on a regional or even supraregional level and to use it for the basis of computational modeling. This, in turn, can inform the production of new hypotheses and research questions that can reinvigorate the study regions and sites. In general, I’m not a huge fan of this kind of modeling for producing answers — especially to the complex issues related to the birth of capitalism in Medieval Europe — but I do find that they have the potential to shape the kinds of questions that we ask. There’s a risk, to my mind, of tautology or worse, naturalizing these ecological systems and the networks of relations that they produce. This is historically (and politically) fraught with such matters as the birth of capitalism.

The other article that I read was Ryan Rybka’s “Tensions, Engagements, and Activisms along the Pipeline Route: Tracing Resistance to Line 93 in Northern Minnesota” in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology 29 (2025). Far from the ecological assumptions and modeling postulated in Cembrzyński’s article, this article understands pipelines as hyperobjects (sensu Morton 2013). These are objects whose extent, impact, and interrelationships are so expansive that they cannot be understood either in whole or through “glimpses” of their parts. The massive network of pipelines that form part of the midstream operations that connect the oil fields to refineries constitutes both a hyperobject in its own right and part of the larger hyperobject of the petroleum industry.

Rybka’s argument is complex and interesting. He argues that the protests associated with the Enbridge pipeline in Minnesota both make this hyperobject manifest and also through their discursive (and even physical) relationship to the hyperobject become part of it. The very “stickiness” of hyperobjects, then, allows or even requires pipelines and extractive industries more broadly to become entangled with the messy histories of colonialism, protest, environmental damage, and, ultimately, the Anthropocene. Protesting the pipeline, then, goes beyond a form of activism and actually transforms the (hyper)object of protest by adhering to its sprawling, uncontrollable, and unaccountable form.

This is compelling to me, in part, because it echoes my idea that the fragmentation of modernity (and fragmentation remains the only way for us to apprehend hyperobjects and as hyperobjects — such as oil or capital(ism) — increasingly constitute a totalizing discourse, the world) aligns it both with the historical development of archaeology and its fundamental methodology. Archaeology, then, is distinctly suited to understand and transform hyperobjects because it is fundamentally a discipline of fragments. The privileged role of photography in archaeology (and especially archaeology of the contemporary world) reflects an awareness that archaeology as a discipline connects its practices, methods, and epistemologies to our world by aligning itself with these fragments (for better and for worse). 

As a bit of an aside, one of the most remarkable efforts to capture the character of oil as a hyperobject is Edward Burtynsky’s Oil (2009; cf. especially his “Oil Fields #22). Michael Truscello’s critique of Burtynsky’s photographs is particularly compelling to me. While Truscello does not reference Morton’s idea of “hyperobjects,” he sees in Burtynsky’s photography an effort to capture the distributed agency of oil and the ubiquity of petroculture. For Truscello, Burtynsky’s images disrupt the ties between the agential state that dominates a static natural world (which is defined by rigid physical borders). Oil resists this kind of domination. Always viscous, Burtynsky’s photography captures oil’s elusiveness without minimizing its impact on the surface. In Truscello’s words, Burtysky’s photographs captured and isolated “the arborescent thought that captures flows in a constant struggle with rhizomatic, open multiplicities” (Truscello 2012, 193).

In other words, Truscello (and Burtynsky) and Ribka both set out to do the same thing: wrestle with the distributed agency of oil by targeting points where the hyperobject becomes manifest. It is in these places and moments where oil becomes susceptible to critique.

Music Monday: Oliver Nelson, Jerome Richardson, and a bit of Hiromi

I listened to some music this weekend, but I’m feeling very stressed not only about things that I can control, but also by things that are well beyond my control.

Maybe music will help. So here’s what I’ve been listening to.

First, I’ve been enjoying Oliver Nelson’s Skull Session (1974). In Nelson tradition, I don’t love all the tracks on the album, but between his arrangement and Lonnie Liston Smith on keyboards and Jerome Richardson on various woodwinds (as well as a full big band), this album deserves to be in the rotation in my house.

This got me to check out some Jerome Richardson. I’m not sure that I love his solo stuff as much as I thought that I might, but I never say no to covers of movie songs. Check out Jerome Richardson’s Going to the Movies (1962). Richardson’s interplay with Less Spann is pretty nice, though. His version of “Never on Sunday” is… perhaps not as nice.

Richardson does play on Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s East Meets West (1959) along with Curtis Fuller, Benny Golson, Johnny Griffin, and Al Harewood on drums. I’ve noted this album as the inspiration for [Ahmed]’s Super Majnoon.

I am absolutely impressed with Hiromi’s abilities and I have enjoyed some of the tracks on some of her albums, especially when she plays in her trio with the late Anthony Jackson on bass and Simon Phillips on drums. Hecks, I’ve even mentioned her right here on this blog and I appreciate that she has virtuosic skills.

My point here is that I enjoyed the first track on her most recent album. In fact, I really like it. Check it out here. The rest of the album didn’t move me really, but I’ll listen to it more and maybe change my mind:

One last thing, yesterday was Antonio Carlos Jobim’s birthday. Here’s a link to his 1967 album Wave … which features Jerome Richardson on flutes:

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s so cold that even the University of North Dakota has closed for the day. Apparently -50 to -60 temperatures are too cold.

Fortunately, there is some fun stuff to entertain me this chilly weekend. There’s the penultimate weekend of NFL games and some entertaining NBA basketball (if the Sixers ever manage to win another game, that is). I have a tradition of tuning into the 24 Hours of Daytona and watching the inaugural festivities of the motor racing calendar. 

Other than that, I have plenty of reading to do, a manuscript to review, some grading, some puttering, and some exercise. I’ll probably socialize a bit too. It seems like the best plan is to just try to stay warm.

Here are quick hits and varia to keep the home fire burning:

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Teaching Thursday: Getting a Class to Slow Down

Usually when I think about revising a class, I think about content or even organization. This semester, I’m trying a slightly different approach and trying to change the classroom atmosphere.

As I noted last week, one of the vexing issues that I’ve been facing is post-COVID attendance. For whatever reason, students have become increasingly ambivalent about coming to class. This ambivalence undermines the group work that is central to what I do in my 100 level survey. 

This week, we started the first of a series of installation assignments where students have to think about how to organize themselves to complete a series of assignments. The first of these assignments asks the students to create a glossary for a chapter in the textbook. This not only requires the students to read the textbook carefully, but also to figure out what is important and what is not. I tell the students that their glossary should not be a series of factoids. Instead, it should be a series of related terms, individuals, places, and events that produces an outline of the chapter for a reader. 

The students have a tendency to “divide and conquer” an assignment like this. They want to get on with the program by assigning each of the terms to a student and then combining them in the end. This is an efficient way to complete the task, but it often produces lists of random facts that do not crate an outline of the chapter. In past semesters, I’ve urged students to consider this outcome before they started to work, but left it up to them to figure out how to resolve it. Most groups chose to produce a random list, turn it into me, and then read my feedback and revise accordingly.

This semester — with my emphasis on the classroom as community — I’m going to encourage the students to slow down. Talk to one another first and come up with a list of terms, individuals, places, and events. Then, if they want, they can go and write individually, but after they have written as individuals, they need to reconvene as a group and read each other’s work. While recommending this process is one thing, encouraging the students to slow down and actually engage with it is another. I’m vaguely tempted to have a little in-class quiz where I ask the students to provide feedback on their colleague’s work. At the same time, I want to make sure that the class doesn’t devolve into a series of short assessments designed to condition behavior. Instead, I want to encourage the students to see that slowing down, talking to one another, and doing deliberate work produces better results without a loss in efficiency.

Finally, I spend a good bit of time thinking about my 100-level courses. I have embraced the flipped classroom, I’ve implemented, problem-based, group oriented work, and now I’m exploring the concept of community (perhaps even “communities of practice”) in the classroom. Without patting myself on the back too hard, much of what I do in this class is informed by various pedagogical conversations (in higher education). 

In contrast, my upper level courses tend to be pedagogically uninformed, at least by comparison. In fact, they continue to follow a traditional: lecture as scaffolding for discussion model. I have incorporated some “lab days” into the class, but again, these are fairly traditional and focus on reading sources, taking notes, producing outlines, and writing papers. A mentor of mine once quipped that historians do things backwards. They teach the most complex and demanding material at the lowest level. Diachronic 100-level survey courses regularly traipse over millennia (or at very least centuries) of content asking the students to pivot from one culture, landscape, political regime, and social situation to the next. This makes it difficult to maintain a unifying narrative (hence the traditional misconception that Rome supplanted Greece and the Middle Ages supplanted Rome that has become the bane of many a history teacher). Implementing a broad structural framework for these period, in contrast, runs the risk of being making the class ahistorical. Making the course “skills based” (say, reading primary sources or writing historical papers) threatens to transform a history class into some kind of introduction to the humanities (or worse: basic college skills) course. To somehow make a class like this work, we do what we’ve been trained to do: we apply ample layers of “pedagogy” to it and turn the class into a teaching challenge as a way to overlook the fundamentally flawed conceptual organization of the curriculum. Note, I am using the word “pedagogy” here like we used to use the word “theory” in graduate school; that is: this work is good, but would be better with more theory. 

Upper level courses, in contrast, are more discursively unified. The course aligns better with conversations and conventions in the discipline and, as a result, it is easier to organize the narrative, debates, and skills of these courses around disciplinary practices. There is less need for deliberate pedagogy as the disciplinary conversation alone provides ample structure. Of course, it is possible to add “the pedagogy” to the mix and to make disciplinary standards more accessible (especially in situations where many of the students are not majors), but in many cases, it’s not necessary. While I embrace this approach wholeheartedly, I can’t help feel like this mentality is old fashioned and the pride before the fall.

Writing Wednesday: The Early History of North Dakota Quarterly

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on writing the early history of the literary magazine that I edit, NDQ, for a piece in the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. I’ve posted the first part of my study last week.

This week, I dig into the history of magazine itself, its editors and its content. It’s a bit long, so buckle up! 

 We know very little about the reasoning that went into the founding of the Quarterly. The University of North Dakota was a small, under resourced, regional institution. The first generation of professionally trained faculty, with PhDs and research agendas, had arrived on campus only over the previous decade where they found an institution and community toiling the shadows of the a devastating flood in 1897 and a state only slowly emerging from the 1890s agricultural depression. The library was inadequate even for teaching in most subjects, many of the campus buildings were in urgent need of repair, and faculty were woefully underpaid and overworked. Louis Geiger, the foremost historian of the University of North Dakota, described the founding of the magazine as part of a larger effort of the new university president Frank McVey to professionalize the institution and its faculty (Geiger 1958, 195, 198-199). Along with the creation of the magazine, he standardized salaries, implemented a sabbatical program, purchased books for the library, and used the Quarterly as a token of exchange with other institutions to increase the number of periodicals. The Quarterly became not only a venue for university faculty to publish their research, but also a way to publicize their research to a broader audience. This, in turn, promoted the institution as well as the work of faculty and the potential of North Dakota and the broader region as well as its distinctive place both in the US and the world. McVey was particularly interested in promoting the “Wisconsin Idea” for the University of North Dakota which involved expanding the influence of the university throughout the state and using its capacity for research and teaching to address social problems, promote democratic solutions, and improve the lives of the state’s residents (Squires 1932: 133). These were progressive ideas that fueled the creation of an extension division and almost certainly contributed to the formation of the Quarterly. That said, the editors of the Quarterly did not envision the magazine to be a mouthpiece for the university alone. In fact, they state in volume 1: “Its columns are open to other writers, particularly of the Northwest, in the discussion of topics germane to the work of higher education, especially to such as bring the fruitage of scientific research, literary investigation or other forms of constructive thought.”

The Quarterly’s first editor, A.J. Ladd, was a PhD from the University of Michigan. He was hired at UND in 1905 as professor of education. On the Quarterly, he was assisted by Wallace N. Stearns, a Classicist and Biblical Scholar trained at Boston University, and the political scientist (and later politician from New York) Meyer Jacobstein. Of the three Wallace Stearns was the most prolific contributor to the Quarterly writing a half dozen articles on Egypt, Biblical, and Hebrew topics. Ladd’s and Jacobstein’s contributions came primarily in book reviews with Ladd being particularly prolific in reviewing nearly 30 books primarily on the educational policy and teaching. Jacobstein reviewed a half-dozen books on political science and economics, which were his specialty. During Ladd’s leadership, the Quarterly published almost 300 articles and nearly 350 reviews which developed some of the magazine’s key characteristics that it would retain for most of its first 25 years. Under Ladd’s editorship, the Quarterly showed a broad interest in four areas: education, social sciences, physical sciences, and nearly a third of the articles show a distinct bent toward regional interest. Articles involved in scientific and engineering questions largely clustered in the third number of the first volume and the second issue of the second volume. Articles on literature and arts, history, business and the economy, and biology and health occupy the rest of the magazine’s pages. All the articles published under Ladd appear in a readable, if understated and dry style.

There was a clear effort to bring together articles on similar topics: education, social sciences, science and engineering and so on, and the editor, presumably Ladd, would announce the emphases of volumes in his “Editor’s Bulletin Board” which would appear at the end of each issue. For example, the third issue of the first volume included contributions on science and engineering. These, in keeping with the Quarterly Journal’s regional interests, reflected the industrial and commercial potential of the state’s resources including its rivers and lignite coal. Similar issues focused on science appear periodically (e.g. issue 5.1, 5.3, 6.3, et c.). The fourth number of volume 2 (1912), featured articles dedicated to education, Ladd’s specialty. The second number of volume 5 included four articles on state institutions: lawmaking, prisons, the tax commission, and institutions of the mentally ill. Issue 8.1 from October of 1917 reflected on the ongoing Great War and issues 10.1 and 10.2 from October 1919 and January 1920 reflect on the state and the university’s contribution to the war effort. It is notable that the historian O.G. Libby’s account of the university’s role in the war effort criticized the lack of preparation and the ineffectiveness of the administration in dealing with the influenza epidemic which took the life of 30 students on campus mostly members of the Student Army Training Corps (S.A.T.C.). It is clear that the handling of the situation caused consternation among the editors of the Quarterly. As early as issue 9.2 (January 1919), the editors note that “compared with other similar institutions we probably had, too many cases of influenza, too many cases of pneumonia, and too many deaths.”

Throughout the first decade of the Quarterly, Ladd sought to balance an emphasis on more academic articles against those focusing on the economic situation of the state, the organization of its institutions as well as broader anxieties about the rise of unions (and socialism and syndicalism), the distribution of wealth, public health, urbanization, and agricultural reforms on a national scale demonstrate a further commitment to longstanding elements of the progressive agenda. Ladd also followed the university in adopting the simplified spelling most visible in the use of the phrase “Publisht by the University” on the first page of volume 1. Quarterly’s interest in education, resources, politics, and even simplified spelling reflects broadly key issues associated with the progressive agenda at the state and university. Moreover, as a later section will show these priorities are features of many regional magazines of the day. Under Ladd’s leadership, the Quarterly established itself a voice of the university directed toward “learned readers” in the region.

Ladd’s progressive bent on campus ultimately contributed to his eventual dismissal. In the aftermath of the apparently mishandling of the tragic influenza epidemic on campus, Ladd, along with the sociologist John Gillette, historian Orin G. Libby, geologists Arthur G. Leonard and Earl Babcock, Joseph Kennedy, dean of the Law School Hugh Willis, and the dean of the new College of Commerce, Ezra T. Towne, found themselves increasingly in conflict with the new president of the University, Thomas F. Kane (1918-1933). Kane was an unpopular leader among many faculty on campus, but he endeavored to continue president McVey’s program of professionalization of the campus. Libby and Gillette, and seemingly Ladd as well, called for Kane to resign over the deaths on campus during the influenza epidemic. It is worth noting that this group — Gillette, Libby as well as Libby’s first PhD student George Davies, Leonard, Babcock, Kennedy, and Willis — had published over 50 articles in the Quarterly and accounted for nearly 10% of the total articles published during Ladd’s editorship. The polarized political scene in North Dakota further exacerbated became more fiercely polarized in the interwar years. Kane’s conservative temperament did not endear him to growing influence of Non-Partisan League, a leftist, populist party that exerted a considerable influence in North Dakota politics between 1918 and 1922. The tension boiled over into the community where firebrand preacher F. Halsey Ambrose inveighed against progressive faculty and called out Libby and Gillette by name. Ambrose aligned himself with secretive power of the local Ku Klux Klan to shape local elections. It likewise seems plausible to assume that Kane had connections with the Klan .Gillette, Libby, and Ladd, who all had progressive sensibilities, found themselves increasingly under fire at the university with Kane calling on the state board to dismiss Libby, Ladd, and Willis. The board obliged and dismissed Ladd and Willis; they declined to dismiss Libby whose status on campus perhaps afforded him protection. Henry Brush, another contributor to the Quarterly, resigned as well.

With Ladd’s dismissal, Ezra T. Towne became editor of the Quarterly starting with the first issue of volume 14 (1923) and continuing through volume 18 (1928). During his time as editor, the Quarterly doubled down on its already significant regional focus with over 40% of the articles having some connection to the state or the region. In his first Editor’s Note, Towne explicitly states “A special effort will be made to present the results of research work and original investigations pertaining to the life and conditions in North Dakota and in the Northwest” and is clear that this will extend to the books under review as well. True to his word, Towne oversaw volumes dedicated to the law with particular emphasis on Minnesota and North Dakota and a volume dedicated to the life and work of Earl Babcock, whose work at the university helped advanced the profitability of the state’s deposits of lignite coal and clay. Despite the issue dedicated to Babcock, there were few contributions concerning science and engineering. That Towne included UND President’s Thomas Kane’s address at the dedication of the new Law School building in 1923 perhaps represented a detente to the on campus conflicts. Towne introduced a slightly more diverse group of authors to the Quarterly, while still publishing articles by Gillette and Libby, whose interest in North Dakota society and history repressively, contributed to the Quarterly’s increased regional focus. The Quarterly also pulled back from its commitment to simplified spelling; under Towne, it was “published” rather than “publisht” by the University of North Dakota. It is tempting to see the publication of Vernon Squires’s article “The New Poetry” in issue 14.4 as another gesture toward more conservative voices on campus and in the region. Squires was a stalwart of the pro-Kane faction on campus, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and nemesis of O.G. Libby. His article celebrated the poetry of Alfred Noyes and followed Noyes’s hostility to modernism. Squires questioned the value of Masters’s Spoon River Anthology as well as the work of Robert Frost, Carl Sanburg, and Amy Lowell. Squires noted: “As has already been suggested, too much of it—far too much—is essentially poetry of mere revolt. It corresponds to jazz in music, to Bolshevism in politics. It has no real beauty of its own.” In 1928, Towne stepped down as editor for uncertain reasons, but with the end of his time as editor, the completion of the Quarterly changed in notable ways.

The final years of the Quarterly Journal before its hiatus in 1933 indicated a new direction for the magazine. The Classicist Edgar Menck becomes editor for volume 19, before abruptly resigning and leaving the journal in the hands of Franklin Bump, a professor of journalism at the university. Under Menck and Bump, the magazine sheds many of its connections to the first two decades of publication. Most notably, Libby and Gillette, who remained active on campus and continued to publish reviews, no longer published articles in the Quarterly. Under Menck and Bump, the Quarterly also pivoted to more works on literature, history, and the social sciences. Duane Squire’s five article series on the history of the university combined the Quarterly’s long-standing interest in education with an almost tragic sense of hindsight on the very eve of the Great Depression. Menck and Bump also promoted the publication of more poetry and fiction than earlier editors with it making up nearly a quarter of the contributions appearing in the Quarterly as compared to the 10% under Ladd and the mere 5 poems under Towne. Under their editorships, the Quarterly focused more on the study of literature, history, and the social sciences and published only a handful of articles on the physical, biological, and health sciences, this is despite a tribute to Arthur G. Leonard who was a profoundly influential figure the geology. It also largely abandoned Towne’s and Ladd’s interest in matters of governance and education. In general, the Quarterly’s focus shifts toward what today we might call a public humanities focus with creative works interspersed with pieces on socialism, the history of sports, a survey on North Dakota literature, and studies on historical figures from John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Joan of Arc.

Washingtonia

It was a great pleasure to read my friends Kostis Kourelis and David Pettegrew’s (with Nikos Poulopoulos, Albert Sarvis, Alexandra Shehigian) article “Washingtonia 1829: an American refugee colony in Greece” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Greek Archaeology.

For those of you who don’t know, Washingtonia was the name of an early 19th century refugee settlement on the Isthmus of Corinth set up by Samuel Gridley Howe, managed by George Finlay, authorized by the Greek state, and briefly settled by refugees from the Greek War of Independence.

There more to this story than that, though. David Pettegrew has been searching for Washingtonia since around 2000. While working on the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, there was constant buzz about the location and character of this strange 19th century settlement set up by Samuel Gridley Howe. This prompted numerous efforts to locate the settlement, Howe’s house, the hospital, and other features (including the konak of Kiamil Bey). Over time, we came to realize that most of these features have simply disappeared without leaving much of a trace on the surface of the ground or in the architecture of various villages of the region. This was a sobering realization to us as survey archaeologists. Instead of the survey representing a palimpsest of past use, certain features including elite residences, institutional architecture, and entire settlements have disappeared leaving very little trace in the surface record. 

[Full disclosure: It was never in my best interest to try to record the number of hours I spent driving slowly around the village of Hexamilia with Tim and Lita Gregory and David Pettegrew looking for traces of Washingtonia. Most recently, in 2023 (I think?), we managed one more slow speed driving field day through Hexamilion before one of us cracked and demanded that we stop this madness and get ice cream. This was well before one of us who had been in a small rental car, driving slowly through a village, tested positive for COVID. I am very pleased that they have been able to find traces of Washingtonia in Hexamilia, and part of me is also very happy to perhaps not talk about Washingtonia for a few years or… you know… ever again.]

Kostis, David, and their colleagues have used documents to fill the gap in the surface and architectural record and to reconstruct the landscape of Washingtonia. They have identified the location of the “manor house” of Samuel Gridley Howe which overlooked (and presumably supervised) the settlement. There is abundant room for metaphor here especially in relation to the idea of Greece as a crypto-colony. Howe’s interest in providing a school and a hospital as well as the panoptic perspective offered from his manor reads like a page from 1960s Foucault especially as Howe occupied the rebuilt the konak of the Ottoman Bey. The drone images offer an intriguing (and deliberate) parallel to the panopticism of Howe’s rebuilt house. This article is too modest in some ways; their analysis makes visible the colonialism of Howe’s philanthropy and reinforces his patronizing view of his mission.

This is a paper that was over 20 years in the making and embodies the best aspects of slow archaeology. Not only did the team demonstrate incredibly familiarity with the local landscape, but also brought together a remarkable array of evidence from 19th century maps, diaries, and archival documents to drone photography, artifacts on the surface, and contemporary architectural study. This patient approach to landscape not only helps us understand the Howe’s view of his work, but also traces the complex processes that transformed the Late Ottoman and Early Modern landscape. In the place of persistent places, the maps and landscape offer traces of settlement — ruined villages, clusters of houses, vanished and ruined buildings. Whatever persistence archaeology assumed in the countryside vanishes beneath modern buildings, agricultural activities, and vegetation leaving only the barest traces.

Their patience in reconstructing the landscape of the early 19th century (as well as early and later traces) reveals how ephemeral even early modern architecture and activities can be even under the scrutiny of 21st century archaeologists’ gaze. This is a vital reminder of the limits of archaeology not only for the most recent past, but for antiquity and the complexities of formation processes in shaping what we can see, recognize, and analyze. It seems almost certain that there is more work to do here especially near Kenchreai. This does little to undermine the significance of their work. David, Kostis, and their colleagues have managed to do what we 20 years ago seemed impossible:  reconstructed the landscape of Samuel Gridley Howe’s Isthmus. 

Music Monday: Joe Henderson, Pharoah Sanders, and Amir ElSaffar

It was a long, windy, snowy weekend which I spent mostly writing a grant and reading in a relatively desultory way. Ordinarily that would be an opportunity to listen to a ton of music, but for some reason nothing really grabbed me. It’s a good reminder that listening to music isn’t always about the music doing the work. Sometimes you have to meet the music more than half way.

So after listening to Keith Jarrett’s At the Deer Head Inn and being completely overmatched trying to listen to Dream Archive by Craig Taborn, Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith, I had to pivot.

On his Facebook page, Ron Carter mentioned (he used the word “masterpiece,” but I’m not going to go there) Joe Henderson’s quirky, but very entertaining album Black Is the Color (1972) which features multiple overdubs and additions. It lacks the kind of energy that a live jazz album (especially of the early 1970s can have), but it is fun (and features a great group of musicians on various tracks: Dave Holland and Ron Carter on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and keyboards(!) as well as Airto Moreira, George Cable on keys and Georg Wadenius on guitar). Check it out here

This led me to Pharoah Sanders’s Jewels of Thought (1970). This album is probably best known for Leon Thomas’s throat singing on “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah.” There’s lots of percussion on this album — with Lonnie Liston Smith, Roy Haynes, and Richard Davis, Idris Muhammad, and even Cecil McBee credited with percussion — and it is amazing:  

Finally, to show that I didn’t just bury my head in the 1970s, I did listen a few times to Amir ElSaffar’s New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal (2025) in Berlin. I don’t know much about ElSaffar and but I definitely enjoyed the interplay between his trumpet and the microtonal piano. The album held my attention and drew me in. 

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s a snowy and windy Friday here in North Dakotaland and after my first week back in the classroom in the new semester, I overslept! I am getting soft in my dotage, it would seem.

I have a full slate of work to do this weekend, but I plan to take some time to watch the Sixers play this evening, the NFL playoff games, and to wrap up the college football season with the national championship game on Monday. I was vaguely intrigued by the Alexis Rocha-Raul Curiel fight tonight, but I guess Rocha struggled with the weight cut and pulled out. Alas.

In the meantime, here are some quick hits and varia:

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