Editor's Note
This week, we’re sharing a special series of reflections on #USIH2020 from our AMAZING Program Committee. Today’s post is by Peter Kuryla (Belmont University). Follow Peter on Twitter: @PKuryla. Tune in every day for a new post, and get YOUR submissions ready for #USIH2021 in Nashville, due 5/28.
I thought it might be fun to consider this year’s USIH programming in something like ecological terms. Before getting into some notes from the field, I’d be remiss if I didn’t start by mentioning that this year’s events were a stunning success. Our conference chair came up with an incredibly ambitious plan that, in the end, transformed our yearly event into months of rich, interesting and incredibly diverse programming. USIH 2020-2021 was unique, precedent-setting and in completely in tune with contemporary ways of doing humanities. There were workshops, teaching events, content for traditional academic and public history work, generous space for different people thinking about different human beings across wide swaths of time. The whole thing is humbling to think about. It’s an impossible act to follow.
This year’s conference events had me thinking about our profession, and just how much the world we share with one another—this specific world of ideas—is a hothouse flower when thought about along something like the longue durée. The field of intellectual history hasn’t been around very long, nor have the institutions supporting it over the years. A global pandemic and a virtual conference only bring this sense of time and precariousness into bolder relief. So much about our larger profession is changing and has changed, and the format this time around pointed both to these bigger, broader transformations, while at other times seemed reassuringly familiar, just in different, virtual guise.
For those of us lucky enough to present or work behind the scenes even a little, the “staging area” before going “live” at this year’s events was wondrously human. That few minutes beforehand, absolutely necessary for getting practical matters worked out, included small talk—sometimes relatively smooth and at other times a little awkward—just as it should be. After all, conference “performances” among our kind, if we mean to call them performances, are weird in the first place. Where else can so many people get together for topics that, if we’re honest about it, appear incredibly esoteric to much of the rest of the world? It seems wry, desperate wit when someone in our field says something like, “As [insert thinker] famously said…” Famous to whom? Would it that we might spread the intellectual history evangel far and wide enough for this or that thinker’s bon mot to be “famous.” Yet I’d keenly feel the loss if I didn’t hear this at least once during our meetings.
So it was hard not to be moved by the persistence of the people at this year’s conference, this feeling of performing, and having “famous” people to talk about with one another. I still remember when our conference chair pitched the idea. From what I gathered, her thinking went something like this: How could we use this extraordinary circumstance, this season of loss and isolation, to flourish rather than merely survive?
In the aftermath, I can’t help but think about those sections of Origin of Species where Darwin uses the metaphor of a polity to make a case for diversity. I’ll just lead a horse to water, so to speak, and let our readers fill out the metaphor for themselves. Darwin accounts for the complex relations characterizing competition between various rivals over scarce resources, until certain groups eventually fill up bounded spaces. After all, “the number of places in the polity of nature is not indefinitely great.”[1] Once an area fills up, those beings with profitable variations rub out the ones without them. Nature selects slightly better modifications. Survival and persistence require diversity at multiple levels: “the more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers.”[2]
Let’s hope we persist, and even grow. USIH 2020-2021 provided the best conditions imaginable for us to do just that.
[1] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 84.
[2] Origin, 86.
One Thought on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Nice post. Never read Origin of Species (not the only gap in my education), so I confess the metaphor is new to me.
If I understand Darwin’s metaphor, I think the post’s title would have been improved by the addition of a small preposition: not “performing the polity of nature,” but “performing in the polity of nature.” In other words, the “polity of nature” is the setting for the diverse performances (or, in Darwin’s terms, for the competition among groups).
Maybe this is taking the metaphor too literally, but if you’re going to use a metaphor, might as well try to be as faithful as possible to its original intent (to not coin a phrase).