May 22, 2013
What We’re Reading: May 23, 2013
By AHA Staff
Today’s What We’re Reading features a re-emergence of the Ithaka S+R report, Wikipedia controversies,” 5 1/2 timeless commencement speeches, and much more.
History in the News
Why Do Historians Insist on Dividing Us?
Sir David Cannadine asks the question in the Chronicle, claiming that while the “idea of the commonality of humanity” is the source of increased study by philosophers, economists, psychologists, sociologists, etc., “Historians, however, have barely begun to engage with this work, or its significance for our understanding of the human condition.”
New Research Tools Kick Up Dust in Archives
The New York Times picks up on the Ithaka S+R report, “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians,” covered by Robert Townsend in the February 2013 issue of Perspectives on History.
Sequestration Forces Cuts to National Social Studies Tests
According to EdWeek, we will know less about how much students know about history, civics, and geography thanks to sequestration: “The executive committee of the National Assessment Governing Board, on the recommendation of the National Center for Education Statistics—which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP—voted recently to indefinitely postpone the 4th and 12th grade tests in the three subjects for 2014. The exams will continue for 8th graders.”
Haunting Relic of History, Slave Cabin Gets a Museum Home in Washington
Acquisition of a slave cabin from Edisto, South Carolina, adds to Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture’s growing collection of singular artifacts.
Digital Publishing
Wikipedia Controversies
Talking Writing asks, “What Should We Do about Wikipedia?” after anonymous editors systematically moved women authors off the “American Novelists” page and onto a new page devoted to “American Women Novelists.” And in Salon’s “Revenge, Ego and the Corruption of Wikipedia,” an anonymous editor who made some 13,000 edits is unmasked. According to the article, many of his changes were devoted to settling old scores (like changing a rival’s cause of death from “natural causes” to “alcoholism”).
Mapping Diversity, Tolerance, and Hateful Tweets
At the Washington Post’s WorldViews blog, Max Fisher looks at “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries” and “A revealing map of the world’s most and least ethnically diverse countries.” Steve Saideman at Political Violence @ a Glance responds. In “Three University Projects Use Twitter to Understand Happiness, Hate and Other Emotions in America,” Open Culture looks at programs that created, for example, a hate map that shows where tweets with racial and homophobic slurs originate.
Odds and Ends
HBCUs Voice Concerns on Loan Denials
Changes in student loan underwriting may have resulted in greater drop-out rates for students at historically black colleges and universities
Infographic: Five Paths to Book Publishing
Handy guide from the web editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review.
5 1/2 Timeless Commencement Speeches to Teach You to Define Your Own Success
Via Brain Pickings, a collection of graduation advice that’s worth hearing no matter when you finished school.
May 21, 2013
AHA Member Spotlight: Ingo Trauschweizer
By Nike Nivar
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| AHA Member, Ingo Trauschweizer |
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our talented and eclectic membership, AHA Today features a regular AHA Member Spotlight series. The members featured in this column have been randomly selected by AHA staff or nominated by fellow AHA members. If you would you like to nominate a colleague for the AHA Member Spotlight, please contact Nike Nivar.
Ingo Trauschweizer is assistant professor of history at Ohio University. He splits his time between Athens, Ohio, and Washington, DC. He has been an AHA member since 2005.
Alma maters: University of Maryland (MA, PhD) and Universität Tübingen, Germany
Fields of interest: modern military history, US foreign relations, 20th-century international history
When did you first develop an interest in history?
I developed an interest in popular history sometime between fifth and seventh grade. I couldn’t say exactly how, when, or why that started, but the more I read the more I realized that I’d like to do something with history. Thanks to my parents for never trying to talk me out of it! Maybe my time as a conscript in the German army after high school added to an interest in military history and military institutions, but I definitely credit my high school teachers for guiding me from simply enjoying the stories to more serious historical questions. We didn’t have undergraduate degrees in the arts and humanities in the German university system back in the 1990s and so I essentially started out as a graduate student. I never thought this could turn into a career and I figured journalism would be a more realistic option, ideally with some sort of political and international portfolio.
What projects are you working on currently?
The past couple of years I have spent most of my time on a number of chapters for essay collections on post-heroic warfare, the Ford and Carter administrations, and military historiography. I am now finishing an essay on NATO’s grand strategy in the Cold War for a similar project. In addition, I am co-editing an essay collection on failed states and, together with David J. Ulbrich, I am a running a book series on War and Society in North America at Ohio University Press. Eventually, I’d like to get back to my broader research on the significance of war and militarism in modern German and American history.
Have your interests changed since graduate school? If so, how?
They have certainly broadened in geographic and chronological terms. My dissertation and first book was an institutional history that considered how the US Army adjusted to a radically changed environment in the Cold War. I am still interested in some of the questions that drove that research: inter-service rivalry, civil-military relations, the relative importance of individual actors and political or bureaucratic structures, and alliance relations at the strategic and operational levels. But through the classes I have taught in the past years, I’ve taken a much greater interest in the global Cold War and my work on militarism has led me back in time into the 18th and 19th century and it has allowed me to read much more broadly in European as well as American history.
Is there an article, book, movie, blog, etc. that you could recommend to fellow AHA members?
I like the Society for Military History’s website as a resource: www.smh-hq.org/. I think it is particularly helpful for graduate students. Mark Grimsley’s excellent blog features creative questions and discussions (www.warhistorian.blogspot.com/).
As for books, David Reynolds’s In Command of History:Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War offers an engaging narrative and trenchant analysis of how Winston Churchill came to craft and distort his World War II memoirs that have loomed so large in our understanding of the politics, diplomacy, and strategy of Britain and the United States. I’ve gotten some of the best graduate-seminar discussions about the nature of history and the reliability of sources from that book.
What do you value most about the history profession?
I think that the combination of teaching and research is a very creative process. Both undergraduate and graduate classes have pushed me into questions and directions that I would not have considered otherwise. Sometimes the odd alignment of courses that look at different centuries or continents in the same semester (even on the same day) reveals intriguing patterns. I am also fortunate to work in a department that has strong ties to the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio, which allows me to think actively and frequently about the linkages of past and present and the ways in which history is used and abused in current political and public discourse. Somebody will always try to use the past in order to advocate policy or going to war. A current example is the increasingly intense discussion about what the Vietnam War can tell us about counterinsurgency and the nature of war in the 21st century.
Do you have a favorite AHA annual meeting anecdote you would like to share?
I am afraid my AHA meeting memories are still heavily colored by four or five years on the job market. Most of them are only amusing in hindsight, like the incredibly soft-spoken hiring committee that made it easier to follow the conversation one table over to the right than to know what was going on in my own interview. I must say that I have gotten some of the most insightful and challenging questions about my research during job interviews and often from senior scholars who are nowhere close to my own field of studies. That has been an eye-opening lesson in professionalism and intellectual rigor. But, frankly, what I like best about the annual meeting is the ability to catch up with a lot friends and colleagues all in one place.
Other than history, what are you passionate about?
I have a long-standing and much too deep emotional investment in soccer and in my hometown team (Stuttgart). Spending Saturday afternoons in the stands is what I miss most and so I read up on the German league religiously and I try to catch as many games as possible online. Playing has become more difficult, but I like to go hiking and generally spend time in nature.
Any final thoughts?
One of the great contributions of the liberal arts to society is our effort to push students to think critically and analytically and to communicate clearly. I am concerned about what I see in colleges and universities now: that constant institutional pressure for more students in classes and the political pressure for shorter times to degree completion. I imagine Ohio’s push for a three-year degree is far from unique and I am worried what that will do to higher education. I am less concerned about the structures than about the product, students who are being rushed through and aren’t given the necessary time to mature into critical thinkers. Clearly, college is too expensive as either vocational school or a four-to-six-year camp. There has to be something more and I get the sense that we’re at a crossroads.
May 20, 2013
Now Available at Perspectives Online: Three Books on Doing History
By Allen Mikaelian
Now open and available to all, James Herbert, former director of research programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities, reviews three books on doing history and what that means: Being a Historian by James M. Banner Jr., History Hunting by James Cortada, and History in Practice by Ludmilla Jordanova.
A common theme that Herbert points out is how “All three of these books humbly refrain from claiming high epistemological status for history … . All three, however, calmly assume the utility of history, of what Jordanova calls ‘the past’s perennial usefulness in the present.’” With this in mind, Herbert goes on to discuss the central role that public (or “applied”) history plays in each of these books, in the expanded career choices for students of history, and in the discipline as a whole.
Also in this issue and also speaking to the broad utility of history are articles by Debbie Ann Doyle, on the economic impact of the National Parks, and Marian J. Barber, reporting on the recent Congressional Briefing on immigration policy by three noted historians. Even if history has no claim to “high epistemological status,” it has concrete, ground-level influence—in everything from national policy formulation to how we spend our leisure time.
May 20, 2013
Why Teach?
At a time when many people are wondering, “What jobs does a history degree prepare a student for?” almost everyone would agree that one such job is K–12 teaching. So this article from a Columbia history major who feels that she and her peers are being steered away from teaching should concern us as historians—even if it didn’t also concern us as citizens. Our communities ought to consider why teachers are paid less than financial advisors; surely our children are as important as our money. But the professors who teach history majors also ought to consider our complicity in the inadequate status afforded to precollegiate teachers in American culture.
- Kenneth Pomeranz & James Grossman
May 19, 2013
History Problems…
By Vanessa Varin
As finals approach and our anxiety levels reach an all-time high, it may be worth having a space for historians and history lovers to grouse and commiserate. I asked a few of my colleagues over social media to sound off on some of the unique (and funny) history problems we face on a daily basis. These are their complaints…
- Not being able to afford another bookshelf you desperately need for all of your books because you spent all of your money on books.
- Someone takes your favorite seat at the archive.
- Someone steals the last plug at the archive so you have to run your laptop off battery power.
- The Google Books scan is smudged, so you actually have to go the library.
- Your dissertation, which you’ve spent countless hours on, totals less than 1 MB in size.
- Someone quotes Foucault more than once in a chapter.
- EBSCO only downloads one page at a time.
- The writer of an op-ed declares, “as history shows…”
Have a history problem? Tweet or Facebook us at AHAhistorians.
Photo via bookhaven.stanford.edu
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May 16, 2013
Grant of the Week: Opportunities for Scholars, Institute for Advanced Study
Deadline: November 1, 2013
Scope
The Institute is an independent private institution founded in 1930 to create a community of scholars focused on intellectual inquiry, free from teaching and other university obligations. Scholars from around the world come to the Institute to pursue their own research. Candidates of any nationality may apply for a single term or a full academic year. Scholars may apply for a stipend, but those with sabbatical funding, other grants, and retirement funding or other means are also invited to apply for a non-stipendiary membership. Some short-term visitorships (for less than a full term, and without stipend) are also available on an ad-hoc basis.
For more information about the fellowship and application requirements, please visit the grant posting. For information on other grants and prizes in history, see the “Awards and Fellowships” section of the AHA Calendar.
May 14, 2013
AHA Council Spotlight: Mary Louise Roberts
By Nike Nivar
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| AHA Councilor, Mary Louise Roberts (Lou) |
To go along with our ongoing AHA Member Spotlight we have introduced an AHA Council Spotlight series featuring short interviews with our elected council officers. Like our membership, the AHA Council is composed of historians with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and stories. We hope this feature will let our membership get to know their elected officials in a different way.
Mary Louise Roberts (Lou) is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is currently a councilor in the AHA’s Professional Division and has been an AHA member since 1987.
Alma mater/s: PhD, Brown University; MA, Sarah Lawrence College; BA, Wesleyan University
Fields of interest: history of women and gender, France, Second World War
When did you first develop an interest in history?
When I was in second grade I developed an avid interest in the Norse explorer Leif Erickson. I edited a small newspaper for my street called the Riverette, and I always made sure to include at least one article about Leif Erickson.
Have your interests changed since graduate school? If so, how?
My research interests in gender and French history have remained consistent. However, I have become fascinated by the intersections of race and gender in the past. In addition, my work has become increasingly transnational.
What projects are you working on currently?
I just finished a book called What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France, which will be published in May by the University of Chicago Press. It concerns relations—in particularly sexual relations—between American GIs and French women during the US military presence in France, 1944–46. I am also editing and translating a book of French memoirs called D-Day through French Eyes: Memoirs of Normandy 1944.
What do you value most about the history profession?
I most value the creative opportunities offered by the profession. In my career, I have been completely free to develop courses and to pursue research in areas which interest me. I also love going to archives and libraries abroad, in my case, in France.
Do you have a favorite AHA annual meeting anecdote you would like to share?
I remember the AHA in Atlanta in 1996. There was a gigantic snowstorm on the Sunday of the conference and the airport shut down. Atlanta, of all places! Graduate students could not afford the hotel, so they slept in rooms with faculty who took pity on them! It was the ultimate nightmare: the AHA meeting that never ends!
Other than history, what are you passionate about?
I am passionate about the fiber arts. I love to design, sew, and knit my clothes.
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May 14, 2013
Writing Tips for Summer Break
By Jennifer Reut
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| Henry David Thoreau’s Cabin at Walden Pond |
A few weeks ago, I ran into a senior colleague who mentioned she was off to Yaddo for seven weeks to finish her book. I was delighted to hear that she’d successfully made the case to Yaddo that historians belong at a writer’s colony, traditionally the dominion of poets, playwrights, and fiction writers. Writing history is both an intensely intellectual and profoundly creative endeavor, but this claim often draws quizzical looks from playwrights and other “traditional” creative writers. Since so many of us turn our attention to our neglected writing projects over the summer, we thought we’d pull together some advice, encouragement, and admonishments to prime the pump.
There is no one-size-fits-all top 10 list that would be useful to every kind of historian writing for every kind of audience. Instead, we brought together some of the more interesting ways of thinking about writing as a process or craft, from overcoming procrastination to the daily routines of successful writers to the way not to write, from the mundane rules of style to the way writing connects to thinking. We hope this gets the writers among you energized to take up that essential task of the historian, good writing, or at least provides a few productive hours of procrastination.
Writing and Thinking
Lynne Hunt’s essay, “How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around),” is a good place for all writers to start and to remember that writing doesn’t arrive fully formed any more than our ideas do.
John McPhee’s recent piece in the New Yorker on first drafts acknowledges the critical importance and the pain inherent in dreadful first draft.
Inside Higher Ed and theChronicle of Higher Education both periodically publish essays and advice on writing tailored for the academic writer. Randall Stevens’ advice on “Turning it Into a Book” could be applied to book reviews, articles, and other kinds of argument-based writing.
Rules and Regulations
The New York Times has a number of writing columns, including the excellent Draft series, but we also like this mix of technical and motivational advice collected here in “Writing Rules!”
Overcoming Obstacles
Anxiety, perfectionism, and writer’s block seem to have a disproportionate role in the writing process and almost every piece of advice on writing we looked at addresses this in some form.
The series in Inside Higher Ed on Overcoming Academic Perfectionism should be read in total, but the post on writing, perfectionism, and procrastination is particularly useful.
“Conquering Writing Anxiety,” also in IHE, talks about obstacles for student writing, but much of the advice can apply to any writer.
A favorite way to indulge in procrastination while ostensibly “curing” it is to read about other writers’ anxieties about writing and how they deal with them.
“13 Tips for Actually Getting Some Writing Done” has many of the familiar rules (write every day, read good writers), but they bear repeating because they work.
How Other People Write
We seem to have an insatiable appetite for insight into how other writers work. The How I Write column in the Daily Beast is devoted to profiles of writers and their working process from fiction, biography, law, and history.
Interviews with writers about their routines are particularly fascinating, perhaps because we hope that we’ll learn some secret that will unlock our own voice. Maria Popova has a written a great rumination on writers and their habits, and her blog, Brain Pickings, is a rabbit hole of thoughtfully curated posts on writing and creativity across the historical and cultural spectrum.
Lastly, as a caution lest we spend too much time looking over the shoulder of other writers, Ben Dolnick warns us to stop reading articles about how other writers work if we want to get anything done.
How Not To Write
There have been many inches (and pixels) of column space devoted to bad academic writing, so we won’t dwell on them. If you’re interested, Stephen Walt’s recent essay in Foreign Policy, “Why is Academic Writing So Bad?” and the many responses are one place to start.
A few years back, the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature held a Bad Writing Contest that included some of the most overheated sentences in academia. The contest, which aimed to “locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article,” only ran for four years but it’s still legendary in some quarters.
Planning to do some writing this summer? Share your tips with us in the comments or on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
May 08, 2013
What We’re Reading: May 9, 2013
By AHA Staff
Today’s What We’re Reading features the latest on the Niall Ferguson controversy, a comparative look at dissertation lengths across disciplines, a vigilante copy editor, and more!
The Niall Ferguson Controversy
Niall Ferguson’s Comments: An Open Letter to the Harvard Community
The Harvard professor apologizes for suggesting that “[John Maynard] Keynes was perhaps indifferent to the long run because he had no children and that he had no children because he was gay.
The Economic Homophobia of Niall Ferguson
Media Matters claims that this is “nothing new” for Ferguson.
Niall Ferguson, Ted Cruz, and the Politics of Masculinity
Garance Franek-Ruta at the Atlantic asks “What happens when our most vexing policy debates turn on the question of quien es mas macho.”
Niall Ferguson’s Real Mistake
Jonah Goldberg, at the National Review, would “like some clarity about what the rules are now. Because I could swear that spelunking into the hidden caves of peoples’ personal lives to shed light—or cast aspersions—on their public personas and preferred policies is the height of scholarship and wisdom these days. ‘The personal is political’ is what my feminist professors taught me in college.”
History in the News
Sequester Impacts Tourism in Washington, DC
Budget issues affect the Mall, museums, and parks in the nation’s capital.
The Nine Cs of Historical Thinking
Tim Lacy adds four Cs and one S to Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke’s “Five Cs of Historical Thinking,” first published in Perspectives in January 2007, and still one of the most popular articles in the Perspectives online archive.
Glowing Landscape Shows River History
Changes in the course of the Willamette River over time make for a stunning visualization.
Teaching and Learning
Length of the Average Dissertation
A terrific data visualization shows that, out of the top 50 majors, history, anthropology, and political science have the highest median page lengths. Contributed by AHA Today reader Phil Katz at the American Alliance of Museums.
Does Blanket “Don’t Go to Graduate School!” Advice Ignore Race and Reality?
Tressie McMillan Cottom for the Chronicle analyzes whether advising students against graduate school reflects a class consciousness, or takes into account the advantages grad school may hold for black students.
You’ll Never Learn!
A look at how our dependence on our mobile phones can be severely undercutting our ability to retain information.
Colleges and Their Priorities
At the American Conservative, Alan Jacobs looks at the rapid and lavish development of campus amenities, and wonders if “a bold college president” will try to distinguish his or her college not by its buildings, but “By the quality of our teaching.”
Wikipedia, Authority and the Free Rider Problem
Confessions of a “selfish Wikipedian” at Peter Webster’s blog.
Fun and Off-beat
American English Dialects
A group of linguists are crowdsourcing data on North American English dialects, via a web-based survey.
Tumbling with the Druids
Jeremy Deller’s giant inflatable Stonehenge at Art Basel Hong Kong is half bounce-house, half monument.
Vigilante Copy Editor
One concerned citizen’s plight to correct punctuation mistakes on the informational placards at the Pratt Institute’s sculpture garden.
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May 08, 2013
AHA Member Spotlight: Joan Neuberger
By Nike Nivar
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| AHA Member, Joan Neuberger |
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our talented and eclectic membership, AHA Today features a regular AHA Member Spotlight series. The members featured in this column have been randomly selected by AHA staff or nominated by fellow AHA members. If you would you like to nominate a colleague for the AHA Member Spotlight, please contact Nike Nivar.
Joan Neuberger is professor of history at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. She has been an AHA member since 2002.
Alma mater/s: PhD, Stanford University; BA, Grinnell College Fields of interest: modern Russian history, film & photography history, visual cultures, cultural politics.
When did you first develop an interest in history?
I studied Russian literature as an undergrad, but when I went to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) as a senior in 1975, I discovered that all my questions were historical questions: how could such a brilliant, warm, hospitable people produce the economic, political, and human rights disaster that was the Soviet Union? But it may go back further: my mother was a natural historian. She knew something about everyone in every branch of our family, for many generations back; she loved to tell their stories and we loved to hear them.
What projects are you working on currently?
I am finishing a book on the political and cultural history of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, a film that was commissioned by Stalin and made during World War II. I’m also involved in several online public history projects. I am the editor of Not Even Past, the UT History Department’s website for making our research available and accessible to people outside the profession. I am co-directing 15 Minute History, an online podcast series for teachers and students and anyone else, produced by our international studies faculty and graduate students. Each podcast is aligned to a required topic in the Texas and National Standards for US and World History. And we are getting ready to launch an interactive public history site for everyone to write a bit of their own history.
Have your interests changed since graduate school? If so, how?
Yes and no. In graduate school I was committed to social history but my dissertation and first book analyzed newspaper articles with a combination of historical and cultural methods; in a way that first book was as much an intellectual history as a social history. Over the course of my career, I’ve included more visual and cultural subjects and methods in my work, but historical questions remain at the center of what I do. I’m interested in understanding cultural production as a political and historical project.
Is there an article, book, movie, blog etc. that you could recommend to fellow AHA members?
In general, I think Russian history is underappreciated for the alternatives it offers to trends derived from west European historiography, especially on political violence, cultural politics, and empire. Louise McReynolds’ Murder Most Russian and David Brandenberger’s Propaganda State in Crisisare two deeply researched studies that change what we thought we knew about key moments when culture and state politics collide. I’m also really excited about work in other fields appearing online. The Appendix, a journal started by four graduate students in our department, Chris Heaney, Ben Breen, Felipe Cruz, and Brian Jones, is experimenting with inventive, new ways to write stories about the past. And the Stanford Spatial History Project and Digital History @ Harvard are posting the kinds of digital history and data visualizations that show us how we can be using computer technologies to produce new kinds of historical data. Kelly O’Neill’s Imperiia Project on the Harvard site is especially exciting and instructive.
What do you value most about the history profession?
I value our standards of evidence. Historians are supposed to make arguments based on evidence, not on speculative analogies or clever wordplay and not as a proof for some artificially devised model. I also value its inclusiveness: anything that happened in the past is fair game for historians and any methodology that produces sound arguments is acceptable.
Do you have a favorite AHA annual meeting anecdote you would like to share?
Last year I got to be on a panel on historical fiction with Geraldine Brooks, a novelist I greatly admire, and Peter Ho Davies, a wonderful novelist I hadn’t known previously. It was a great panel with a terrific discussion afterwards.
Other than history, what are you passionate about?
Long bike rides on our flat Texas country roads. Modernist artists who believed they could change the world for the better if they could just get people to see things in a new way. People who still call themselves feminists, who are re-fighting the battles we thought we won. And, most of all, my two boys. I honestly don’t know how they turned out so well, but they are two of the most delightful, smart, compassionate, funny, irreverent, and interesting young men anyone could wish for.
Any final thoughts?
I’m very grateful to have had a career as a historian at a great public university during a period when the production and sharing of knowledge were still valued. I worry that corporatization really will destroy what was great about our public university system, making it even harder than it is already to make quality higher education available to everyone.
