Last night, we picked up Doug’s parents at the airport who are going to spend the Thanksgiving break with us. They are the textbook definition of amazing grandparents, complete with slippers and robes for their morning breakfast. I love them to death!  And, so do my boys.  My sisters, Emily and Megan, will arrive tomorrow morning. Since I’m punching a clock every day of my life, I painfully and inconveniently stopped at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods this morning to buy food for the impending feast, that my sister Emily has planned and will masterfully prepare with minimal help from the others (I really can’t pretend to take any credit). Then, Doug dropped me off on campus to work on my classics research project. So, instead of making pumpkin pies today, I will buy them at Costco (I won’t even buy them; I’ll send someone to buy them: the academic must work). So, although unable to participate in the pre-Thanksgiving fun, I’m thinking about it in my cubicle at the library. Because really, I can’t be distracted with the contingencies of a holiday when Professor X wants me to produce document Y for his class next week.

So, as I sit, I’m reading an essay on feminist revisionist history that I felt apropos for the moment. If I can’t prepare food, I can at least prepare some festive conversation. Jane Donawerth edited a collection of rhetorical theory by women before 1900. In the introduction, she states the tenets of revisionist history that have influenced her. They are:

• History legitimates a viewpoint that includes political and ideological assumptions.
• Historians are rhetoricians who construct texts, not just inspired discoverers of evidence.
• Histories are dangerous if they rely on myths of continuity, heroic men and women, and progress.
• The best histories strive not to glimpse universality but to locate theories and events in specific historical and material circumstances.
• The best histories do not tell a single story, leaving out information that does not fit, but stress multiplicity and diversity.