notes for packing and a comment by Linda Colley

Greetings. Virtually everyone has now posted once (thanks!; I was beginning to think I was in the class alone) although someone posted anonymously, so I don't know who that is.

As we get ready to depart I have had queries about what to bring: sheets, towels, alarm clocks, etc. They have sheets and towels, but, as Dr. Bredesen noted an old towel stuffed into a corner of your bag comes in handy (and you can always throw away at the end). As for electronics and material comforts in your room, you might contact your room-mate, and the pairings I have are: Ben Gaylord and Raymond Szarsinksi, Caroline Deters and Kristan Cagle, Krystal Rose and Megan Tellerina, Amanda Terrell and Ashley Moreland, Cassandra Murray with her friend in the English group. In other words, don't bring two of something that you only need one in a room. But I can't tell you what you need for day-to-day living because (1) I don't know you that well; and (2) I've only spent one night in Harlaxton and it wasn't in the student area. I will ask an informant (a student last year), and try to make one more posting about such things. But if you bring clothes, Cannadine, and a willingness to try and learn new things you won't go too wrong.

Still coolish in UK. Up to 71 F (they use Celsius, so weather reports will seem strange) in London when we arrive, but as low as 49 F at night in Grantham. I have made contact with a colleague at Emmanuel College, who has agreed to give us a brief tour around that college as well, so now we have two residential colleges to tour as well as the university (and we'll see many of the colleges as we walk around).

Finally, note the following from the Guardian Weekly, "The feeling is always mutual," by Linda Colley, professor of history at Princeton University, on how American and European prejudices contain awkward truths about the way both sides view each other

• "Like the proverbial elephant in the room, American anti-Europeanism has loomed large for so long that few trouble to notice it. After all, Americans visit and live in Europe in large numbers and they are generally civilised, smart and generous.
• "American prejudices about Europe rarely surface in headlines, but they are real, pervasive and ingrained. Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture and identity depends on positioning Europe as the "other", as that "old world" against which they define themselves. During the 17th and 18th centuries, American schoolchildren learn, European refugees crossed the Atlantic to seek sanctuary in a new, better, more abundant land. In 1776 Americans declared themselves independent not just of the oppressions of George III and the British but also of the taste for monarchy, aristocracy, war and colonialism exhibited by Europeans more generally. Americans were fortunate, George Washington declared in 1796, in being so "detached and distant" from "the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice".
• "Some 40 million Europeans chose to migrate to the US in the 19th century. The greater prosperity and political rights enjoyed then by most ordinary Americans, provided they were white, entrenched the view that one side of the Atlantic was intrinsically better and more blessed than the other. "While we shall see multiplied instances of Europeans going to live in America," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "I will venture to say no man now living will ever see an instance of an American removing to settle in Europe." Henry James chose to settle in England, but his novels still endorsed the view that Europe was both corrupt and corrupting. Those of his American characters who cross the Atlantic tend to be inveigled and damaged by the old world, like Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, or are morally contaminated by it, like the expatriate American anti-heroine of The Europeans.
• "Seeing Europe as potentially malignant was in part a tacit American acknowledgment of its superior cultural sophistication and armed force, but as the US became more powerful, so the nature of its anti-Europeanism changed. Europe ceased to seem the place where the future was under construction. Instead, US intervention in two world wars encouraged the American view that Europe's inhabitants were so terminally violent and pathetically incompetent as to need to be rescued from themselves, and that only the US could achieve this.
• "Of course, not all Americans think in these ways or ever have; and historically the US has borrowed ideas and institutions from Europe as much as it has disapproved of and distrusted it. None the less, American preconceptions about Europe require taking seriously.
• "To begin with, they reveal what Americans fear and dislike about themselves. It is now almost de rigueur, for instance, for American universities and radical scholars to teach and write on the iniquities of past European colonialism and imperialism. Fair enough, one might think. But the silence about the history of America's own overland and overseas empire is almost deafening. There is a sense, clearly, in which American anxieties about home-grown aggression and imperialism are being transferred on to Europe. In much the same way, most Americans far prefer books and movies about Europe's undeniable class divisions than to think hard about their own economic inequalities or the very considerable degree of hereditary status and influence in their own land.
• "There is a more specific sense in which American anti-Europeanism functions as a kind of self-commentary. In the past America's white elite cherished Europe as well as suspecting it. They adopted European fashions, built universities like Oxford and Cambridge, went on grand tours of European cities; and many of these American patricians were Wasps, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. As the US population has become more diverse, however, so the authority of this old elite has diminished."