Historiann

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 »

31 Comments »

From the mailbag at Historiann HQ, a question about working outside the historical field in which one originally trained:

Dear Historiann,

I have a question about working outside one’s dissertation field, and wonder to what extent the topic of one’s dissertation dictates the career.  Is it permanent?  I am now working on a topic largely unrelated to my doctoral work, and I have already discovered this to be less-than-an-asset on the job market.  For jobs in my dissertation field, any search committee would look askance at current project; for jobs in “current project field,” they will look askance at the dissertation.  (Think: dissertation on revolutionary France, current project on Argentina). 

To what extent are we defined by a choice of dissertation topic, even throughout our careers? I have heard people commenting about a very senior (famous) historian who wrote a recent book, saying “how can he work on Y? He’s a specialist on X!” (X being his doctoral subject). He completed his Ph.D. 30 years ago, and has written a number of books. My view is, surely he’s had time to become a specialist in some other field/s of history since then. But this view is obviously not shared by all in the discipline. Should a junior scholar wait til after tenure to bust out their “true historical passion?”

Signed,

Roving Renata

Renata, I agree with you that people in our profession can be extremely fussy and fuddy-duddy about switching fields and gaining new competencies.  (And as someone who wrote a book that wasn’t a revision of her dissertation at all but was an entirely new project–well, let’s just say that I can relate to your anxieties.)  People are unusually identified with their first books, especially if their first books were well received.  I once had a colleague who was absolutely haunted by this.  He once said to me, “it’s just agonizing to think that people will read my first book and think that that’s who I am as a scholar!”  Continue Reading »

22 Comments »

Photo of Paul Krugman and Robin Wells by Tina Barney

No kidding!  See Larissa McFarquar’s portrait of Krugman in The New Yorker:

Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman’s economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there’s no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.

Awesome!!!  It’s all so simple!  Never mind why only certain people were enslaved, and others weren’t; never mind how slavery made ideological sense as well as economic sense to the architects of slavery; never mind what the lives and deaths of the enslaved were like; never mind how masters maintained their dominance even in the face of a massive enslaved majority of people.  It’s all just so much simpler when you look at it as an economist!  You know that old joke about economists:  “Sure it works in reality, but will it work in theory?” 

The paragraph above, about mid-way through the article, helps explain Krugman’s description of his political quiescence through the 1980s and 1990s: Continue Reading »

30 Comments »

Today we have in a letter from the mailbag at Historiann HQ some interesting questions about finding appropriate publication outlets for interdisciplinary work.  We all say we support interdisciplinarity and admire it–and yet, scholars whose work is truly interdisciplinary have a damnably hard time finding jobs and appropriate outlets for their publication.  Here, a young scholar wonders about the politics of attempting to publish an article in one field when she’ll one day be looking for a job in another discipline

Hi Historiann,

I’m a long time reader and lurker.  I’m a history grad student with one toe in [a Closely Related Discipline, or CRD for short].  I did an intensive study of an unpublished collection [in CRD], which my committee is suggesting I publish separately from the dissertation because it’s heavy on details appreciated more by practitioners of CRD than history, and because getting an article out in grad school looks good. 

The problem is, while “interdisciplinarity” is all the rage, I don’t know where to publish.  I wanted to throw this out to someone outside my department and committee, because they’re starting to sound like an echo chamber.  CRD journals seem like a good fit, but I’m worried that history department hiring committees won’t know what to make of an article that’s not published in a history journal.  What kind of audience should a first article be aimed at?  Do interdisciplinary journals really live up to their goals?  Would it be better to go with a full on CRD journal and hope some historians read it, or try to pitch it to a history journal with interdisciplinary aspirations?  How does one measure the “prestige” of the journal and their readership?  (This is something my committee keeps telling me to keep in mind, but I have no idea what it means!)  How does interdisciplinary work look to hiring committees?  Will publishing in a CRD journal mark me as a bad fit for a history department hire, even if I have history conference CV lines? 

Thanks for your help,

Interdisciplinary Eileen

Dear Eileen,

First of all, congratulations on having written something that your committee believes should be published.  That is quite an achievement for a graduate student, and you should feel proud of your committee’s confidence in your work.  Secondly, I think you’re worrying yourself unnecessarily about hypothetical problems.  Continue Reading »

25 Comments »

Why watch the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics on the teevee, when you can participate in winter sports yourself?  (Well, those of us near the snowy mountains have a bitof an advantage!)  No, I’m not going to Mt. Tremblant or anything near Quebec–we in Colorado can ski on lovely, fresh powder much more conveniently.  Easterners:  how do you ski on all of that ice?  How is it any fun?  I’ve only tried it once, in Vermont in 1994, and it was the antithesis of fun, unless your definition of fun includes adjectives like “terrifying,” “damp,” “cold,” and “miserable.”  (Well, I suppose the definition of “fun” for most New Englanders might include one or more of these terms.  But, they fetishize discomfort and view it as a sign of moral rectitude.)

Here’s a fun, if slightly creepy, fact about this blog:  every day, dozens of people click here because they’re searching “women athletes,” “hot women athletes,” “athletic women,” “olympic women,” or some other similar phrases.  And as you regular readers know, this is a blog that only very rarely comments on sports or athletic affairs, if ever.  So, enjoy the images of women on vintage ski posters here! Continue Reading »

12 Comments »

Can I choose "none of the above?"

Howdy!  Hellsapoppin’ here.  While some of you in the East may be shoveling yet more snow today, we in the West have got more than a few stalls to muck out today, and a lot of fences to mend.  Here are some items for your delectation and consideration:

• National Politics:  What’s up with our Transformational President?  Well, not his approval numbers, that’s for sure.  Jonathan Last offers an analysis that says it’s the Clinton primary voters who jumped off the bandwagon first, and looks at the recent election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts from that perspective.  Michael Lind writes that the Republicans have nothin’–but that won’t stop them from winning because of Dem fecklessness, diffidence, and/or incompetence:  “Buyer’s remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait — which party are we talking about here?”  Meanwhile–there are open rumblings about the incompetence of the Chicago bubble that appears to have been more effective at getting President Obama elected than they are at governing.  (H/t RealClearPolitics.)
• Local Politics:  Our new U.S. Senator, Michael “Never Won a Single Vote” Bennet is sinking like a stone against Republican front-runner Jane Norton, and even against Weld County D.A. Ken Buck.  (OK, so they’re only Rasmussen and DailyKos polls, but wev–that’s all we’ve got.)  Gee–who ever would have predicted that it might be a craptastic idea to crown this guy Senator?  Meanwhile, a guy who actually ran a few successful campaigns and won a lot of votes is now in the lead to replace Gov. Bill “The Family Guy” Ritter.  Go figure!  Historiann might be voting Republican for the first time in her life come November–unless Andrew Romanoff wins the D primary, and even then, I might vote Republican anyway.  Why should I reward bad behavior by all of the d00dly d00dz who think they run this state?  (Of course, we’ll have to see how Norton and Buck play their hands, too.)
• Literature:  Leonard Cassuto considers J.D. Salinger’s Bartleby-like retreat from literary celebrity, and predicts Continue Reading »

12 Comments »

The Berlin Wall started to crumble 20 years ago today, November 9, 1989.  What a weird beginning of the end of the Cold War:  in the early and mid-1980s, Americans had worked themselves up into a frenzy of “Evil Empire” fear–any of you old-timers like me remember Red Dawn and The Day After, and Testament?  (The video below, Nena’s “99 Balloons,” English version, is a little treat for all of you.  That’s what the MTV generation was grooving on in the early and mid-80s, while Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were summiting at Reykjavik:  big hair and nuclear war!  The original German version, “99 Luftbalons” is here.)  And President Reagan had big hair too, remember?

But with the fall of the wall, decades of fear in the U.S. were over, or so we thought hopefully.  I remember listening to the news on my radio in my dorm room, looking out over the darkening college green on that late afternoon, Continue Reading »

18 Comments »

Well, I did.  Will the Nobel be Obama’s “Commander Codpiece” moment?

Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize furnishes yet more proof of the enduring fatuity of our times.  Most Americans–and many Europeans, apparently–who really should know better make political decisions based entirely on their feelings, not on objective reality.  Just as many Americans voted for George W. Bush in 2004 because they “felt” he would make them “safer,” so the Nobel for Obama has also been awarded not for concrete achievement but on the basis of the emotions he stirs in some:  “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.“  (Emphasis mine.)  Good Lord.

Can we eat Hope?  Will Hope cover your hospital bills?  Will Hope shut down Guantanamo Bay and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Will some magical Hopey goodness halt the melting of the polar ice caps?  Huh?  How’s that working out for us so far?

26 Comments »

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.  (We discussed dreams similar to this one last fall–remember?)

It occurred to me the other day, as I was re-reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that its author Charles Dodgson (pseudonym Lewis Carroll), a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford, must have suffered terribly from these sorts of professional anxiety dreams.  The whole story is literally a dream, and one characterized by a high degree of anxiety on the part of its heroine, Alice, who knows that she must find the white rabbit (although she doesn’t know why).  The white rabbit himself is terribly anxious too, because he’s late!  He’s late!

Continue Reading »

15 Comments »

UPDATED BELOW

At least in the coverage of Roman Polanski’s arrest it has!  I keep hearing about how he was arrested in Switzerland this weekend on a 32-year old charge of “having sex with” a then-13 year old girl.  (This New York Times story will stand as representative of the chicken$hit coverage.)  Funny–he was actually charged with rape in 1977 (aggravated with the use of drugs and alcohol to incapacitate the girl), but pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of statutory rape.

Here’s something even more inexcusable:  the Denver Post ran a Los Angeles Times story that featured a photo with a caption of the victim in which she is described as the girl who “accused Polanski when she was 13.”  (The Denver Post’s headline in their print and online editions this morning is “Polanski held in 1977 rape case,” however, so “rape” is OK in a headline presumably because it’s shorter than saying “sex case” or “having sex with 13-year old accuser.”) 

Thank you, Kobe Bryant, and your very capable but total dirtbag of an attorney, Pamela Mackey!   Continue Reading »

47 Comments »