Vacation highlights...

...from a long weekend visiting my uncle and mom in the metro Detroit area:

1)  My mother sampled several IPAs and declared that they taste like "geraniums".

2)  At a buffet that my uncle demanded that we go to, he was disappointed unlike other times he'd visited and not only called it "lousy", but also said his fish was horrible and "full of fluid".

3)  When I was shitting on Michigan's GOP governor to my uncle, I jokingly asked if he had heard about his latest pro-business initiative to jumpstart the economy, allowing children to work in factories again.

"But there aren't any factories," my uncle was like.

4)  At a shitty restaurant downtown with great hotdogs, a guy sitting down the long table from me, my mom, and my godmother was a born-and-bred Baltimorean who had moved to California and now was in Detroit to help his son get moved in before starting a medical residency.

He said that after the 1960 riots, for as long as he lived in Baltimore, the anger was "palpable" with every (black) person that you met.  He was pleased to hear that wasn't my experience visiting the city, and said that the duration and severity of the recent riots were nothing compared to the ones that he had experienced living there growing up.

He also said that when the riots were happening, all the city and police officials you saw on TV condemning them as acts of criminals were (black), whereas before all the officials on TV who had been saying the same things were (white), and to him, that was a sign of progress in the city.

5)  After the author talk of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who my mom likes, she asked me what I thought, and I said that there some nice things, but I found his values "reactionary".

"That's juvenile, I can't take you anywhere," my mom was like.  "I always thought you'd grow out of that."

I then said that I appreciated his advocacy for better teaching of history, and that led into a conversation about the difference between history-as-entertainment and history-as-inquiry-and-critical-thinking.

"You could teach an entire class about [the subject of the guy's latest biography]," my mom was like.

"Well, not so much at the college level, that'd be tough," I was like.  "It's not like you slap in a TV documentary and keep the kids entertained.  Maybe you could use the biography as a jumping off point into different lines of inquiry into social history, though you'd really really have to design the course well."

When my mom asked for an example, I said that though the author had portrayed his subjects as not-that-privileged, there were some signs that they were - and then there was the whole question of (African Americans) in that area of the time, and how they fit in socially.

"You got to remember that this was the era Great Migration, when the black population went from being rural and southern to urban and northern." I was like.  "And so that whole thing about the key to success being a good mother and father and growing up in Ohio, I would love to see how much their opportunities matched what was available to all the people living in their town at the time."

"That'd be a whole separate book," my mom was like.

"No," I was like, "That'd be fuller context, a few more pages in the bio at most.  And you asked, anyway."

I then said I'd rather have students be able to think critically about interpretation of a primary source - e.g. a list of library books belonging to the biography's subjects - than memorize dates, but I don't think my mom really got that.