Posted under American history & European history & GLBTQ & Gender & bad language & race & women's history
How long has it been since you heard someone called a “revisionist,” or heard someone muttering darkly about “revisionism” after a job talk or search committee meeting? (For all of the non-historians out there who might still be reading: “revisionism” was a charge thrown around a lot in the 1980s and 1990s by those historians who imagined that history is the pursuit of Unchanging Truth, and who were generally quite hostile to most of the new approaches to history since 1960 or so–social history, subaltern history, feminist history, queer theory–pretty much everything except political and intellectual history focused on DWEMs, that is, Dead White European/Euro-American Males. Anyone who had different ideas or subjects in mind were called “revisionists,” which implied that we were doing Made-Up history, which was seen as an attack on the Unchanging Truth.) I think it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve heard these terms in serious conversations. Continue Reading »




Most teachers and professors I know have had the same dream, or a close variation on it: you are late to teach your first class of the new semester, and you’re very anxious because for some reason it’s a calculus class and you’re a historian and you’re not good at all with calculus, so you don’t know why someone thought that was an appropriate assignment for you and you don’t have a syllabus yet, or notes, or any idea what you’re going to teach in a calculus class, and you’re naked, besides, but you’re late and you know it’s very, very bad to be late even if it’s to a class you’re totally unprepared to teach! And you’re naked! And you can’t find the room, and you keep walking into the wrong classes! Naked, and very, very late. (
It occurred to me the other day, as I was re-reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that its