Week 4 Response - Rose

George Chauncey Response:

     I absolutely loved reading the introduction and second chapter of George Chauncey’s Gay New York. Having read quite a few history texts over the past three years, I find it particularly delighting when a historical text that conveys deeply nuanced and rich history takes a more approachable, conversational form. Countering three strong-held beliefs about the gay community - isolation, invisibility, and internalization - Chauncey explores the “gay male world” in New York City before the Second World War. The seamless way in which he incorporates all of the different factors that went into shaping the gay self-identity and outsider perception, helped me better understand the research approach that Bianca was talking about last week. Initially when she explained the importance of understanding each of the “branches” of the historical topic, I did not have a clear picture of what that would look like in practice. However, in Chauncey’s text, I could distinctly see the areas that he had researched as a result of the his main topic. For example, when he describes the term “coming out” as a play on the traditional debutante sense of the term, he adds an aside about the tradition, thus giving the reader a fuller picture of the meaning and context of this newly formed term. I hope to incorporate some such asides in my paper, as well as, emulate the overall tone of Chauncey’s paper. 

     The introductory chapter is broken up into sections that are not named, simply numbered; however, their existence helps guide the reader through each argument that Chauncey plans to expand upon in the rest of his book. He also made the choice to lay out exactly what he will not be discussing in his book - lesbian history - and why. As I grapple with such an expansive topic, I want to make sure that I also alert the reader as to what I will not be able to discuss in my paper. Chauncey’s ability to interweave the work of other scholars is best represented by the last paragraph in the second section of the introduction. Here he introduces the work of a group of scholars in order to explain the existence of “gay worlds” in other cities (a good example of a “branch” that helps to deepen his argument especially that of the dominant culture). Within the span of a few sentences he places their work in context while adding to it with his own primary source research. Chauncey’s masterful ability to simultaneously incorporate secondary sources and layer on primary source evidence that brings it back to main argument lays the foundation for an incredible work of history.

Response to David Waldstreicher

     In his article Reading the Runaways, David Waldstreiche looks at Antebellum American advertisements to analyze the self-transformation of African-Americans for their own advantage and to asses the extent to which print served the owners’ needs to reassert control over their slaves and reinforce the concept of slavery itself. Waldstreicher takes advantage of the question as a powerful rhetorical tool. Questions are studded throughout the article, each helping to refine and delineated exactly what he seeks to answer. In this way, the questions take the place of the section headings, helping to guide the reader through each layer of his argument. I am not sure that I want to pose questions as often in my paper, but it is definitely a tool that I will consider using after reading this article. 

    For the most part, the article is made up of detailed analyses of primary source documents from the late 18th and early 19th century, advertisements for the return of fleeing slaves in particular. Because Waldstreicher concerns himself with one main type of primary source documents, he can forgo the detailed introduction that usually precedes new types of primary sources (I am thinking back to the detailed account of Fitzgerald’s novels in Ockelmann’s paper). This contributes greatly to the smooth flow of the paper, because he is not bogged down by contextualizing each individual advertisement. I enjoyed reading the Chauncey and Waldstreicher articles in conversation, because it helped to highlight two different approaches to writing about identities and the concept of self-transformation.
Paper Topic

     In my paper, I hope to examine the epidemic of mass shootings as a deeply disturbing facet of the American identity. More specifically, I intend to look at the Gilbert Twigg shooting in Winfield, Kansas on August 13, 1903. My research thus far has lead me to believe that this specific incident represents one of the first in American history that fulfills the criteria commonly present in contemporary examples of mass shootings - a dimension of mania, over four people dead, and little to no explanation for the act other than that of mania. After thoroughly researching and analyzing the Twigg shooting, I hope to come to some conclusion about how the Twigg incident may have laid the foundation for these contemporary examples and how America’s response to such crimes has evolved since 1903. If the page limit allows, I will attempt to compare the 20th century shooting to one of its 21st century counterparts.

     I find my exploration of the history of mass shootings to be especially pertinent to concurrent discourse around the topic - mostly shaped by legislators and activists trying to address this uniquely American problem - because it covers a less considered aspect of the topic. Conducting a simple Google search using the keywords “mass shootings in America” garners results from thousands of sources listing the history and statistics of the topic starting either in 1966 (Whitman UT Austin shooting) or 1984 (San Diego McDonalds massacre). Few sources go far enough back to look at the origins of this culture of violence in America. This is something I hope to begin to rectify with my paper. I expect to rely heavily on newspaper articles published about the mass shootings. If relevant, I would also like to bring in other forms of primary sources - perhaps pamphlets about mental health in the early 20th century or maybe some medical texts describing mania and how to cure it. Due to the relative obscurity of my topic, I think I will have to rely on secondary sources produced in non-historical fields or about other shootings. I know that a lot of research has been conducted in the medical and social science fields in the hopes of verifying a link between mental illness and mass shootings and also to analyze the effects of gun safety education on gun violence prevention; so I think I will have plenty of secondary sources from which to choose.

      One of the “problems” that I have already encountered is that this specific case does not represent the racial element of mass shootings that I have begun to face in my research. The Twigg case serves as an outlier of sorts in the early 20th century, because it was perpetrated by a white man. Looking at the “List of Rampage Killers (American)” on Wikipedia, I noticed an unexpected trend of recorded mass shootings carried out by people of color between 1889 and 1932 and again between 1969 and 1976. In the earlier mass shootings their race was sensationalized - made explicit by the headlines of articles following the incidents. While this trend interests me immensely, I am not sure how I could go about exploring it or incorporating it in my paper’s existing framework. It also relies heavily on a list of perpetrators that I assume underreports the incidents that match the criteria of “mass shooting” in the late 19th and early 20th century, which complicates this “problem” further.