Today’s What We’re Reading features the history of coffee, the etiquette of responding to a blog post with a peer reviewed article, edible masterpieces, and more!

History in the News
Tough Times to Be Lobbying for History on Capitol Hill
David Austin Walsh for HNN reports from OAH 2013, and discusses the efforts by Lee White, the executive director of the National Coalition for History, to advocate for history and historical research on the Hill.

1066 and All That
The Economist covers the recent debates in Great Britain over proposed changes to the national history curriculum, and compares it to similar debates in other countries.

The Caffeinated History of Coffee
The History Kitchen on PBS Food covers a beverage that’s been written about almost as much as it’s been consumed.

The Historian’s Stories
Robert Caro talks about how the first paragraph of Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August made him want to be a historian.

Humanities and the Job Market
US Humanities PhDs “Produce More Employable Graduates”
Interesting take on the value of our humanities PhDs from across the pond.

The Other Job Search
The “Eunice Williams” series in the Chronicle, detailing a long and difficult search for a faculty position in history, turns to the added complications of the fact that Williams’s partner was looking for a job at the same time.

Peer-Reviewed Article Responding to a Blog Post: What Is the Etiquette?
Mark Goodacre, an associate professor of religion at Duke, covers his experience of having a blog post critiqued in a peer-reviewed journal and asks an important question about blog posts by scholars: “Should we treat them like casual academic gossip, a kind of online senior common room, or is every post fair game for a full, formal response in a peer-reviewed journal?”

Fun and Offbeat
12 Masterpieces Made with Toast
BuzzFeed presents The Art Toast Project, a collection of edible remakes of major works of art.

If I Could Live In Any Decade, It Would Definitely Be The 960s
The Onion offers another satirical piece, but this time it’s a fictitious op-ed by Jonathan Soifer that answers the question, “If you could live in any time period, what would it be?”

This post first appeared on AHA Today.