waging academic warfare on two fronts

By which I mean fieldwork (domestic) and the job market. Fieldwork resumes next semester, as the wonderful folks at the LBJ library are going to fund me to visit their library as well as some others in the spring term. So I have nothing to report on that front. But I know that my upcoming trips to the LBJ, FDR, and Reagan libraries don't hold the possibility of meeting the former president himself, unlike when I was at the Carter library and JC showed up randomly one day.

The second front of the war, job searching, is going ok, but I'm fairly paranoid about posting about it due to my fear of jinxing myself as well as my wish to avoid the stupid, stupid job blogs. So email me if you're interested in an update.

On a more political note, has anyone noticed the trend of "zones" in our lives - free speech zone, child safety zone (having to do with laws about where convicted sex offenders can live), drug free zone? Shouldn't we at least strive for these to be universal? I feel like the upper-middle class populations who seem to be claiming these "zones" are simpy giving in to the privatization of basic rights; that this is on some level an acknowledgement that these concepts are not universal, and an acceptance of that fact rather than a commitment to fight. Is this new? Where did the idea of "zones" come from and when did it emerge? Has anyone else noticed this? I know the free-speech zones thing got some press (as being patently ridiculous), maybe around the beginning of the Iraq war?