Editor’s note: this piece welcomes our new permanent editor Alison G. Laurence. Read her Contingent Story, or jump to the bottom of the page to hear her read it herself.
“The Brontosaurus (Thunder Lizard),” New York Tribune, July 6, 1919. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
How shall I begin?
With an evocative setting to pull the reader into the story? Reference to a Big Historical Event to convey the subject’s importance? Or will a poignant question be enough to generate narrative momentum? After all, historical research starts with questions.
My Contingent story has several possible beginnings.
It might begin in Chicago in the 1990s during the Michael Jordan Era. My grandma, a retired social studies teacher, volunteered at several of the city’s museums and sometimes brought me along with her. As a kid, I spent a lot of time around taxidermy and pottery shards.
It might begin some years later in a seminar room in Providence, Rhode Island. As an undergraduate, I made the less-than-prudent but intellectually satisfying decision to major in Latin and Ancient Greek. Spending my days deciphering verses written by people (and in languages) long dead, I felt connected to the past. I also felt connected to a community, the dozen-or-so other students who judged this kind of study worthwhile, valuable even. My friends humored my passion for ancient poetry, but they didn’t really understand it. I was decent at translating texts, yet I struggled to translate why these texts—and the work itself—mattered.
Perhaps, the story really starts in 2012 in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where I volunteered as a historical interpreter at a pair of historic house museums. I was working toward a master’s degree in public history at the time and eager to animate the past, even for tourists who had only wandered away from Bourbon Street by accident. Visitors who expected tours focused on decorative arts were surprised by a script that instead offered insight into the lives of the enslaved people who labored in these grand homes, the significance of sanitation infrastructure, the devastation of yellow fever epidemics. It was satisfying work, but it was volunteer work. I couldn’t do it forever.
It’s clear, I think, from this brief biography that I have always believed in Contingent’s mission. History is for everyone. There are countless ways to do the work of history. And, as a matter of principle and material requirement, historians must be paid for their labor.
In March 2019, when Contingent began publishing, I was just-nearly-done with a PhD in History and Science Studies, the kind of multidisciplinary experience that sometimes causes me to question whether I’m proficient in both or neither field. I had, in broad terms, trained as a cultural and environmental historian of the modern United States and found my place within the growing subfield of animal history. When I told my advisor I wanted to write my dissertation about dinosaurs on display, she was entirely enthusiastic. There’s a perspective shared by those who do animal history, I think, that every subject under the sun (and even those in the ocean deep, where the sun’s rays don’t reach) should be studied.
This is Contingent’s perspective, too.
I was hurtling toward my dissertation defense and waiting to learn if I’d have a job, any job, in the coming academic year, when Contingent released Eddie Guimont’s “Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa,” a stunning essay that explains natural history as a colonial project, drawing a connection between historical European “discoveries” of already known African animals to cryptozoological conspiracies that continue to have purchase in popular culture today. It was a delight to see this kind of surprising historical analysis given a platform and it was gratifying to see how warmly it was received.
Did I feel just a twinge of territoriality?
Hardly! I could not have written that essay. Nor can other historians create what I do. Just as there is no single way to start a historical narrative, there is no single way to research it, craft it, share it. We need dinosaur historians by the dozen. Diverse perspectives and practitioners only enrich our understanding of the past.
Ever since that spring of 2019, I’ve been a contingent scholar, teaching first as a limited-term lecturer and now as an adjunct. Like so many others in this precarious position, I’ve rarely had the chance to teach courses aligned with my specialties. There was one happy exception, though.
A few years ago, I designed a course called “Animal Archives,” a seminar that asked students to think seriously about non-human animals as historical subjects and as historical agents. Talking horses, plastic pink flamingos, and imperial livestock (among others) together introduced students to a menagerie of methodologies for understanding our more-than-human past.1
“I really hope they offer it again,” one student wrote in the anonymized, end-of-term teaching evaluation, “because I have been telling everyone to take it!”
The course, of course, was not offered again.
Through my work in museums and college classrooms, I have come to see that people are genuinely curious about the past and excited to encounter it in unexpected ways. Still, some struggle to embrace history as a process; it can be difficult to let go of inherited narratives. So, the work continues.
Where, then, shall I end?
This is a new beginning for me, but not for Contingent, which will continue to champion and compensate the labor of historians who work off the tenure track. I am honored to contribute to a magazine that publishes critical, creative historical work and one that offers perspectives on how historians do that work.
- These are creaturely references to Marion Copeland, “’Straight from the Horse’s Mouth’: Equine Memoirs and Autobiographies,” in Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing, ed. Margo DeMello (Routledge, 2012), 186-199; Jennifer Price, “A Brief Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo,” in Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (Basic Books, 1999), 111-165; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford University Press, 2006).