No administrative meeting tomorrow, which is good. If I can get into a groove at the office, I'll be able to build a couple of spreadsheets in short order. I am going to compare faculty ratios (per student in the major) and student credit hours across a variety of majors. I've already done this once, but the committee wants it reparsed because they think it will be more favorable. I disagree and I am looking forward to proving myself right.
Finished a book on the Versailles Treaty this afternoon - the first chance I've had for sustained reading in I-don't-know-when. The author is rather an apologist for the Big Four, fighting the conventional attitude that Versailles alone set in motion the factors that led to WW2. He seems to say that they did their best with an extremely complicated situation, given the parameters of their divergent economic and political interests, the personalities involved, and their respective philosophical bents.
I find the issues about self-determination and national identity the most interesting. What, for example, did it mean to be "Polish" between 1795 and 1918? My mom, when she was here last week, reminisced a bit about her father. She thinks he was born around 1889 and came to the US around 1906, when he was 17. Two brothers were already here; one or more sisters stayed "there" wherever there is. My mom thinks it was somewhere in Prussia.
He immediately became a citizen, because he was drafted in 1917. Toward the end of the war he was sent to Alsace/Lorraine to help with interpreting, since of course he spoke German natively. She wondered aloud what it felt like to fight against the country of your birth, and she is going to copy some of the papers she has so that we can perhaps piece this story together more completely.
The political tie to the soil seems among the most interesting and complicated of human relationships to me. If one wonders why people don't flee from war or famine or other disaster, one begins to appreciate the magnitude of that tie of "homeland." It ripples out from the earth to connect with other people, in national pride, or a sense of national character, or goes over to the dark side in nationalism (where some parts of the US seem to be headed at the moment).
Thus my interests clarify: political geography; notions of statehood and nationality; national identity. It has good ties to literature too - a sigh of relief for the possibilities for the future.
Posted by otto0114 at July 29, 2004 07:43 PM