Questions about queer activism? Wondering what’s up with sexual assault? Curious about campus history?
Come join us for a teach-in and skill-share on recent activist history at Wesleyan.
We’ll give a brief tour through the now-updated activist timeline and have time for Q+A :)
Date: Wednesday, March 7
Time: 8-10 PM
Place: 200 Church
Facebook Event
“Wesleyan is like History or God, it’s a vehicle people use to transmit ideas.”
This is the first in our series of Wesleyingiversary interviews. You can find the rest here.
Approximately half-a-score ago, we arose from the womb of a 4am AIM conversation. At the time of its founding, Wesleying was at a Wesleyan where social media was only just beginning to make a mark on campus life. Twitter did not yet exist and it was still called “thefacebook.”
According to founders Holly Wood ’08 and Xue Sun ’08, Wes needed a vehicle to unite increasingly disparate segments of campus life, preserve Wes history, and inform the masses of party locations. And thus, Wesleying was born. A decade, lots of bloggers, and bushels of sarcasm later, you are reading this post.
You are reading this post because you want to know what happened when we caught up with Holly and Xue to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the 5 year anniversary of Wesleying and talk about butt plugs (yes, those again) and flossing. Well, here’s our attempt at crafting an origin story:
I don’t really know how to say this, but does anyone remember 2006? I was in 5th grade listening to Buy U a Drank authentically, and not as part of a childhood-regression themed pregame playlist. Anyway, way back on 8/23/06, a little thing called Wesleying was founded.
Yeah. This fucking site was around before Twitter. And it was founded back when it was still called thefacebook. Well, 6.5 million pageviews and a Wikipedia page later (Jesus, we should update that), we still exist. We have survived the 33 month lifespan that this random article from 2006 said was the average lifespan of a blog. Back then, the Argus website looked like this. We looked like this. We’ve had some fun along the way. And now we’re gonna party on the internet.
Wanna learn about communism?
In 1955, an enormous statue of Stalin was unveiled in Prague; in 1956, following Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” Stalin went from hero to villain; in 1961, Prague’s Stalin was obliterated with 1,600 pounds of explosives. Paulina Bren ’87 will discuss what came next: the story of the vast plinth that thereafter remained empty, and the uncharted territory of the 1970s and 1980s in the Eastern Bloc, a period of history known as late communism.
Bren is the author of the award-winning book, The Greengrocer and His
TV: The Culture of Communism after the Prague Spring, and a Wesleyan (Class of 1987) and College of Letters alumna.
Date: Wednesday, February 24
Time: 4:15-5:15 PM
Place: PAC 001
From the beautiful Sadie Renjilian ’17:
Historical Narratives, the Wesleyan History publication of student work, is seeking submissions! Submit your 5-25 page essay to hnarratives[@]gmail[.]com.
Date: December 8th through January 31st
From the Center for African American Studies:
Gretchen Long ’89 Professor of History and Africana Studies at Williams College will be giving a talk entitled, “He’s Got No License, Nor no Deplomer”: A Black Doctor & His Story After the Civil War.
Date: Thursday, November 5
Time: 4:30 – 6:00 PM
Place: Vanguard Lounge
For the historically minded:
Dione Longley will speak about Heroes for All Time, the book she co-authored with Buck Zaidel using soldiers’ letters and diaries and written accounts by nurses, doctors, soldiers’ families, and volunteers on the home front to vividly portray the war through their moving stories. The book includes hundreds of outstanding period photographs, most previously unpublished.
Dione graduated from Wesleyan with a BA in American Studies in 1982. She was director of the Middlesex County Historical Society in Middletown for 20 years. Now a public historian and writer, she resides in Higganum with her husband and two daughters.
Heroes for All Time is available from Wesleyan University Press, and will also be for sale by Broad Street Books at the event. If you would like us to reserve a book for you, or any other information about the event, please emaillibfriends[at]wesleyan[dot]edu.
Date: Tuesday, April 21
Time: 7 – 9 PM
Place: Develin Room, 2nd floor, Olin Library
An invitation from Earl Y. Lin ’15:
Are you an underclassmen who enjoys learning about the past? Do you like understanding how and why things are the way they are? Do you like free food?
If you answered yes to any (or all!) of those questions, then come by the HISTORY DEPARTMENT OPEN HOUSE and learn more about Wesleyan’s History program. Faculty and majors will be in attendance to answer any questions you might have. And pizza from Mondo will be in attendance, too!
Date: Thursday, February 26th
Time: 12:00PM
Place: CSS Lounge
I think the title says it all, but if you need more details, Theo “Guess He’s Not An Anthro Major” Sullivan ’16 has them:
Meet history faculty, fellow students, and enjoy some warm winter treats: hot chocolate, cappuccino, cookies, coffee cakes, carrots, and much more!
Date: February 3rd
Time: 4:15 PM
Place: Zelnick
1959: “Conn College Girls Get The Whistles; Holyoke, The Dates; But Wellesley Chicks Get The Men”
These days, it’s not uncommon to take surveys about things like our use of campus spaces, our views regarding fossil fuel divestment, the quality of our academic courses, and other exciting and important topics.
In 1959, The Wesleyan Argus gave some Wesleyan students a very different kind of survey.
On Friday, October 23rd, 1959, the Argus’ front page shared the results of a questionnaire asking Wesleyan students (“Wesmen”) to rank women from other New England colleges on the basis of their beauty, personality, intelligence, desirability for blind dates, and potential to be wives. In their article, the writers explained their bizarre experiment:
With its usual interest in the cause of public enlightenment, the Argus recently offered Wesmen the opportunity to pass judgment on girls from five of the major New England colleges. The young lovelies were assessed via questionnaires on their looks, personality, intelligence, and desirability by 200 coldly calculating Wesleyan students.
And so, these students filled out the survey, sharing their “cold, calculating” judgments of the women of Connecticut College, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. The results became front-page Argus news.
More after the jump:
