Finding Women in History - June 24, 2008
This post is a shortened version of the presentation Robert Townsend gave at the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women.
Celebrating Change: Online Databases and Collegiality in the Discipline - May 21, 2008
Some recent observations in the blogosphere about the “conservative” nature of our disciplinary research practices, and an invitation to speak at the JSTOR publisher’s workshop last week, got me thinking about just how far we have traveled over the past 20 years…
Wither H-Net? - September 12, 2007
Mills Kelly over at edwired wonders about the health of H-Net in the Web 2.0 era.
Celebrating 40 Years of Preserving the Past at the LoC - September 11, 2007
Dianne Van Der Reyden offers a fascinating survey of the enormous debt historians owe to librarians and archivists for preserving the materials of the past, both for our use and for the use of future generations of historians. Her essay marks the 40th anniversary of the Preservation Directorate at the Library of Congress…
AP African American History and the Minority Question in History - August 08, 2007
Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed offers a fascinating article about an effort to create AP courses in African American history, and the chilly reception it received from the College Board and university administrators. Here at the AHA we don’t have enough information to assess the merits of the proposal, but the article hones in on some really intriguing ancillary questions for the discipline as a whole.
Pells Bells: The End of Cultural History? - August 02, 2007
In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Pells (a historian at the University of Texas at Austin) charges, “The vast majority of American historians no longer regard American culture—whether high culture or mainstream popular culture—as an essential area of study.” It’s an interesting article, and the Chronicle reports that it is among the most e-mailed for the week, but I think it should be read with considerable caution…
Preserving Blogs - July 16, 2007
In her “On Doing Local History” column in the winter issue of the American Association for State and Local History’s History News, Carol Kammen notes that “we are in the midst of an explosion of personal commentary” through the blogosphere. Just as journals and diaries once recorded people’s daily lives, blogs comment on everyday, local, and national events. Kammen challenges local historical societies to take steps to preserve this valuable material for future researchers.
Feeling the Pressure: A Report from the AAUP Meeting - June 19, 2007
The university presses are enjoying modestly better days financially, but still seem to be struggling through an identity crisis arising from the challenges of online publishing and perceptions in their home institutions. The university presses play a critical role in the dissemination of new history scholarship, so their welfare is of considerable concern to the profession. I came away from the three-day meeting of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) this past weekend feeling better about their immediate prospects.
Time for a Second Opinion: PhDinHistory - June 11, 2007
For anyone interested in the challenges and prospects for doctoral candidates in history, PhDinHistory offers a useful counterpoint to reports generated by the AHA (and this author). The blog casts fresh light on the anxieties and discontents of doctoral students in the discipline, usually supported by a wide-ranging and fresh reading of the available data.
Remembering D-Day - June 06, 2007
Today we honor his bravery and the sacrifices made by the thousands of other American, British, and Canadian troops who took part in Operation Overlord, the Allied offensive which liberated northern France from Nazi rule and set the stage for the final push on Berlin.
NAEP’s History Lesson - May 18, 2007
Back in the early 1990s I represented the Organization of American Historians, where I served as Executive Director, on the Steering Committee to develop the U. S. History Framework for the National Assessment of Education Progress test in history. It was an ambitious effort, bringing historians from higher education institutions and professional associations together with public officials from school boards and departments of education around the country, as well as teachers, union leaders, and private citizens from many other walks of life. Public hearings were held in key cities and hundreds of individuals reviewed the document. Not surprisingly the process was sometimes contentious—a staff committee coordinator once jokingly asked us to leave our guns at the door prior to one meeting—because we were being asked to incorporate not only new scholarship but also new ways of thinking about the test. The process ultimately affirmed that the upcoming NAEP history assessment should recognize the complex and necessarily inclusive nature of the study of history and that the test should strike a balance between the current teaching of U.S. history at that time and how it could be improved in the future. In the end, historians were particularly pleased with the inclusion of indicators to measure key skills for studying history: weighing varying kinds of evidence, for example, or establishing cause and effect relationships, along with more traditional themes and chronological periods. For the NAEP history framework see http://www.nagb.org/pubs/history_06.pdf
This week the U.S. Department of Education released results of the 2006 NAEP test in History, proudly asserting that the nation’s students now know more history than ever before…
High-School History Text Divides Cambodians - May 15, 2007
A new textbook on the history of the Khmer Rouge—the Cambodian Communist faction which murdered an estimated 1.7 million people during its four-year reign of terror in the late 1970s—cannot be used as a stand-alone reader for high-school students, says the government in Phnom Penh. Instead, the book will be assigned as a supplementary source and used by the Cambodian Ministry of Education to produce a less controversial work on the same topic. As reported in the Washington Post.
Google Books: What’s Not to Like? - April 30, 2007
The Google Books project promises to open up a vast amount of older literature, but a closer look at the material on the site raises real worries about how well it can fulfill that promise and what its real objectives might be.
Over the past three months I spent a fair amount of time on the site as part of a research project on the early history of the profession, and from a researcher’s point of view I have to say the results were deeply disconcerting. Yes, the site offers up a number of hard-to-find works from the early 20th century with instant access to the text. And yes, for some books it offers a useful keyword search function for finding a reference that might not be in the index. But my experience suggests the project is falling far short of its central promise of exposing the literature of the world, and is instead piling mistake upon mistake with little evidence of basic quality control. The problems I encountered fit into three broad categories—the quality of the scans is decidedly mixed, the information about the books (the “metadata” in info-speak) is often erroneous, and the public domain is curiously restricted.
Gettysburg Foundation Flooded with Greenbacks - April 18, 2007
Huzzah! The Gettysburg Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to the preservation of America’s most-hallowed battlefield, is awash in cash. Two months ago, the organization announced that its “Campaign to Preserve Gettysburg” has raised more than $93 million dollars, prompting it to boost its overall fundraising goal to an eye-popping $125 million.
The American Tax Tradition - April 12, 2007
Although T.S. Eliot wasn’t thinking about the federal tax deadline when he described April as “the cruelest month,” his words have a special resonance for those of us who will spend the next few nights chained to our desks with a calculator in one hand and a Form 1040 in the other. The first federal income tax in American history was enacted on August 5, 1861…
Clinton Librarians Accused of Stonewalling Record Requests - March 26, 2007
A number of reporters, researchers, and Republicans are frustrated that their requests for documents from the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library.
A Clear and Presentist Danger - March 20, 2007
Harvard University professor of psychology Daniel Gilbert recently published Stumbling on Happiness, an informative look at how the human brain works, or, more specifically, how well (or rather, poorly) the brain predicts which future occurrences will make us happy.
Gilbert argues that one of the reasons our mind has a difficult time predicting what will make us happy in the future is that old historians’ foe: presentism.
AAUP Calls for Cautious Approach to Open Access - March 07, 2007
In a statement released on February 28, 2007, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) outlined its position on the problematic—and often contentious—issue of providing open access to scholarly information, and declared that what was needed at this juncture was careful experimentation and development and not any risky plunging straight into “pure open access.”
Article of Interest: “Baghdad Day to Day: Librarian’s Journal” - February 07, 2007
Today’s New York Times Arts section featured an article about Saad Eskander, a librarian and archivist in Iraq. His fascinating online diary entries, hosted by the British Library, “detail the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq’s central library open, preserving the surviving archives and books and, oh yes, staying alive.” Read the whole article, “Baghdad Day to Day: Librarian’s Journal,” on the New York Times web site.
Born to be a president - December 28, 2006
A hundred-and-fifty years ago today, an obscure Presbyterian minister named Joseph Wilson welcomed the arrival of his third child, Thomas Woodrow. As he cradled the infant in his arms, Reverend Wilson must have wondered what his son would be when he grew up…
History of Thanksgiving - November 23, 2006
Get out the cornucopia; it’s Thanksgiving! After you’ve had your fill of turkey (or tofurky for the vegetarians), gather around the computer and visit some informative sites on the History of Thanksgiving.
Got Books? - November 15, 2006
As historians, we love our books. Two interesting new reports provide useful information on how and where books are being distributed.
Wikipedia: Valuable Resource or Abyss of Misinformation? - October 27, 2006
The Internet is often the first place many students go when gathering research for a paper, project, or other class assignment. And while there are many excellent and invaluable resources available online, the quality of one site is still under debate: Wikipedia.
Historians are Humorless, Suggests New Study - February 28, 2006
From a carefully researched (if possibly contentious) quantitative investigation of ephemera affixed to office doors, University of Texas anthropologist Karl Petruso draws the inference, inter alia, that history faculty could be—if evidence from one anomalous individual is ignored for the purposes of statistical rigor—”consigned to the depths of humorlessness.”
Petruso created what he calls the Humor/Pedagogy index, Ψ, which is calculated as the ratio between the number of humorous items, h and pedagogic items, p, that are displayed on a faculty member’s office door…
Is History Coming to an End? - July 14, 2005
Forget Fukuyama; this is more serious. History as we know it—or, to be more precise, the historical record as we know it and on which we must base our reconstructions—appears to be dying, argue some historians and technologists, who view with increasing consternation the growing mountains of unsorted electronic records accumulating at the portals of the National Archives and other document repositories.