I work in an interdisciplinary department and chase the elusive rainbow of interdisciplinarity. My talk weaves through that central theme with the thread of being a feminist, hoping to paint the fabric with stories that tell how my research on gender and the environment is entangled with my identity. I have written it all down just to make this wading through the trickle easier. Roughly, I follow a chronological route with only minor detours. So I will start at the very beginning. That I studied geography was a matter of chance. As a child, I used to be a visual person and expressed myself best through colors and sometimes music. I knew that when I finished school, I would go to art college. But alas, that was not to be for this man. My father, a pragmatist and economist, wanted me to study his discipline, economics. His reason was simple.  My father was thrown out of his family for marrying my mother for something called love, a strange thing at that time. Mother was from another religion and born into a lower caste. Father wanted to make sure my education would let me have the wings to fly free. That was the basis of his reasoning, but it took me many years to understand. Of course, I did not give in entirely and rejected fathers not to subtle suggestions to study economics. I chose geographies solely to satisfy my wanderlust and insatiable desire to see the world, because in my head was the positivist idea that seeing is believing. My father was one of the 14 million people who were displaced by the partition of India. His family was originally from the part of Bengal, now known as Bangladesh. My mother was a city girl from Calcutta. They met through the budding communist movement in India and suffered when the Communist Party was banned after independence. When they settled down in a small university town, not far from Calcutta, my parents chose to follow no religion. So along with my brothers, I grew up being watched over by portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, who scrutinized our Bengali fish and curry meals. We were exposed to the tales of beautiful Russian princess Vasilisa, who transformed the frog into Prince Ivan with a wave of her arm. Imagine someone like me being introduced to Western culture, but not through English literature, but through Bangalore translations of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov. Later, father passed on books like Spartacus by Howard First for me to read. Many years later, in 2010 in Tallinn, I was greatly pained to see the Russian art on ordinary lives of working classes. An essential part of my childhood had been relegated to the Soviet propaganda museum to gather dust. These busts are from that museum. Despite the guardianship of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, home was full of fun, debate, and music, which mother gave me. It was an open home. My father's colleagues and students would drop in day and night, anytime. Parents would discuss with their colleagues world affairs, which I devoured. My mother completed her degrees and then became the head of a girl's school. Our family was different from others. The love marriage in our atheism, in the magical intellectualism, and in a deliberate non-materialist pursuit. And I grew up to know it. This childhood taught me to understand and accept difference. The idea of difference was to become a defining feature for me. My father organized academics teaching in tertiary education institutions in remote rural areas to fight for an even and equitable pay scale. I used to travel with my father as an assistant. These travels and the discussions he had with colleagues in these institutions first opened a window in my mind. They communicated to me the value of collectivist organizing, the importance of being independent, and the need to protest against unfairness and injustice. From my parents, I also inherited an overall respect for the printed world, for education, and for freedom. The other influence in my life was the Bengal Renaissance, a series of social and religious reforms that radically changed in the late 19th century the cultural, social, and intellectual lives of Bengalis who lived in Eastern India. The Renaissance took place among urban middle classes, but its emphasis was on modern English-style education of women. One of them was my mother's grandmother, Kumudini Das, who you are seeing here. She graduated from Calcutta University in 1887, very long ago. After her graduation, this woman took up a job in the Mysore Maharaja's palace in far away South India to teach the women there. Later, she became the principal of the Bethune College for Women's Education in Calcutta. Here is a story about her. Before Kumudini, primarily British women had led Bethune College, but Kumudini would not give up. After graduation, she wrote a letter to the British head of education program, making a case for hiring qualified native women. What is the purpose of educating us, sir? If you do not offer us jobs so that we could educate other women, that was the letter she wrote. It takes plenty of courage to ask such a question, but it is the quintessential story of women in different places and in different times. A story of asking for a place at that fabled dinner table, as Virginia would describe. When this country, Australia, was still a British colony, Australian women demanded comparable privileges. In a multicultural Australia, many women like me asked for pretty much similar rights. A fortunate birth and a benign patriarchy shaped my childhood, but also led to significant disadvantages. When a young girl from an idealistic utopia accustomed to esoteric things such as class struggle jumps into a marriage at the age of 19, she's bound to encounter the extreme entrenched viciousness of patriarchy. Terrible things happened to her. All those ghastly things happened to me and more. Suddenly I faced a world that my cerebral and communist upbringing had not prepared me for. I will remove the curtain ever so slightly to tell you a story. A few years ago on a holiday with my sons, this picture is from that holiday, they asked me what the dot-like black scar on my shin was. I was not ashamed to tell them that it was from the butt of a cigarette, pressed on me as a means to scare me into submission to rape by a respectable in-law. When I was only 20 years old, my sons shed tears and hugged me in response. Then they said, ma, we did not know. Why didn't you tell us earlier? Now that my hairs are all growing white and I'm getting old, I will confess that I had also not told them that that singular incident had not stultified my interest in all men. Trust me, that scar does not bother me anymore. Although my crash into the real world at that time was sudden, rough, and traumatizing. And at a very young age, I managed to survive. I looked around, but there was no model to follow. Instead of returning to my parents' home, there was only one option left to me. Complete university education, get a job and find a place to live. It took me six long years to do all that during which my studies were interrupted by the birth of my first child. But I did. That was the first success in reinventing myself.  I was soon hired by a large regional university to teach geography as a lecturer. The salary of a university academic in India those days was much lower than a bank clerk. So I lived on the border of Penury with my child. But I still had that wanderlust that drew me to geography. So how do I satisfy it? My son now becomes my co-traveller as we travel around the countryside in India. In those days, people still traveled by train. The great Indian Railway, where the remarkable people move us. One had to reserve a seat often months in advance. Mostly wooden long benches as we could not afford upper class tickets. On the day of the journey as the train chugged into the station, the joy of seeing one's name on the list is indescribable. Each of these journeys introduced diverse experiences. The train compartments were a tiny cosmos buzzing with life and presenting a panoply of Indian melu. The Haura station, you're seeing that here, that station. The gateway to Calcutta, then the largest metropolis of India was jam packed with millions of daily passengers.  The train stops frequently at stations on the way and the platforms come to life with all sorts of vendors shouting over others to sell their wares. It was an invaluable experience for both mother and son in their collective discovery of India. You would think that struggling through the university with a child, finding a job and leaving the marriage and the in-laws home to start another life of penury was the first step in my becoming a feminist. Regrettably, that is not the case. Living by myself turned me more into a marriage counselor. For the ladies in that small university town in India, when they were unhappy in their marriage, I was the go-to person. When things were hunky-dory, I was someone to shun. This hide and seek meant that I had no friends. I had no place to publicly express myself, but once again, society made me determined to stick to my difference. Yet as I toil to survive in that patriarchal culture, the everyday struggles in life forced me to think more deeply about who I am and my place in the society as a woman. I would say that I was a closet feminist then. But it was not a quick or easy transition into feminism. There was geography, the discipline I studied to contend with. Geography, I think there is a little bit of a, this is the picture that should go here. Geography as it is practiced in India at the time would not let me become a feminist so quickly. Susan Hansen, one feminist geographer, described geography and feminism as two completely separated worlds in collision. The conventional conceptualization of space recognized geography as a spatial science that deals with abstract space, defined by locational and geometric properties such as distance, latitude, and longitude. In India, geographers did work on gender, but they described themselves as gendered geographer, not as feminists. They saw difference purely as a corrupt map, like this map, in which each spatial unit is separated from the others by different shades or colors. You can see that in this conceptualization, space is thought of as a bounded entity with no gray zones, no hybridities, or uncertainties in between. An additional dimension was the advent of the Communist Party to power in the state of West Bengal. Now, after China's disputed attack on India, the party had split into two, a pro-Soviet group and a pro-China group. The pro-China group came to power, and as you can imagine, the whole lot of pro-Soviet's, of which my father's family was, ran helter-skelter to change their camp, or to hide themselves, or just leave. Those who remained suffered. Throughout the 90s, controls were imposed on who could do what and when and where. For a woman, social control meant disapprovals over mobilities and actions, but also on thoughts and expressions. For a single mother, the results of disobeying can be dangerously explosive in a society where patriarchy has married communism. As a result, I lost my gods one more time, but this time I lost Marx, Engels, and Lenin. But the good news is that I also gained some new friends. I began to look for a different kind of politics that would intertwine my research, my teaching, and my existence. My research on dams, on rivers, led me again quite by chance to Medha Patkar, the leader of Save the Normada movement. Following her ideology, I got involved in the national alliance of people's movements that was protesting against India's obsessive passion with dam building. In this, it is this active community engagement that made me discover my place in India. It showed me that the feminine face of rural India where women live their lives, not as statistics, but as real people. Indian geography continued as a monolith. My discipline was changing elsewhere. After completing my first book in English on Anglo-Indians and McClassky-Gonja, about which I will tell you in a minute, I embarked on the ambitious project of writing about the history and philosophy of geography. Perhaps the months spent in the United States in the late 1980s had triggered the desire, I do not know. Perhaps my youthful adventurousness led me into it. You know what John Robinson says. She says that only academics at the early stages in their career and at the very end become interested in their discipline's history. The result of over five or six years of intensive reading on the philosophy of geography was this book. Its title translated into English is Development of Geographical Thought. The extensive reading made me reconsider my training. Space now presented itself with a sense of place, imbued with women and men, a realm to which people forge profound attachments and identities and endow it with value and meanings, meanings that are subjectively appreciated and perceived. I realized that it is possible to see place in this way only if one borrows the tools and methods from other disciplines. This was a point of departure from my conventional training and has remained crucial to the ways I have practiced research from then on. One of my early research interests was on the homeland that the Anglo-Indian community planned for themselves in the early 1930s. This place is called, quite uniquely, McCluskey-Gonch, a name that conveys its Indianness and its Anglo origins. The Anglo-Indians imagined the place to be their homeland, a magnificent utopian imagination at a critical time in the history of the community. This book, in search of a homeland, was published when other social scientists were far ahead in their thinking. They were debating the location of culture and showing how culture sits in places. But alas, my geography training had only quipped me poorly to deal with the hybrid and complex identities of Anglo-Indians. So I used the sociologist Robert Park's concept of marginality to explain the utopia that McCluskey-Gonch was. Indian geographers considered the deviation an unpardonable crime, although the topic was firmly within the tradition of place facts of geography. But it did not deter me. I grew up in Bengal, a land built by Riverine Silt. I lived next to one of the fiercest rivers and knew the ferocity of monsoon floods firsthand. I knew that human lives are entangled with that of rivers. But in conventional geomorphology, rivers are purely physical elements shaped only by nature and often seen by experts as lines on a topographical map sheet. A defining feature of my research, therefore, has been the urge to overcome the boundaries of my discipline. As I researched the lives of people living on the flood plains of Bengal, I also became aware that the small things matter more than the big picture. God is indeed in the small things. The result was my research on chores.  These chores are the result of sediments being deposited on the riverbed. But they are also the products of a long history of messing with the river system. Sometimes directly through the construction of embankments, sometimes indirectly through the establishment of revenue systems that put more value on dry lands in the riverine environment of Bengal. Chores, by their very existence, challenge the deeply entrenched separation of land and water. They also extend our conceptualization of hybridity of the environment by going not just beyond the nature culture binary, but also the water land binary. Chores allow us to think of the fluidity inherent in environments as they are neither fully land nor fully water, as you can see, but sometimes one or the other and at times both. If chores taught me the value of scaling down instead of scaling up, they also showed that our discipline-based theories have also been too rigid. They do not accommodate flux, flow, change, and other boundary blurring phenomena within the core of place and time. Chores made me realize that theories need to be flexible to absorb new contextual information without pretending to be universal or breaking under its own weight of rigidity. Most importantly, scaling down teaches us that we do not need to arm ourselves with the powerful weapon of a theory before going to the field. This is crucial for feminist research that does not need to pretend to be certain and can happily bow down to the empirical facts of local contexts. This realization coincided with a great transition in my life, taking up a job in the ANU. Again, something that happened quite by chance. I was happy to leave the communist-infested state to restart my life at the bottom of the heap in the old research school of Pacific and Asian studies. I arrived in an ANU that was intensely white and extremely masculine. Working there was not easy, if at all, it was intimidating. The Aussie culture seemed so different to my Indian eyes and ears as I tried to get accustomed to the accent. Another story comes to my mind. Soon after joining the ANU, someone invited me for lunch. After we finished, he took out his wallet and paid only his share. I was caught on the wrong foot, or rather with a belly full. For I had not carried my purse to a lunch invitation. See, in India, these niceties swirl around in a circular fashion. I return an invitation by another. Let me tell you another story about the work wives of old aerospace. You have heard it correct, work wives. There were plenty of efficient women there, but they were mostly in administrative positions. I have heard that in the past, academics had women research assistants, nicknamed as work wife. The work wife carried out data collation, literature review, and some even did writing. Some of them co-authored papers with male academics and were no less competent than the academics themselves. If two academics shared one assistant, she was also jokingly called a half-wife. If you think this is all fabricated, then check the book, The Coombs, A House of Memories, published in 2006. It had 22 contributions from male academics and only one from a female academy. It is extremely easy to be relegated to the margin of margins in this kind of masculine environment within that academic community. If someone mentioned diversity, for example, people who generally think of the aboriginals, who were of course nowhere there, and maybe sometimes Europeans, beholding my face, many people immediately profess their love of curry. Looking back, I feel that it was possibly because I was the wild card. No one knew my politics, but the fact that I was someone without Western training or mentoring allowed me to be someone who owned her own way of thinking. As I tried to, so I became this woman, standing on my head. So as I tried to find my place in Australian academia and society and struggled to be recognized as a legitimate Australian academic, what might mean to belong to a place was brought home to me? Within the ANU, this quest coincided with a steady decline of the discipline of geography. Therefore, the first few years queried my unenviable vantage of a quintessential and archetypal outsider, a gatecrusher subaltern. Someone whom the post-colonial scholar, Gayatri Spivak, described as the native informant, located in an area studies school to inform others about people like us. In response to this novel gazing, my research to different twists and turns, not only did the research themes change, but I also had to rethink how I do my research and with whom. And that reconsideration became central to my academic existence. If the transformation from the subject of research to the position of an agent was crucial, it became equally, if not more critical for me to practice what I preach in my research. So what vicious patriarchy and venomous comrades had failed to activate could now come out in the exciting scholarly environment that ANU provided. This was when I was able to reclaim my identity as a feminist. The self-inspection also rekindled the contrarian, the argumentative Indian in me. Other people helped. He is not here today. Professor Bob Wasson, at the time he was the director of Center for Resource and Environmental Studies. Professor Bob Wasson once came to visit me in my office. I stood up in a hurry to honor him.  Oh, how I loved it. This is the wing I had always wanted so badly, you know, all these years. Indeed, I took this advice as the mantra in my new Australian larricking avatar. Luckily, I was also able to find exceptional colleagues who generously offered love and support and who befriended me in spite of all the difference. They progressed from being colleagues to friends. Many of these individuals are here today, so I do not wish to embarrass them or myself by mentioning them by name. This is the enchantment of life. It deals you with things quite by chance. In life, they come with human faces who lets you make something out of each of these relationships. There is simply no way to describe the joy and delight from them, no way to deny one's indebtedness to the many people whose paths have crossed with mine. If I am standing here today talking about my life and work, it is because of people who trusted me, believed in me and respected me well enough to put me here. Soon I was conversing with a cohort of scholars located within the ANU, but also beyond it. These conversations were partly disciplinary and partly feminist. To feminists, I showed how differences of not just gender and age, but also race, ethnicity, and to go back to the theme of my childhood class, constitute important aspects in women's identities. My research explored how women's lives are lived locally and how places and gender are mutually constitutive and exist in a dynamic relationship across space and time. Since the restructuring of ANU in 2009, we have been stitched up with the Crawford School of Public Policy. Here I have had to re-script myself again as we collaborate with colleagues from Economics and Political Science. This forced me to think repeatedly about what disciplines are and if they advance our attempts to make sense of gender. The question that nags me is in bridging the gap between disciplines or in crossing borders and boundaries, what models should we use? One must not forget here the models inherent in interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. They mean different things and are useful only for certain purposes. We feel the confusion most acutely when we want to switch between applied or issue-focused research and basic inquiries. In my own work of research and teaching, interdisciplinarity is crucial as feminists we take pride in being eclectic. But in the context of resources and the environment, what one means by interdisciplinarity is connected to the problematic of finding foundational concepts for and from research while retaining the right to be critical of policy-making agencies. The difficulty is most acute in integrating gender in our research and teaching about resources and the environment because much of our understanding of the environment or resource use is based either on the hard sciences or on equally hard economic or political economic interpretations. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the compelling irrefutable and convincing evidence that makes the strongest case to mainstream gender in resources and the environment has come from research that presents women as victims, victims of poor water supplies and sanitation, victims of dams, victims of deforestation, victims of large-scale mining projects. This extremely sound body of research has been able to advance well-refined tools that count, assess, and quantify how women suffer more than men or are worse off than men as a consequence of poor developmental planning. This body of research has been extremely influential in shaping policy and continues to be so. For example, when an agency like the World Bank or DFAT invests money on gender in a hyper-masculine industry like mining, they find it easier to do so if the money is to be spent to alleviate the sufferings of women. Yet, there is a biological essentialism ingrained in this approach. It is also far removed from the recent developments in feminist theory. To get this body of research to converse with and benefit from advancements in feminist theory remains notoriously painful because development practitioners avoid feminist theories and vice versa. Similarly, labor studies scholars or the historian who works on women's labor contributions to mines keeps at an arm's length the feminist political ecologist who shows how poor extractive resource projects harm women more than men. So this compartmentalization of disciplines and mutual avoidance of theorists and practitioners have prevented productive scholarly dialogues. This is where a truly feminist and interdisciplinary approach can intervene and contribute effectively. A feminist epistemology would ask which groups of women in poorer communities are primary resource managers? Which groups of these women have a history of involvement in natural resource management and why? Which groups of women bear the greatest brunt of non-participatory natural resource projects and why in most instances most rural and poor women are still excluded from decision-making? So to cross disciplinary borders our task for all of us could be to theorize our disciplines. Disciplines are not natural cognitive constructs that map knowledge is but rather social achievements made and perpetuated through commitments of ideas and resources and a variety of socio-technical practices. We can think of disciplines in various ways as maps, models, or as standpoints. You know, the entire body of feminist theories is standpoints. If we accept that disciplines are social constructs the advantages and disadvantages of disciplined approaches to investigating complex phenomena such as the unruly and all-encompassing topic of gender resources and the environment in the context of a developing country becomes apparent. More importantly, as Australian academics we can then begin to exchange knowledges with scholars who are located within the Asia-Pacific region, the region that we study and the region within which Australia is located. Such conversations are urgent because conventionally research on these topics in isolation has reflected embedded worldviews or political views. As new ontologies emerge within the broad field ontologies that resist disciplinization interdisciplinarity increasingly emerges as being more relevant. This manner of thinking about the political aspects of our research links with that of the personal to people, visible minorities, to people like me. It allows the thinking of feminism not in its biologically essentialist interpretation but as arising from flexible theories that are able to accommodate race, class and other intersections of difference. To an imposter like me it allows a path from the personal to the political which interestingly is not only a one-way street but a track along which a continuous to and fro takes place. In other words when as feminists we cross over disciplinary boundaries we can then bring the politics into our personal domains to enrich and enhance our ordinary life's journeys. One of these domains is our relationship with students. Much of our research begins and ends in the classroom and there is hardly any clear cut demarcation between the two. Admittedly as a third world woman who's the subject of development herself teaching gender and development at the ANU has not been a bed of roses. For me negotiating this extremely complicated terrain has not been easy at all. Yet I have received tremendous affection from my students in both India and Australia. The enormous support was possible because I was able to share with them the love and respect that I received from others. I would like to believe that I motivated them as a person, a teacher and a researcher. And in this picture you're seeing one of my favorite students came to me at the age of 16 fresh out of village first generation tertiary student. And she is now a professor of geography in a university in India. And we have become a collaborator. So I'm very proud of her. So let me go back to what I was reading. While seeing remain the point of emphases I was able to show to my students that one has to believe it to see it not the other way around as we were told. One or two of my doctoral students completed their thesis and moved on to becoming collaborators. I also took on my research assistants as my co-authors. I could create a level playing field in my interactions with them showing that we are working together and that rather than being a burden the mutual process of learning can actually build a nurturing space where flows of affection are as important as flows of knowledge. So as I'm coming to the end of my talk as women our professional and personal lives are interwoven I will never forget the severe warning of dire circumstances that a colleague a highly successful woman from the public service threatened me with in my early days in ANU.  Are you not the mother of two sons? Think about them. With women ruling the world, what will happen to them? Unfortunately that moment has left ANU whereas I have survived and fled. In an environment of growing recognition of gender equity by both women and men, if she was here today I would have told her what my sons feel about me. Now here is another story. When they were growing up I often worried that my sons did not have a male role model. Would they know what that women and men are different but must have equal rights? Will I be able to teach them empathy well enough, love for others, zeal for life? These are thoughts that cross every single mother's mind. I received a wonderful answer to all these queries the other day. I was in a car with my son, happened to listen to the radio program about role models for boys and young men. I asked my now grown up son the delicate question cautiously half expecting to hear the bad news. His reply was ma, you are my role model. That my rag tag family life, the wonder last and intense stars chasing have failed to create a misogynist's at home is not just my victory. As a feminist our research, our teaching and our beautiful students all fuse together. For me in the long journey of an ordinary girl from bird one India to the ANU. It is this collective victory and joy that make it so extraordinary to some to some people. Parts of my story would still appear ordinary. A typical migrants story. We are all ordinary. My late husband David used to say, David received a tiny part but still a part of a Nobel Prize besides other honors for his exemplary scientific work. I have in this life done nothing that will take me even closer to that kind of recognition. Some would say it is the story of any middle class woman from any place and any time. Yet my life is defined by continual and contradicting processes of giving up and dogged determination of letting go and sticking to it of learning and relearning. My being a woman was crucial to this journey of resilience and Phoenix like rebirths. I'm greatly honored by and grateful for this invitation to speak as one of the inspirational women at the ANU. But I would rather stay grounded in my ordinariness for I know in my heart that I'm only one among many, many, many inspirational women in this great university. Some of these women I know and some whose parts have yet to cross with mine. I stand here today representing each one of them. I would say every woman is inspirational in one way or the other. Every woman has a story to tell if there is someone to listen.  Thank you.


Discovery, this is Houston. Larry King is on the line. Are you ready to begin the interview? Larry King, this is Houston. Please go ahead with your interview. Columbia in 1989. Colonel James Buckley, mission specialist. He's flown three times prior. And Captain John Creighton is the commander of the shuttle. He has flown twice before. As we joined them and we can see them, and they all look terrific, the shuttle. We've got this special satellite hookup. The shuttle is moving at 17,000 miles an hour. It's over the Marshall Islands off the west coast of Australia. By the time we finish in 20 minutes, they'll be approaching the west coast of Canada. And first we have to say, does the capsule communicator in Houston ready to put us in touch with the astronauts? Larry King, this is Houston Capcom. Please go ahead with your interview. Guys, how are you? You can all hear us, right? We're doing fine. We're going to read you loud and clear, right? I'll read you loud and clear now. Is that Captain Creighton? That's me. OK, Captain, you look real good. There was a near, we'll start with you, Captain. We'll take some calls from listeners. There was a near miss in space today. Discovery had a change orbit to avoid a piece of Soviet cosmos upper stage. Is space junk becoming more of a problem, Captain? And some altitudes it is. Normally at the altitudes that we fly the shuttle, why it's self-cleansing most of the material out there decays in relatively short period of time. But as you get higher, objects stay longer and then it becomes more and more of a problem. But yes, it is becoming a problem and it is a concern, particularly for space station freedom that's going to be up in space for years. Sam, you're going to land at night about 24 hours from now. Is that more risky? Well, I think if you ask any pilot, there's a little more risk involved in landing at night than in the daytime, just because you don't have the depth of perception that you've got in the daytime. But Ken and I have done all of our practice for the last year at night. And so we both feel confident that we'll be able to bring the shuttle in right on the money. Now, Ken, this is Ken's first one, isn't it, John? Yeah, he's the only rookie on this flight. And we hand the mic over to him because I just I'm a rookie, excuse me. Right. How does it feel? Can Ken hear me? Which one is Ken? Yeah, go ahead. What's the first one like? Well, I can tell you it was quite a ride going up hill. And when we got here, it was like nothing else I've ever felt in my life. Would you guys all like to work with the Soviets more closely? Anyone can take this. I'll see if they've got one mic that they're handing around to each other, so and it floats right to them. Or who's that responding in the green shirt with the white? This is Jim Buckley. Hi, Jim, would you like to? And the answer is I think all of us would. I think as we get further into our space programs, it will become evident that all of us throughout the world need to cooperate in that effort for our own, everyone's mutual benefit. OK, what we're doing is if you'd hand the mic back to Captain Creighton, we are going to start taking calls from listeners now. Now, this is the first time ever. We have our five astronauts. They are Kenneth, Sam, Mark, James, and John. John is the commander of the shuttle. We are going to go to the first caller from San Antonio, Texas. Hello. Hello, thanks, Larry. It seems like going into space would be a life-changing experience. What is it? What caused or what really changed you when you went up to space? John? I don't know that I could point to any one single thing. I think that what all of us spend any pre-time we have doing is looking out the world and looking out the windows and watching the world go by.  And it tends to give you more of a global perspective and an appreciation for the environment. When you look out at the horizon and you see the atmosphere and it's only about an inch thick, you realize just how fragile this planet can be. And we better learn to take care of it. Austin, Texas is the next caller. Hello. Yes, would any of you gentlemen like to be the first man on Mars? Well, let's pass it around to someone. Is Mark Brown there? Mark is over on the right of the captain. Mark, would you like to go to Mars? Well, probably not this week. That's kind of a long trip. I think it's something that we definitely do need to do. I'm not sure that I personally will be in the program long enough to do that. But I'm sure there'll be a lot of people that volunteer to go. Our next caller is from St. Petersburg, Florida. These guys are going 17,000 miles an hour. You're talking to them live. Hello. Gentlemen, what is it like to sleep when you're weightless? OK, what is it like who wants to take that to sleep when you are? This is the only one we haven't heard from, so this would be who? Let's just say I'm going to talk to you later. OK, Sam Jamar, what's it like to sleep in space? Well, I think the big thing that I noticed in sleeping is that your body feels totally supported. And it's very restful, very serene. And I've never had any problem up here in my previous flight or in this flight sleeping. It tends to, again, we work pretty hard by time at that time where we've put in a 16-hour day and always been busy, and I'm always ready to go sleep. Just close the eyes and sense the drift off in just a few minutes. You dream? Any of you guys dream in space? Captain Creighton, John, do you dream? Not that I remember, but being a captain has its privileges. My particular sleep station is right under the overhead windows on the flight deck so that if I happen to wake up during the middle of the night and we sleep with a mask on because it gets daylight every 45 minutes, you can take the mask off and look out the window and watch the world go by. And if it's something interesting, I may stay awake and watch for about 45 minutes to an hour and as we go around the world and then put the mask down, go to sleep for another couple hours. New York City is our next caller for Kenneth, the writer, Sam Jamar, Mark Brown, James Buckley, and Sean Creighton. Hello. Good evening. Hello up there. Suppose if you were like me, who always wanted to be a national, but because of medical reasons, have finally concluded that he couldn't and already had to find terrific training, what other jobs in the space program would attract you? What would attract you in space if you couldn't fly? Anyone could take it. Mark? Let me take a crack at it. This is Jim. I think probably even more than being a member of the crew, being part of the shuttle team is just as rewarding. And one needs to remember that while you're able to see the five of us on board the shuttle, literally thousands of people getting us ready to go fly, getting payloads ready to go, integrating the program and getting the vehicles ready. And each one of those jobs is an integral and very rewarding part of the whole program. Everyone I've talked to seems to have that same feeling and that same dedication and sense of purpose. So the best answer I can say is any part of the space program is a great job. And each part is recognized as being a very integral and very important part of the whole. Ithaca, New York, hello. Ithaca, are you there? Yes. Go ahead. They travel all through your dreams. Did you bring your wallets? Did you bring them? What do you bring along? Anybody bring them? Captain Creighton is laughing. We can see the astronauts, by the way. We have a special hook up here that we can see them. Did you guys bring money? John? Well, yeah, we did bring money. They take pretty good care of us here. I'm afraid our wives have got our wallets back home. New York City, hello. Yes, gentlemen, hello. Do you think we'll ever see civilian space flight in how soon? How soon for civilians? Who wants to take that, Jim, or Sam? Sure, I understand the question. If the question was, do you think we'll see civilians, non-professional astronauts in space any time soon? I think that when there's a need, and in fact, I think that another school teacher has been designated to be the first civilian to fly on a future flight, that flight has not yet been named. I think it will happen just how soon. I really couldn't say. Now, right now, I'm looking at all five of you. You're all very relaxed, you're wearing comfortable look like South Florida kind of wear in August. Who's piloting the ship? I mean, who's looking out? None of you are looking out the window. Who's running things? How do we forgot something? Ha, ha, ha, ha. We have a very good autopilot on board. And generally speaking, does a very good job. We just tell him occasionally, which direction to point us. New Haven, Connecticut for the astronauts in space, hello. Thank you, Larry, gentlemen. It's an honor and a thrill to speak with you. I'd like to know what was unusual or different about the position of the sun and the orbiter that made you visible to the naked eye so long after launch as far to the north as you were able to be seen? Okay, anyone could take that. The phenomena you saw because of the whole sun angle and the altitude of the flight and again, the direction that we launched the orbiter in, which was up the east coast, we were clearly visible. I suspect probably all the way up beyond New York. And in some cases may have been up the coast in Newfoundland. Again, it was because of the whole sun angle and the high altitude that we launched and the direction up the east coast. You're also gonna be pretty visible coming back here to Palm Bay, Florida, hello. Hello, how are you, Larry? Fine. I just wanna talk to one of the astronauts, anyone will do.  I just wanna know, do they ever have any scary thoughts when they look down, when they look back at us? Okay, let's hand it over to Jim Buckley, who hasn't been heard from in a couple of moments here. Is that Jim, which one is, who's on the right of you? Captain, I'm a little lost now. This is Mark Brown over here. Mark hasn't been heard in a couple of seconds. Mark, is there anything scary about this? The view down is not much different from flying a high-speed jet at the high altitude. I guess the difference is that the space shuttle continues to go around the earth without jets constantly firing. And you can't just stop and land anytime you want to. It takes rather coordinated rocket burns to decelerate the orbiter to come in for landing. There is some sense of remoteness from the earth and the people down there. Your inner reaction with the planet is different from when you're down in the atmosphere and that you don't feel the air in your face or smell of flowers or anything like that. It's very much a visual sensation of all the hues and colors to the point where the earth very much looks flat except for sphericity because even mountains that are a couple miles high look relatively flat when you're over 300 miles above them. So it's a different sensation but not necessarily one that's scary. Mid Pines, California, hello. All right, what a thrill. Greetings from just south of Yosemite National Park. I hope Dr. Fisk will take note of my question too and perhaps comment later. Greetings to all the astronauts. What's the question? You launched the UR satellite tonight to study ozone destruction but it's ironic and here's the question because every space shuttle launch puts out 75 tons of chlorine which destroys the ozone and that's larger in one launch and there's only a... You agree with that, Captain? You think you're putting out more than you're investigating? Well, I certainly hope not. I'm afraid I'm not qualified to answer that question. I know there isn't concern with the solid rocket bloom but I think on the whole we're doing more good than harm. Champaign, Illinois, hello. Hi guys. I just wanted to say I think we all dream about going off in space and I wondered what your feelings were when you finally realized whatever age you were that you were actually going to be astronauts. Hello, they all can't answer it so let's let Kenneth, this is his first flight, answer it, what's this all like? I think most of us in the program have wanted to be astronauts for a long time. I certainly have and worked hard to get down there in the program and work in the program until we were selected for a flight and I can tell you from my perspective right now it was worth every second of the wait. It's a great experience, a great opportunity to make a contribution to the nation and the world and I'm real proud to be a small part of that. Rogers, Minnesota, hello. Hi, I have a question about space-based space and freedom. Go ahead. What? What is it? One day I plan on being on space-based as an astronaut and I heard that you're planning on purchasing from the Cosmonauts' space-based space. Is that true or are we still going ahead with that in the conversation with Mike? I think that's a better question for someone here on the ground purchasing from freedom in space. Grand Rapids, Michigan, hello. Well, real quickly, seeing as how the astronauts have an advantage point of the universe that most of us do not, I'd like to know one or all of their opinions on possible extraterrestrial life in UFOs. Okay, does anyone can take that? Well, I guess we'll, how about, how about Sam? Sam is... Yeah, thanks, Ray. Well, let me just start off by saying in the nearly 10 days I guess that my limited space experience, I haven't seen no evidence of extraterrestrial life for any UFOs and in talking with other people. I've never talked with anybody that, at least in the astronaut office, that has had any evidence of any either. I guess the rest of it is also philosophy, whether or not we believe that we are the sole beings of the universe and beyond, or whether there are other life forms out there. One of the dangers in answering the question is we have to first understand what it is we're looking for when you talk about extraterrestrial life. We know life is a carbon-based object and our search may involve species that are something other than that. So again, I think it's a question of individual philosophy and I've seen no evidence of it, but I think that there is, I think it's beneficial to continue the question of our research. Last caller, Fields Landing, California, hello. Hello, this is Randall Norris Bell from Fields Landing, California. I'd like to say, first of all, bless y'all in outer space and hope you have a very good time. Like, no, what do you do when you're about all your oxygen, huh? How do you know when to fill the tanks up and how do you know when you're out of here and with... Captain, what about oxygen supply? Ever worry about that? We only have about a minute. Probably obviously you're concerned with all of our consumables, not just oxygen, but hydrogen, monomephylhydrazine. We carry all sorts of propellants on board that, and we watch them very closely and so does the ground. And all of those consumables determine how long we can stay up and when we start running out it's time to come home. And if we should have a lake or something, we just come home a little early. Do you get any turbulence or is this very smooth? Well, smooth once you get up here, but it's quite a ride on the way up. There is turbulence on the way up. A lot of shake, rattle, and roll. You guys, we thank you for this 20 minutes. This has been historic. Certainly the people that we're able to get through will always remember it. The people that listen will remember it. We're able to see you. I thank you very much, Captain Creighton, on behalf of everyone here on Earth. We look forward to a very safe return. When do you guys come back? Tomorrow night, about 24, a little after 24 hours now. Thanks very much, guys. You can all say goodbye to Captain Creighton. There they go. Discovery, Houston, that was great. Thanks a lot.


Eau Clairex in Nigeria have asked Nigerians not to give up on the country, despite the various challenges being faced. They insist that better days are ahead. At the Hallelujah mega-praise season, organized by the redeemed Christian Church of God, Ogum Province, they appeal to Christians to participate in the electioneering process. That is all. Even when you're not to praise God in your struggle, when you're not to praise God in your difficulty, God will come down and everything will be over. That is what we have come to do tonight and very soon the cloud will be over. Yes, the situation in Nigeria is just like the land of Israel. Israel was facing all kinds of problems. For example, Geoshafaz, the king of Judah, he was surrounded by a powerful king, five of them. They were helpless. In Nigeria, we are pray, we are fasted, nothing happened. But we decided that by praising God, God will fight for us and defeat all our enemies. On the physical point of view, praise is good. It's good for the body. It's good. We are living in very difficult times in our country. We are living in very difficult times. People are passing through all kinds of challenges, difficult times.  We bring relief to many. They will be happy. They will dance. They will rejoice in the presence of the Lord. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. One. Okay, bingo. We're back. This is Think Tech on a given Tuesday. I'm having lunch with my partner Ed Bendett today. As I have for the past 50 years, hi Ed. Shout out to Ed. This is Peter Hoffenberg, Peter H. Hoffenberg, who was a history professor, or shall I say, an associate history professor. Associate professor? Yes. Thank you. You know, we talk to a lot of science guys, but we don't talk to people in history and civics, and in my view, that's really important in our time, and we haven't been teaching that much history to the electorate, and they may have issues about exercising the franchise because they don't know about history. So this is like a peek into something at UH that we need to know about. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Great to have you here. Thank you. Nice shirt by the way, too. Thank you. Great minds think alike. We didn't plan this. I want to be clear. It's like you're going to Las Vegas with the slot machine, and it comes up bingo. Can we win something? Well, mine's a little tight. Maybe you won something. Switch? Yeah, sure. So Peter, you know, what's it like at UH Manoa from, you know, the point of view of a history professor. It's different than doing, you know, research on the stars, the moon, on chemistry, on plant, you know, plant science, or physics, what have you. This is different. And somehow in a way, this is more mainstream to the future of our country, isn't it? I think that they're both mainstream. And I would say being humanities or arts and humanities professor is a very good life. It is a very secure life. The scientists often depend upon soft money, governmental money. We don't. So we have a great advantage to be able to teach students honestly. There are no, at least in my department, there are no pressures about what you cannot research. It's essentially an exercise in good, open scholarship. And you have the opportunity to share it with your students. All worlds are imperfect. But I think that sometimes we think of both what is good and what is bad and why is being unique. So a lot of the difficulties with humanities and social sciences are shared throughout the country. Yeah. And at the same time, we have some unique opportunities here. Yeah. Well, first, you know, I do want to talk about Minoa and UH. And I want to offer a disclosure thing or a disclaimer thing that you're not speaking for UH here today. You're speaking for yourself. These are your views. We're going to be talking. Right. I have many personalities. I'll just say I'm speaking for my personalities. Right. Fair enough. So what's it like? What's it like teaching history and related subjects at UH Minoa these days? You've been there a long time. 25. 20 years. So you were baskin that. Right. I mean, Riley Wallace's days. Yeah. It's way back. Right. You've seen a lot of action, too. Oh, I have.  Some good, not so good. Yeah. I remade all we've done a number of shows about some of the historical protests and controversies at UH. You've seen a lot of that. I think I've been part of those pretty much all the sniffing at ones since Professor Lee in the Vietnam War. I was going to mention this. I think Lee, though, is still, I think, the mountain of protest. And obviously, the Supreme Court, the most significant protest here. But no, we've had some tumultuous times, although in general, the union and the university and the legislature, unlike the federal government, have generally gone to the cliff and not leaped off. So closures are rare. Why does this remind me of a certain photograph that Professor Lee showed us? Because we covered him when he talked at the Harvard Club about a year ago. And a remarkable photograph of some student hanging off the side of a building and the students below sort of catching him as he fell. Right. It was an example of the, oh, I don't know what you want to call it, the violence, if you will, of those protests. Well, I think it's an important reminder that amidst all this talk about American society disintegrating. I think any historian who's spent more than one semester in a classroom will remind you that comparable to the American Civil War, comparable to the violence of reconstruction, I'm sure your parents, like my parents, live through the Great Depression. I know we have our difficulties, but actually the disintegration of society is not comparable to those. And in a way that picture reminds us that the Vietnam War colliding with civil rights, colliding with some rather horrific racial behavior in this country did bring us pretty close in the late 60s. And that, of course, the two assassinations. And Oliver Lee is really unchanged after all these years. Well, I think it happens, you know, and my parents were unchanged by the Great Depression. I mean, these are momentous affairs. I think much of what we're going through now will pass, will be changed. But I'm not so sure it's going to be quite as transformative as either those who want the transformation or those who want to stop the transformation will be. You know, a fellow named Richard Hornick spoke at the China seminar maybe three weeks ago, and he talked about mind control in China. And little by little, I have seen that seeping into the press. And the worst aspect of it is that before, say, five years ago in China, there was a kind of academic freedom in the universities. But now Xi Jinping is closing that down, and you are penalized if you go off track when you speak or engage a class in China, any university right now. And some universities are favorite universities for him because they only do the party line. But I wonder if you see that kind of process happening here. I mean, what's the state of freedom of academic speech in your classes and on campus? OK. So again, it's only my personal view. Of course. Knowing my colleagues and talking to my colleagues. And to be honest with you, at least in our university, I have never experienced official repression in any way. So no dean, no chair, no administrator. I think like much of life, colleagues and public opinion shape you much as much as the government. John Stuart Mill worried in the middle of the 19th century that what would suppress free speech would not be the government. It would be the need to get along or the need not to offend or the need to be accepted. And I think that at least at UH, that's much more likely to be an issue than David Lassner, our current chancellor and president, or Dean Peter Arnaudy, our current dean. We may have lots of financial disagreements. But I have never, in my 25 years, I don't think I've ever seen a university superior tell somebody you can't assign a book or you can't lecture about that. We are given relative freedom to teach. Now, that means responsibility, though, right? It means to address what our students need and their particular needs for our students here coming out of the school system. I think it means appreciating, particularly in Manoa, the political history of Manoa. You don't have to go to one extreme or other. But I mean, Manoa has a different kind of political history than, say, UCLA as a large public university. I would say that at times there are organizations or groups who may or may not put pressure on certain people. But again, usually at UH, people do as they did in East Germany.  They just don't show up to events. So probably many of your viewers or listeners have seen pictures of certain student groups being shut down or people being attacked. I cannot remember that, to be honest, in my 25 years. Well, this is good. This makes, in my view, this makes- But again, that's my personal. Somebody else might have experienced it, but I don't remember that. This makes University of Hawaii superior in that way, I think, because there are schools on the mainland that do not enjoy the same level of freedom. Am I right? I would say that don't enjoy the same level of freedom. I think it's a matter of certain issues have become lightning rods, where students may be in a classroom which is not censored, but ideologically bound in one direction or other. And certainly there are certain groups that have felt threatened on campuses. And those things are not from what I can see happening here. I mean, there are groups that are underrepresented at UH. We should, there's certain efforts we should make, particularly, I think, with local high school kids, to reach out and build a stronger relationship between Farrington and Manoa, or Kahuku and Manoa, and shouldn't just be the football team, or it shouldn't just be training kids to pull towels for hotels. And we have a real opportunity, maybe one of the few opportunities in their lives, for a kid from Kahuku to come and learn about French poetry. But those are also issues that are not just under our control. They are under the government's control as far as, for example, financial aid. Funding, yeah. Right. And there's a lot of pressure, I would say, if you ask sort of the restraints on kids, I think at Manoa, perhaps the single most significant constraint is to pay for and get a degree in four years. So the federal government, in fact, doesn't encourage people to change majors. It doesn't encourage people to go to school for more than five or six years. And those are all things which are more amorphous, I know, but are very important, many of our kids work. It means you'd be able to do that. To be able to come to Manoa, to afford to be able to go to Manoa, most of the kids work, or at least many of the kids work. Interesting. And people like musicians, athletes, lab scientists, students, spend a lot of time outside of the classroom having to do something. To pay for their education. To either pay for their education or to fulfill their degree. And it's become very difficult to fulfill that degree in four years and at the same time do at least what liberal arts education is supposed to do, which is expand your horizons. Yeah, and is history a required course? So there are courses, and again, I'm not the most well-attuned to this, and some of my colleagues would be able to answer you directly. So let me answer you indirectly. We have some social science requirements, and I believe that, and somebody perhaps should correct me, I believe that history 151 and 152 as world history can be included as one of those requirements for education. Used to be you had to take 151 and 152 to get a degree. So I will be at Costco and some student from the 1960s, and I will start talking. And they'll remember when the lecture was at Varsity Theater or Spalding. You remember a conversation students, and they remember you from the 1960s? Well, they don't remember me. They remember my colleague Herb Siegler, superb lecturer, who was known for being a wonderful lecturer and for taking a smoking break. Every lecture. But people remember, he's very bright, very articulate. He has a real passion. So they talk about having to take those two courses to get a degree. So now you don't have to take those two. I think you may have to take one, you might. But you could take, for example, world philosophy or world religion. And then the other half of that requirement is supposed to be something related to why you're the Pacific. So you do not graduate from UH without the opportunity to understand the past. So it may be the philosophical past or the religious past. But you still, it'd be difficult to sleepwalk through four years. And not know something that we would think of as historical or in the realm of the past in that sense. And plenty of disciplines approach that. I mean, we historically approach it differently. But plenty of the disciplines do cover the past, just as we talk about film and we talk about literature the way that English and film schools do. When I went to Queen's College, just for a reference now, this is 1958. There were several required courses in this area. And they were all called contemporary civilization. And they were really, I remember the readings till today. I remember the teachers who changed my way of looking at things till today. I was 16, 17 years old. I was very impressionable. And it changed my view of the world. And I'm wondering if we're missing something by not making it required. And I'm wondering how important you feel it may be to exercising the franchise, to being a responsible informed citizen, to take these subjects as a requirement. As a potential Temudic scholar, I'll give you on one hand and on the other. Sure. Okay, I agree. And I think most of my colleagues and I think many folks on campus would agree that a history course or contemporary world course should be required. Then we run up against what I just mentioned though. Four years, limited funding. So Columbia, for example, still has its great books requirement. Columbia can do that. It's a private, well-endowed university. Reid has its requirement, which made the news this year. We live in a very different world here. We live in a world that's closer to a lot of public universities that don't have a tremendous treasure chest of money. And kids who, remember part of schooling is for social elevation and social mobility, we have kids whose parents never went to college, kids whose parents went to UH, and they want them to do better than they did. So I know it sounds, but no. That means economically do better. But also have more opportunities. I mean, they may make the same amount of money, but maybe grandfather started an auto shop, and dad had to work in the auto shop. And now the son or daughter wants to do something else. They may not make any more money, but they might have a choice and opportunity. But it's difficult to say that to kids when the pressure is to finish in four years. So if we rethought everything, people talk about a paradigm shift. I think if you want to talk as if this is after Habdallah and we're having the non-sacred conversation. Okay, I would say make college more than four years. I would say certainly have public funding in one way or another. And then make the requirements. But if, for example, you're in engineering or pre-med, there are certain plethora of requirements. And then, I think very importantly, UH requires a foreign language. That opens your horizon. Yes, exactly. So I have to say yes to both. Yes, it should be required. And yes, we need to make changes to allow it to be required. Well, you mentioned earlier that you have a certain amount of gratification, but being where you are, doing what you're doing. Absolutely. And I would like to explore how you got into that. I mean, why did you choose this area? Was it happenstance? Or was it something that you decided at the age of 16 or earlier? Why did you study this? I wanted to play center field for the socks or dodgers or be a sports writer. For about three days, I thought about being a rabbi. And then I am heavily influenced by Vietnam and Watergate. So I wanted to be a journalist. All right, and then I went to college and I want to do all those other things. And I somewhat fell in love with academia. I must also say, and anybody who's listening knows my family history. My father was a professor. So this is kind of a family business. But having said that, there were other choices. Why I study, why I study is I had some very good teachers. Unlike Professor Schwartz, who was here before, who was a brilliant linguist. I am not a brilliant linguist. So you can usually tell if somebody does British or American history. We like the archives. We like history. But we're a little linguistically challenged. So that's one of the reasons I do British and American issues. It's all English. No, I will really confess. And it makes me a poorer scholar. If I knew more languages, I'd be able to be a better scholar. And then when it came time, push came to shove. The Reagan administration did not accept me in the Peace Corps. So I then went to graduate school. Interesting. So a lot of choices here and there. Your life would have been different had that gone the other way. Now, the way it would have most radically been different is I spent time, and I'd encourage any students who are listening, I spent time a year off working on Capitol Hill. And I'd really encourage any students who want to take time off, or even do something before graduate school or their career, spend a year in a political situation. So we're going to do that now for one minute. We're going to take time off. Sure. And we're going to have a little wee break. OK. We're going to come back, and then we're going to ask you about your specialties, and your activities on campus. We'll be right back. Peter Hoffenberg. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. My name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 AM. Please join us. I'd like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. OK. We're back with Peter Hoffenberg, and we're talking about his life in times as a history professor at UH Minoa. And I wish we had more time. That's one of the families. We only have 28 minutes, and I wish we had a lot more time. We have to do this again, Peter. We will. Absolutely. So your specialty, I mean, I really want to examine the specialties and the areas of research and writing that you do, and how that changes your view of the world, how you see the world. I want to know. Let's talk about your specialties. Of course. So my specialty, I suppose, on my epithet, my obituary would be a student of World's Fairs and Exhibitions. So it was very big and narrow. Well, it's narrow, but it covers a tremendous amount of people, and a tremendous amount of geopolitical territory. Yeah, because all that feeds into it. Right.  There was travel, but limited travel. Obviously no social media. So we go back into a world where the exhibitions and department stores, which were connected to them intimately, brought the world to you, or you got to see the world. So out of that, I've developed interests in Roger Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling. And if anybody read Kim, he's introduced at the beginning of Kim as the head of the museum. I have interest in travel. I do some work on Australian travel. At this point in my career, I'm finishing up two books on exhibitions and looking forward to moving into new areas at my late age. But with the cost of living here in three children, I expect to write and research until I'm 140, at least. Yeah. So if you merge exhibitions with American history, I guess you have to do that, global history, actually. I wonder where the Chautauqua idea fits in. Because that was kind of an early exhibition kind of process, wasn't it? Right, I would say the Chautauqua idea fits in with what we're known as Mechanics Institutes, or what were very popular, Public Lecture Series. And those were very popular for years and years. Chautauqua brought people to a place for those to proceed rather than having the wandering lecturer. Chautauqua exists to this day. And you could see there were many Chautauquas in the exhibitions, so particularly if you were interested in art or science. Say some of your viewers again might be scientists. There were great debates about evolution at exhibitions. There was the display of new scientific technology. So they're complementary. The Chautauqua, though, demographically was more limited. Whereas, for example, some of the exhibitions could have over a million visitors, particularly the biggest ones in London and those in Paris. The one in Paris around 1900 had probably well over a million visitors. Now, some people visit more than once, of course. Carol Montalie, our Executive Vice President, maybe we went on our own nickel to the National Association of Broadcasters a couple of years already in Las Vegas. It's big. It's one of the biggest. But it has 104,000 visitors. That's not nearly a million, is it? So when we talk about historically these exhibitions, they were bigger than the kind of exhibitions we have today, no? Much so. I suppose what would be comparative. I've never been to NASCAR. Evidently, there are a lot of people in NASCAR. There's really nothing comparative. What you could say is the exhibition fulfilled different functions for today. So it was a department store. It was a botanic garden. It was a museum. It was a lecture hall. It was a place of innovation. So those who study American exhibitions remind us things like hot dogs and Ferris wheels and ice cream. So at the heart was consumerism at the very heart. But unlike a department store, for example, or a museum, when you went to an exhibition, you also observed how things were made. And that gave a certain power to the market relationship between the producer and the consumer. So if I wanted to buy an Indian textile or just know about an Indian textile, I could go to a store or I could go to a museum. But if I went to a London show or a show in Calcutta, I could see the artisans making the textile. One step ahead. Right, very different. Yeah, it started today when you go into a restaurant and the kitchen is open. You can see the chef working. I like to do that for myself. So I'm just wondering if the United States, the evolution development in the United States, provided the world with models of exhibitions that were useful? Or whether it was an idea that came from somewhere else like Europe? Or whether it's an ongoing exchange of ideas, which is a global process? OK, so the easy answer, because those are wonderful questions and open-ended questions, the easy answer is the first exhibitions we think of exhibitions are products of France and Britain. The British one included some American participation. They were a series of relatively small ones on a Napoleon, made perfect sense for Napoleon, like the Louvre, perfect sense of public art. And most folks agree, obviously historians tend not to agree on a lot of things, but most folks agree that the great exhibition in 1851, which is sometimes known as the Crystal Palace, is really the first modern international exhibition, followed very shortly by the US. And I would say there was constant cross-fertilization, although you could tell when you went to a French show. There were certain things privileged in the French show and certain things privileged in a British show. But each of the countries, for example, was responsible for its own court. So what was American architecture at that moment would have decorated the American exhibit, and somebody visiting from Italy would have then seen American art. That's why maybe the World Wide Web, in a way, is the closest, as far as interaction and the resulting bubbles sometimes would also significant interaction. There are important American legacies, like in Chicago, what we think of as modern Chicago architecture. 1898 was it? Exactly. That was 1893, I'm sorry. Sorry. 1893, because it was supposed to honor Columbus. So it's a Colombian exhibition. Some people may be from San Francisco, and downtown where the exploratory used to be is what's resulting from the 1915 Pan-Pacific. You're writing about this. So I write a little bit about the US, but my main interest is Britain, the British colonies, particularly India and Australia. But each book or each chapter usually has something about the US and something about France. So you write your research, find details you were not aware of from sources maybe you didn't see before, and then you integrate all that into an article or a book. Exactly. And you try to publish in a notable journal. What's the best journal for history? The best journal for history? I think, well, again, personal. Person of you. If you live here, or in North America, I think probably the American Historical Review is still considered to be the pantheon. You've been in there. No, I haven't. Well, you're working so hard. No, I'm not that good. You flatter me. You're very kind. Fortunately, I know people who have. Some people I went to graduate school with. And their arguments, their evidence, their writing, which is not to say other journals are not important, but I think you probably, if you live here, that would be the ideal for a general history. In other words, American Historical Review will publish articles about Africa and Europe and the US. And then each discipline or sub-discipline, I should say, has its own journal. So for me, in British studies, for example, Victorian studies or the Journal of British Studies would be the places to publish. But there are lots of venues to publish. And lots of reputable ones. You're teaching these things. You have courses on them? Well, actually, one of the differences between me, perhaps, and some other folks is I don't integrate very well my research in my teaching. Teaching tends to be more general. And I'll talk about an exhibition or something. But if I teach Victorian Britain, the students expect to know about all Victorian Britain. So I would say what I privilege is my previous education, right? What my professors taught me and what I like to read and what I think the students would be interested in. Some of my colleagues are much keener and they've got it down much better. And they integrate their courses with their research. And most major universities do do that. What about in the graduate program? Is there a master's in the graduate program? So we have a healthy master's. One of the consequences of not requiring history 150, one in 152 is that that nest egg, which helped pay for our graduate students, is no longer there. So we don't have a lot of money to offer students. We often get very good applicants in fields that were very strong in like the Pacific or Southeast Asia. And Cornell will be able to offer a better package. And you can't fault a graduate student. I mean, you're talking about potentially eight years for a PhD. That's a lot of money. So we have a good healthy master's program, which I think serves a very important civic purpose, which is we have a fair number of people who either want to go and teach, including DOE, or are already teaching and would like to enhance their education. And my colleagues and I have talked about, I think that's one of our objectives should be at a master's program to take care of the needs of the teachers and those teachers students. Very worthwhile for a rounded university. I think we need to have that. I think so. So let me go to one other topic. We don't have a lot of time left. But you mentioned that at one point you were thinking about becoming a rabbi. I was thinking about becoming a teacher. For 48 hours there, but my voice wasn't coming up. When you're in your teenage years, these are real possibilities. So can we talk about Judaism, your Judaism, and Judaism on campus? Of course, OK. So Judaism on campus, we have made, I think, great strides. And not anything that I've done, but we as a community, we now have a Halal chapter, which we did not have before. And Halal allows the students to at least, and young adults, recent graduates, at least once a month do something together as young Jews. And that includes Jews from across the spectrum, from Chabad to atheists. And it's a chance to see a movie, go to Shabbat dinner. We sponsor there going to the Jewish Film Festival, which is coming up. So that probably is one of the notable aspects. We don't have a Jewish history class. Lee Siegel occasionally teaches the Judaism class, but he retired. I don't know if there's even going to be a class in Judaism. There is one class in Hebrew. So if you looked at the catalogs, you probably would not have come here to study Jewish studies. OK. We are, though, thinking about a certificate program, which would bring together various courses which are connected in one way or another, like Mideast politics, for example. Or there are some literature classes, which are either about the Holocaust or Jewish literature. Oh, I'd love to see that. Well, we're working on it. My wife just retired. She's looking for an academic pursuit of some kind. She would love to do that. Wonderful. So I give her my email. I will. OK. And what would be anti-Semitic activities on the campus? Do you see that? And this BDS organization wants to boycott Israel. You see that? So, right, but let me step back a little bit, because they're not necessarily connected. They can be, but not necessarily. I have seen, in my time, my 25 years here, I've actually seen more anti-Semitism off campus than on campus. Painting of swastikas, my boy and I were called Christ killers. I've seen more of that off campus. And not a lot, again, compared to these are the best of times still. In Jewish history, living in the United States, at this time, we are still living the best of time as Jews. So we don't have, I don't think in the community, for example, the Torahs were stolen from Chabad. I want to ask you about that. Right, but there's no evidence that that was a hate crime. The arc wasn't defiled. I mean, if that were a hate crime, and similar things have happened on the mainland, and certainly in Europe, certainly, the building would have been trashed. Somebody would have sprayed a swastika. Somebody would have spray-painted some horrible epithet about Jews. There's no indication of that. There's no indication. It seems to me, and I've only emailed Israel and Pearl, we've only emailed, that Torahs are worth a lot of money. There is a tremendous amount of property crime here. Fortunately, we live in a state where there's not a lot of personal crime, but there's a lot of property crimes. Because economic disparity leads to that. Very much so, and we leave our doors open. Okay, and we leave our cars open, because we're accustomed to it not happening. Interesting. Right, or it's quite possible, and I think itchell and Pearl will have to think about this themselves, whether somebody in the community is really angry. We don't know, I mean, but it seems to me, and we had a discussion, we have a very informal Jewish community relations council group that meets once every two months, and we had a good heart-to-heart discussion about this, and the consensus was certainly not to jump to the anti-Semitic hate crime. Don't jump there. It may turn out to be, but let the police do what they're doing, and I don't think Pearl and Itchell even think that it was necessary. Not from what they've been quoted to say in the newspaper anyway. Right, and they're honest people. If they, you know, and they have experience. And they know what anti-Semitism is, right? I mean, they, the Mubai, Rabbi and Rebbitson, they know what, yeah. Now, as far as BDS, so there is a, I would suppose, relatively active group. BDS is the Boycott and Divestment and Sanction Group. It is housed generally in a couple of departments, and they generally write letters, sponsor visitors, don't attend our events when we try to engage. So they exist. I don't wanna talk about the disparity of news on this. Yeah, I think, and some people who oppose BDS also don't want to talk. So this is not to demonize BDS by any means at all. But in a way, it's a mini version of our country where people don't really want to engage. It is don't engage. And some of us are trying to get an engagement going because I think there's some similarities that we can talk about, very importantly. I think there's some issues that we could probably work together. Then there's some fundamental differences. I would like to cover this in greater detail, and I regret we don't have enough time to do now. I'd be more than happy to come back to talk about it.  And I have some kind of an unusual view about it. I wanna hear that. Sure. I wanna discuss it with you, I think it's very important. Peter H. Hoffenberg, Associate Professor of History at UH Manila. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be able to talk to you. It's been a pleasure. It's been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thanks a lot.


Haiti has asked for foreign troops to be sent to the country to protect key infrastructure after the assassination of Pro-President Jovenel Moise. The request was sent by the government of the U.S. and the U.N. but the U.S. says it has no plans to offer military assistance at this time. Haitian police earlier said the group of 28 foreign mercenaries killed the president on Wednesday after a gun battle in the capital, Port-au-Prince, 17 of them were detained. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


We're here at the UBC Northern Medical Program at UNBC and it's weedless Wednesday so we're of course using the opportunity to encourage people to stop smoking. We know in British Columbia we have the lowest smoking rates in all of Canada at 14.5% but we can do better. We need to get down to 10 or 11%. And so the BC government has great programs to help people stop smoking through 811 or quitnow.ca. You can access those support services and also the nicotine replacement therapies or perhaps prescription drugs that can help you quit. Your doctor, your pharmacist can help guide you through this process and then the support services at quitnow.ca are very helpful in encouraging people to stay on the program. It was like an epiphany for me because the tobacco free Tuesdays and the weedless Wednesdays I'd been doing for probably about six months before it actually finally just hit me one day when I said you know I'm a non-smoker two days a week this is crazy why don't I shoot for seven and that's when I really started you know taking use of the resources that were out there for me. So I joined the quitnow and I get an email to my phone every day actually I get them twice a day I get them at night and in the morning and I really look forward to it because it's something new something innovative something different that gives me the support that I need and I chew the NRT gum that the provincial government is providing through 8-1-1 so it's been excellent for me.