Soaked

0.5 hours writing, 5 hours researching/reading

This week's blog monitor is Geordan Drummond, in Philadelphia. Geordan and I went to high school together, and were each other's best men. When we talk on the phone, it's usually in Italian, so it takes about twice as long to say the same things. Cathy and I are going to visit Geordan and his wife Pattie this weekend, so it's good timing for him to be monitoring. Check out Geordan's original music on his MySpace page. It sounds like robots in love, underwater. Welcome, Geordan!

Wow, it was really rainy in New York today. I went to Grand Central with Cathy to drop off her asbestos-coated clothes from Thursday's pipe explosion at the Con Edison collection point - and got soaked. I went out to lunch - and got soaked. I went to the library - and got soaked.

While drying off (for the moment), I continued to work on the police chapter. I'm using the examples of Gaza and Iraq to illustrate the contemporary relevance of the historical case I examine, and it's tricky. You don't want to focus too much on something happening right now - because the situation will be different in six months when I'm finished with the dissertation, and you don't want to make predictions or recommendations - because they'll soon.

I'm starting to look at state-level data during La Violencia. At the library, I began going through reports from Santander state that the governor submitted to Congress each year, like a technical state-of-the-state. Geez, they sure had a lot of hassle building a railroad in the '20s. Not much about the police during that peaceful decade, but after the Liberals win a presidential election in 1930 for the first time in nearly 50 years, things start to heat up. A lot of the fuss is around the emerging labor movement, and the tone of condescension and fear is thick in these otherwise dry bureaucratic documents.

Elite reaction to the incipient labor movement is a key theme in Daniel Pecaut's Orden y violencia, a study of Colombian politics from 1930 to 1953. This is an interesting choice of time period, because it basically treats the time between the Liberals' electoral victory in 1930 and the military coup in 1953 as a unit - whereas the periodization I've been using is more about La Violencia starting in 1946 and extending through the early 1960s. I'll be interested to see what's distinctive about Pecaut's alternative timeframe.

My goal this week is to complete a draft of the chapter on the police and send it to a professor who's offered to read it. Onward!