The Penn State scandal brought forth a thoughtful commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.  Mendelsohn begins his recent New York Times op-ed, “What if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?”

He concludes that then Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant to the football team, would surely have intervened or at least called the police.  "But the victim in this case was a boy," Mendelsohn notes.  He goes on to speculate that the university, too, would have taken the crime more seriously, had the victim been female.

Even though we cannot know for sure without at least interviewing McQueary and Joe Paterno, Graham Spanier, and other Penn State officials, surely Mendelsohn is right.  As he puts it,

Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl?

However, Mendelsohn mistakes the source of this inequity.  He locates it in the shame associated with homosexuality.  Since the rape was male on male, he opines, the victims were “somehow untouchable, so fully tainted they couldn't, or shouldn't, be rescued.”  He notes that athletics is “the last redoubt of unapologetic anti-gay sentiment.”  Of course, he has overlooked many other redoubts, such as religious organizations from Muslims and Orthodox Jews through Mormons and Southern Baptists.  But this is a quibble:  male athletics is an anti-gay redoubt, if hardly the last one.  Mendelsohn goes on to speculate that somehow this anti-gay sentiment prompted denial, converting anal penetration into mere "horsing around," in the now-notorious words of Penn State's athletic director. 
Such reasoning falls short.  Of course, loyalty to a coach, to a friend, can prompt police avoidance, regardless of the sex of the victim.  However, to claim that prejudice against homosexuality promotes winking at homosexual behavior is not logical.

Besides, there's a simpler explanation.  Our society does not take violence against males as seriously as violence against females.

Look at what happens in domestic abuse cases.  Research shows that, although women are more likely to be killed, men are the victims of domestic violence about half the time.  (See, inter alia, Straus and Gelles, The National Family Violence Survey, Philip W. Cook's Abused Men, and copious studies by David Finklehor.)  Yet most cities provide many shelters for abused women and none for abused men.  The federal government passed a “Violence Against Women Act” but no “Violence Against Men Act.”  Imagine a federal law designed to protect white victims of criminal acts while ignoring black victims!

Outside the family, the pattern continues:  in the workplace, men are more than a dozen times more likely than women to be killed.  To be sure, men also commit more than their share of workplace murders, but 90 percent of deaths on the job are accidental, not purposeful, and women's jobs are statistically much safer than men's.  Even God seems to have it in for men:  lightning strikes males seven times as often as females. 

Lightning, of course, is random, but men are much more likely to be working outside in inclement weather.  They are “supposed to”—terms like “telephone lineman” convey this expectation.  Men are also more likely to be playing outside in bad weather.  It's “not manly” to give up football or even golf just ‘cause of a little thunderstorm.  It’s also not manly to seek shelter from domestic violence.

For that matter, it's not manly to see a doctor for “just a little ache or pain.”  So it happens that women make 70 percent of all visits to doctors while men die five years earlier than women.  This difference is slightly greater than the difference race makes.  Like the racial difference, the male/female difference in lifespan largely derives from our culture, not our genes.  It has changed over time; a century ago, men lived longer than women.  Yet the discipline of sociology, which has taught us that most gender differences stem more from social causes than biological, has mainly ignored perhaps the most basic gender difference of all:  in length of life itself. 

Mendelsohn's piece about Penn State, reinterpreted, prompts us to notice what we otherwise take for granted:...

Just now, your local post office—easier to find than it will be next year, when the Postal Service plans to close as many as 3,600—features a stamp of Owney, a dog.  He appeared in the Albany, NY, post office in 1888, where "clerks took a liking to him," according to the history that the USPS supplies on the back of each sheet of Owney stamps. 

Owney followed mailbags onto trains, where Railway Mail Service employees considered him their good-luck charm.  As Owney traveled the country, clerks affixed medals and tags to his collar to document his travels.

The Postal Service goes on to tell how the Postmaster General John Wanamaker gave Owney "a special dog-sized jacket to help him display them all."  He wound up with between 400 and 1,000 tags, far more than could fit on the jacket.  Later, Owney "toured the world by steamer and became an icon of American postal lore."  The account on the stamps ends with this happy conclusion:  "Today he enjoys a place of honor at the Smithsonian Institution's National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C." 

Such a cheerful story.  In those years (and for decades thereafter), clerks rode the rails, sorting the mail in special cars while the train was moving.  Trains picked up more mail without even stopping from trackside poles.  The system was very efficient.  And the story gets even happier:  in an era when train wrecks were all too common, no train Owney rode was ever in a wreck.  Postal workers came to see him as a good luck charm.  During his tour around the world in 1895, he met the emperor of Japan among other notables.  Briefly, he was the most famous dog in the world and lent his charisma to dog shows by making guest appearances. 

But that's not the full story. 

In April 1897, the Superintendent of the Chicago mail district forbade Owney from riding the rails any more.  His edict was unkind:

If the dog were in any wise remarkable for his intelligence, there might be some reason for paying attention to him.  He is only a mongrel cur, which has been petted until the thing has become disgusting.  His riding around on the postal cars distracts the attention of the clerks, takes up the time of employees at stations in showing him around, and it is about time he is kicked out.

Nevertheless, Owney took one final ride.  On June 11, 1897, now perhaps seveenteen years old, Owney took the rails to Toledo.  While he was there, a postal clerk tried to chain him for a photo opportunity, and Owney bit him.  The postmaster had a local gendarme shoot him, still chained. 

The postal service knows the full story, of course.  So does the Smithsonian, which now displays Owney at its Postal Museum.  But apparently the stamp-buying public does not need to know.  Neither does the museum-going public.  The museum displays Owney in a prime location, near the entrance, where no visitor can easily miss him.  It used a $10,300 grant and additional donations to pay for his makeover, just in time for the new stamp.  He got a new hand-sculpted snout, new eyes and claws, and pieces of coyote pelt to patch up some bald spots.  He gets a case all his own, next to a railway mail car, and a total of three different labels—but none tell anything bad.  Nor does "Owney the Railway Mail Service Mascot"—Owney's main page at the Postal Museum website — say a thing about his unfortunate demise (http://postalmuseum.si.edu/owney/index.html).  In an obscure corner of its website (http://postalmuseum.si.edu/owney/Postmasters_Advocate_Owney_article-2011-04.pdf, 9/2011), Nancy A. Pope, Postal Museum historian, tells all, although her account of Owney's demise differs from mine in a few details.  But there is no way to get from Owney’s page to Pope's article. 

"Relax, Loewen," some folks may say.  "You’re going postal.  It's just a dog, for heaven’s sake!"  Indeed, Owney was "just a dog"—and now just a stuffed dog.  But where do we draw the line?  Do we tell the unpleasant truths about, say, Woodrow Wilson?  He's long been a favorite of historians:  when Arthur M. Schlesinger asked 75 leading historians to rank the presidents in 1962, they listed Wilson fourth, ahead of Jefferson.  So let's write postal history about...

The AASLH (American Association for State and Local History) just concluded its annual meeting, held in Richmond, VA.  Signs of "new beginnings" in local history—a phrase used in the conference title, abounded, both at AASLH and in Richmond.  Just in time, too! 

My book Lies Across America:  What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong has at least one entry for every state.  Virginia received eight, more than any other state, and Richmond supplied four of those.  I visited the city several times in the late 1990s and found it overrun by a neo-Confederate interpretation of its past.  Since then, new voices have been raised that famously contest Richmond's past.  Arthur Ashe got added to Monument Row.  A good historical marker went up, telling the story of Elizabeth Van Lew, spy for the Union.  An amazing monument telling about Virginia's massive resistance to school desegregation and the courage of black students in bringing the case now stands on the Capitol grounds.  A statue of Lincoln and his son Tad, commemorating their bold walk through Richmond shortly after its surrender, drew protests from the Sons of Confederate Veterans but remains on the landscape at Tredegar Ironworks.  Tredegar also boasts a new Civil War museum, telling the story from three viewpoints:  Confederate, Union, and African American. 

AASLH is also changing.  I was the AASLH banquet speaker last year in Oklahoma City and found that almost 80  percent of that national audience believed the Southern states had seceded "for states' rights."  That kind of traditional thinking seemed missing in Richmond.

AASLH built Richmond's sites into its program.  For example, on the first day of the conference, Richmond natives Sylvester Turner and Cricket White led a tour titled "Walking Through History, Honoring Sacred Stories."  We began at a landing point on the James River where ships disembarked enslaved Africans.  Turner minced no words, reminding us of the literally putrid condition we would have been in as we made our way to the shore.  Then we walked perhaps half a mile holding hands, simulating a coffle, stepping slowly to accommodate our slowest member, likely a child.  Mosquitoes attacked us, requiring us to cooperate to brush them off or to drop character and hands and swat them; either response helped us feel the discomfort members of the coffle would have experienced.

Hope in the Cities organizes these walking tours at least twice a month, usually for school groups, but also for as many as 150 adults.  Individuals can also walk the trail, however, owing to about sixteen historical markers with extensive text and illustrations.  Again, these are hard-hitting; one heading, for example, was "Despair."  Cricket White's husband Ralph White, who runs the James River Park System, wrote a booklet, "Seeing the Scars of Slavery in the Natural Environment: An Interpretive Guide to the Manchester Slave Trail Along the James River in Richmond," that the Park System put out in 2002.

At a turn-around point, Turner noted that coffles sometimes had to walk from Richmond all the way to Natchez, MS.  Our destination, which we reached by bus, was Robert Lumpkin's slave yard and jail near Richmond's Main St. railroad station.  Lies Across America told the story of Lumpkin, one of the biggest slave dealers in the U.S., and lamented that nothing on the Richmond landscape memorialized any form of the slave trade.  In 2008, Richmond hired archaeologists to explore Lumpkin's property, called by African Americans in 1850 the "Devil's Half Acre."  They unearthed many objects, a beautifully paved yard, and foundations of the jail and other buildings.  To preserve it, they covered it all back up, but three historical markers tell its story.  Nearby is one of the few manifestations anywhere in the world of the triangular trade, from West Africa to the U.S. (and the Caribbean) and the United Kingdom.  This is a sculpture, "Reconciliation," unveiled in 2007 before a crowd of 5,000 people.  Also spearheaded by Hope in the Cities, similar monuments stand in Benin and Liverpool.

More traditional conference fare was a panel the next day, "Interpreting Divergent Voices and Challenging Narratives."  Although traditional in form, it was innovative in content.  One speaker told how an upper-class home in Richmond, complete with gold faucets and silk wallpaper, now narrates the story of "the help" — years before the recent bestselling novel.  Another told of Colonial Williamsburg's tentative beginnings toward interpreting Native Americans, surely overdue, since Native tribes from as far away as present-day Pennsylvania and Ohio came to the town to treat with the English.  The room was full.  Other conference panels had titles like "...