Tim's Light Reading (3-1-2012): The Information Age, ISIH, Ron Paul, Religious Freedom, And The Minds Of Children

1 (of 5). The History of the Information Age

One could do worse for primary and secondary intellectual history sources on "the information age" (depending on how defines that age) than those listed in this "FiveBooks Interview" with Nicholas Carr. Three of the books Carr recommends are, in fact, histories of some sort. Standage's The Victorian Internet is number one on Carr's list.


2. The Mind of Ron Paul

I noted in the other post that I wasn't interested in writing any more about Rick Santorum. But I didn't promise I wouldn't offer something on history and another contemporary politician. This piece on Ron Paul, for instance, is different. Authored by David Halbfinger for The New York Times, the title signals its historical bent: "Ron Paul’s Flinty Worldview Was Forged in Early Family Life." Here's an excerpt from the articles opening passages:

His father and mother worked tirelessly running a small dairy, and young Ron showed the same drive — delivering The Pittsburgh Press, mowing lawns, scooping ice cream as a soda jerk. He also embraced their politics, an instinctive conservatism that viewed Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman as villains and blamed Democrats for getting America into wars.

As a young doctor in training, dissecting cadavers or practicing surgery on dogs, he would tell all who would listen about how the country was headed down the wrong path, about the urgency of a strict gold standard and about the dangers of allowing government too much power over people’s lives.

“Once that got ingrained, that became his religion,” said his brother Jerrold, a minister and a psychotherapist. “He says he preaches the ‘gospel of freedom’ — that’s the money quote. Politics became his crusade.”

And the article's thesis: Supporters and detractors often marvel at his consistency since entering politics in 1974, citing it as evidence of either levelheadedness or lunacy. It contrasts sharply with some of the rivals he is trailing in the Republican primaries, including Mitt Romney, who is often accused of ideological flip-flopping.

As the article progresses you learn more about the books he read (e.g. Atlas Shrugged, Doctor Zhivago, The Road to Serfdom), the family roots of his ideology, and his relationship with the Birchers.


3. The ISIH Annual Meeting for 2012

Here's the CFP for the ISIH's 2012 meeting. Here's the title: "The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective." Very cool. And the meeting is on U.S. soil!---at Princeton University. Cool. Too bad my travel funds are uncertain for this year because I'd love to go and talk about the great books as liberal learning in a transnational perspective (i.e. jump start my next book project!). Here are the first two sentences from the CFP:

The ideal of liberal education, long a mainstay of Western ideals of higher education, is suddenly under attack the world over. In country after country, the idea that higher education should aim primarily at the cultivation of the intellect and sensibility rather than at preparation for a particular vocation is being swept vigorously aside by more exclusively utilitarian understandings.


4. The Freedoms of Individuals v. The Freedoms of Religious Institutions

Janine Giordano Drake applies historical thinking to the topic at Religion in American History. Here's the big question: Can Catholic social service agencies have it both ways? Can a private, religious organization both manage social services on behalf of the public and also be immune from the checks and balances of that public which invested them with that worldly power?

And here's a taste of her conclusion: We’ve been through all this before. A hundred years ago, Catholics were protesting the overreaching power of Protestant schools, hospitals, and insurance companies in the civic realm. Protestants maintained that this was their “public witness,” even though Catholics held that nobody had the right to a public witness which overshadowed the right of others to follow their alternate Christian conscience.

Check it out.


5. The Minds Of Children and the Role Ideology in Children's Libraries

Writing for The Millions, Alan Levinovitz dissects the issues around the late twentieth-century, and early twenty-first, censorship of certain children's books. The occasion for the article is tomorrow's film opening of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. In the course of reading the article I learned that Tim LaHaye published an iteration of his "Left Behind" for children (of which Levinotvitz rightly observes that the book has never been the object of a censorship drive by Left-leaning parents).

Tim's Light Reading (2-23-2012): Beck-Inspired Flaming, Documentaries, Instrumental Universities, The Market-Democracy Relationship, and New Works of Interest

[Updated: 8:40 am]

1 (of 6). "The Culture Wars are Real": Beck's Minions Attack John Fea

You may or may not know that Glenn Beck has a "news" website called The Blaze. I didn't---until Messiah College professor John Fea, author of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, recently relayed a story about being featured on the Beck site.

The Blaze feature, authored by Billy Hallowell, brought attention to Fea for a line in a recent Patheos editorial wherein Fea opined that "Obama may be the most explicitly Christian president in American history." Hallowell's story has garnered 848 comments (as of 3 pm yesterday), and Fea has reported receiving nasty e-mails and voicemails. As an aside, I was somewhat surprised at the attention Fea received because, beyond the title, Hallowell's article isn't particularly incendiary.

I forward this for your consideration because, well, our relatively quiet blog community might garner this kind of attention at some point. It seems logical since we both write about recent political issues (and candidates), and receive some popular attention from moderates and lefty types. Granted, that attention comes from thoughtful corners. But I wouldn't be surprised if a rhetorical bomb-thrower from the right doesn't hit us soon.


2. "We’re Living in a Golden Age of Documentary Filmmaking"

This was the title of a recent Slate article by Eric Hynes. Hynes focuses on the short-shrift this golden age is receiving from the Academy Awards, but I agree fully. I particularly enjoy the work of Errol Morris. His The Fog of War comes up in the article, and I use that documentary religiously in my twentieth-century American survey courses (as well as The Weather Underground, which complements Fog nicely). The point of Hynes's article is that we have lots of screening choices.


3. Perceived Social Rank and Cognitive Ability

Check out this summary of study by a team of Cal Tech researchers. Here are some relevant passages:

Our cognitive abilities and decision-making skills can be dramatically hindered in social settings where we feel that we are being ranked or assigned a status level, such as classrooms and work environments. ...The finding flies in the face of long-held ideas about intelligence and cognition that regard IQ as a stable, predictive measure of mental horsepower.

"This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed," says Steven Quartz, professor of philosophy at Caltech and one of the authors of the new study. ..."This suggests that the idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other."

I'm still sorting all of this out, but I'd say this study might have something profound to say to intellectual historians---particularly those whose work covers class-based societies (i.e. all of us). Cue the study summary:

Throughout the 20th century, IQ was used in different arenas as a way of sorting or classifying people into niches. Because people believed it to be a more abstract notion of cognitive ability, it was thought to have strong predictive validity of mental capabilities even from age six. But IQ was always measured in social isolation. "That reflects a long tradition of intellectual history, of considering rationality and cognition to be this isolated process," Quartz says. "But one of the things that we're learning more and more in social neuroscience is the role of our social contexts and the social adaptation of the brain." Understanding the role social context plays and its differential impact on the brain may ultimately help educators and others to design more effective learning environments.

And last but not least:

The present study found some unexpected trends, including the tendency for female subjects to be more affected than males by the implicit signaling of social status during the test.


4. Economically Instrumental Universities

USIH friend and public intellectual(!) Ethan Schrum [right] recently penned an op-ed for the Richmond Times-Dispatch that chastises the Obama administration for a having a narrow view of the role of higher education in recent American history. Here's Schrum's conclusion:

Obama, by contrast, told students they were at Michigan to get skills and training for building their personal finances and the American economy. He gave no indication that a student might be at the university to be formed as a person, as a thinker and communicator — and as a global citizen.

Obama's narrow, short-sighted rhetoric for American higher education puts our universities in peril. We must wake up to the possibility that universities might be living on borrowed moral capital and begin framing higher education policy in ways consistent with our universities' noble traditions, before it is too late.

Sure, this is a long-running problem that pre-dates Obama's recent speech. But the president deserves a tongue-lashing for using the nation's bully pulpit to promote a one-sided, and frankly erroneous, view of higher education. Although I understand the needs of the campaign trail ("It's the economy, stupid!"), Obama could've been more honest.


5. A Forthcoming Work of Possible Interest

(a) Bernard Hodgson (forthcoming), "Democratic Agency and the Market Machine," Journal of Business Ethics.

[From PhilPapers] "The alliance of pure market economies with democratic polities has traditionally been a problematic one. It is argued that orthodox theoretical conceptualizations of market behaviour and the application of such theory to our communal lives have entrenched an incoherent alliance. In particular, the reductive mechanism characteristic of both neo-classical economic theory and its deployment in our socio-economic order has severely undermined the telic agency required for the autonomy or self-rule definitive of an authentic democratic order. Such reduction is observed to function through the disabling of the cognitive capacity of consumers and by disempowering the agency of workers such that coercion is misconceived as freely agreed contract."


6. From My OAH-RSO Feed: New Books and Articles of Interest

This month's RSO is loaded with intellectual history---more than I've sampled below. Be sure to check out entry (i)!

(a) Barry, John M., Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012).

(b) Bromell, Nick, "A `Voice from the Enslaved': The Origins of Frederick Douglass's Political Philosophy of Democracy," American Literary History, 23 (Winter 2011), 697-723.

(c)Fischer, David Hackett, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

(d) Goodman, Joyce, "The Gendered Politics of Historical Writing in History of Education," History of Education (London), 41 (Jan. 2012), 9-24.

(e) Laats, Adam, "Monkeys, Bibles, and the Little Red Schoolhouse: Atlanta's School Battles in the Scopes Era," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 95 (Fall 2011), 335-55.

(f) Lee, Maurice S., Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

(g) Lee, Michael J., "American Revelations: Biblical Interpretation and Criticism in America, circa 1700-1860" (PhD Diss, University of Notre Dame, 2009).

(h) Matteson, John, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012).

(i) Murphy, Paul V., The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

(j) Powell, Tara, The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).

(k) Rose, Anne C., "The Invention of Uncertainty in American Psychology: Intellectual Conflict and Rhetorical Resolution, 1890-1930," History of Psychology, 14 (Nov. 2011), 356-82.

(l) Szalay, Michael, "Ralph Ellison's Unfinished Second Skin," American Literary History, 23 (Winter 2011), 795-827.

Tim's Light Reading (6/16/2011)

1. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History

This is the title of a short (189 page) new book by Derrick P. Alridge. Here's a review by Jon N. Hale, assistant education professor at Muskingum University. The review is quite informative, and here is Hale's conclusion (bolds mine):

Alridge provides a very important analysis and delineation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ educational thought. This book is critical for foundations of education scholars who present the traditional dichotomous Du Bois-Washington relationship that is too often used to represent black education ideologies during the Jim Crow era. This book is also important for historians interested in continuing to explore the tenets and nature of the Long Civil Rights Movement, especially the centrality of education as a critical site of racial, cultural, and ideological contestation. Beyond these specific academic circles, Alridge is an articulate author who engages primary sources and the socio-political context of his subject in a way that is meaningful, accessible, and informative to all readers. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois is a well-written and supported text that makes important contributions to the field of education and history.

2. When It's Good to be Decanonized and Desacralized

Marshall Berman argues, in Dissent, that the fall of communism was the best thing to happen to Marx and Engels. I agree. [Note: The essay is actually "the introduction to [a new] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto published [this past] March."]

3. Science as Cultural Integrative Force in U.S. History

Check out David A. Hollinger's take on this: "The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States between the Two World Wars," Pacific Historical Review, 80 (May 2011), 211-30.

4. The Faulty Mind of An Historian

Ta-Nehisi Coates is reading Shelby Foote's trilogy on the Civil War. Having learned more, however, about Foote's philosophy of history regarding the Civil War, Coates (properly) faults Foote's "white romanticism." Here's the conclusion of Coates' post on the subject:

[Foote] gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

5. FYI: TOC for the Forthcoming American Studies (50 3/4, June 2011)

- “One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue” - Kristin Matthews
- “When Modernism Was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-Era America” - Shannan Clark
- “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel” - Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
- “Howard Fast’s American Revolution” - Neil York
- "Black Presidents, Gay Marriages, and Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama" - Judy Rohrer

From here.

6. A New Journal and Society

There is now an "International Society for the Study of Skepticism." Its first journal, appropriately titled International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, came out last month. Here is the society's "about us" page.

7. Deweyan Playground Rhymes

Here's a little Thursday humor for you.

Tim's Light Reading (6/16/2011)

1. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History

This is the title of a short (189 page) new book by Derrick P. Alridge. Here's a review by Jon N. Hale, assistant education professor at Muskingum University. The review is quite informative, and here is Hale's conclusion (bolds mine):

Alridge provides a very important analysis and delineation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ educational thought. This book is critical for foundations of education scholars who present the traditional dichotomous Du Bois-Washington relationship that is too often used to represent black education ideologies during the Jim Crow era. This book is also important for historians interested in continuing to explore the tenets and nature of the Long Civil Rights Movement, especially the centrality of education as a critical site of racial, cultural, and ideological contestation. Beyond these specific academic circles, Alridge is an articulate author who engages primary sources and the socio-political context of his subject in a way that is meaningful, accessible, and informative to all readers. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois is a well-written and supported text that makes important contributions to the field of education and history.

2. When It's Good to be Decanonized and Desacralized

Marshall Berman argues, in Dissent, that the fall of communism was the best thing to happen to Marx and Engels. I agree. [Note: The essay is actually "the introduction to [a new] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto published [this past] March."]

3. Science as Cultural Integrative Force in U.S. History

Check out David A. Hollinger's take on this: "The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States between the Two World Wars," Pacific Historical Review, 80 (May 2011), 211-30.

4. The Faulty Mind of An Historian

Ta-Nehisi Coates is reading Shelby Foote's trilogy on the Civil War. Having learned more, however, about Foote's philosophy of history regarding the Civil War, Coates (properly) faults Foote's "white romanticism." Here's the conclusion of Coates' post on the subject:

[Foote] gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

5. FYI: TOC for the Forthcoming American Studies (50 3/4, June 2011)

- “One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue” - Kristin Matthews
- “When Modernism Was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-Era America” - Shannan Clark
- “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel” - Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
- “Howard Fast’s American Revolution” - Neil York
- "Black Presidents, Gay Marriages, and Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama" - Judy Rohrer

From here.

6. A New Journal and Society

There is now an "International Society for the Study of Skepticism." Its first journal, appropriately titled International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, came out last month. Here is the society's "about us" page.

7. Deweyan Playground Rhymes

Here's a little Thursday humor for you.

Tim's Light Reading (5/19/2011)

1 (of 6 total). The 1960s: Good or Bad for America?

Charles Kaiser argues for good in this brief CNN article. Among many designations, others have called it "The End of Modern America" and the "Age of Contradiction." Here's the opening of Kaiser's piece (bolds mine):

----------------------------------------------------------------
"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America." -- Molly Ivins, great American newspaperwoman

Forty years after they ended, the 1960s remain the most controversial decade of the 20th century. Either you believe that they destroyed America, or they cured it.

Put me down as a fervent believer in their success as a cure. ...
----------------------------------------------------------------

And these passages will be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians:

----------------------------------------------------------------
A significant factor in all of this progress was the fact that organized religion -- and all of the prejudices and superstitions it embodied -- was at one of its lowest ebbs in our history.

That's the social and political side. Then there's the cultural side.

The liberation that was occurring at the polling places and universities was mirrored elsewhere...

The Vietnam War was the decade's greatest tragedy. ...But those Americans did not die in vain -- because of their sacrifice, the Vietnam syndrome was born.

Wrongly maligned by neoconservatives [read: conservative intellectuals], this was the syndrome that prevented us from repeating anything like that on a similar scale for more than 30 years -- until George W. Bush and his henchmen embarked upon the equally disastrous and unnecessary invasion of Iraq.

The idealism embodied by John and Robert Kennedy and the Martin Luther King Jr. inspired a whole generation to change the way America was governed, and how millions of Americans would get to live their lives.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Sure, it's just an opinion piece. But it references intellectual history topics, and takes strong stand (e.g. "cured") in terms of pre-1960s wrongs. When I composed this post Kaiser's article had 265 comments and 2661 Facebook 'likes'.

And if you think that interpretations of the Sixties are not still relevant, see this. Apparently the leadership of a institution with roots in antiquity was deeply corrupted by the "tumult and change" of the decade.


2. New in Paperback

Andrew Hartman's Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) will be out in paperback this coming December. For the unfamiliar, Andrew's book is an intellectual and political history of American schools during the era of John Dewey's influence (both directly and indirectly) and the early Cold War.


3. JHI Articles of Interest

The April 2011 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas (Volume 72, no. 2) has two articles that may be of special interest to USIH readers:

(a) "William James’s Ethical Republic," by TRYGVE THRONTVEIT

Few have systematically analyzed William James's ethics. But examining James's moral philosophy in light of his epistemology and metaphysics demonstrates its coherence and robustness. James provided a metaphor succinctly expressing his ethics in terms of its purpose: an "ethical republic." No fixed set of principles, the ethical republic was an ideal of private and public interests converging through widespread commitment to three virtues: intellectual experimentalism, historical wisdom, and empathy. These sustained democracy as James understood it: a culture of deliberative discourse facilitating negotiation and organization of values. Recognizing deliberation's power and limits, James's ethics have implications for modern-day interdependent societies.

(b) "How Old Are Modern Rights? On the Lockean Roots of Contemporary Human Rights Discourse," by S. ADAM SEAGRAVE

This article critically assesses three recent attempts by Brian Tierney to extend the historical analysis he provides in The Idea of Natural Rights to contemporary human rights discourse. These attempts tend to exaggerate the conceptual continuity between early medieval "rights" and those claimed in contemporary contexts. In particular, Tierney's interpretation of Locke as a central example of historical continuity in rights thinking largelyf misses Locke's distinctive contribution to contemporary ideas of human rights. It is, rather, in Locke's writings that human rights first become recognizable to the modern eye.


4. Debating Obama's Political Legacy

Cornell West thinks Obama will be remembered as the "black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs... black puppet of corporate plutocrats...and [proud]...head of the American killing machine.” Ta-Nehisi Coates disagrees.


5. Rock 'n' Roll and USIH

No one I know attended this NYC conference on Ellen Willis. But Michael Bérubé was there, and he reproduced his paper at Crooked Timber for your enjoyment and pleaasure.


6. A Personal Note

A dear friend of mine is leaving academia. I've only gotten to see him sporadically over the past 3-4 years, and I didn't know him as well as I would've liked when we had more time together in Chicago during the late 1990s. He is leaving higher education for a private school in a major metropolitan area. Read his reflections on the process that has led him to this point. It's heartbreaking, though this particular post looks mostly at the lay of the land in higher education. I particularly hope that senior professors will read it, perhaps in conjunction with this article from The Nation that has received some positive play. Best of luck to "Werner Herzog's Bear" as he embarks on a new adventure!

Tim's Light Reading (5/19/2011)

1 (of 6 total). The 1960s: Good or Bad for America?

Charles Kaiser argues for good in this brief CNN article. Among many designations, others have called it "The End of Modern America" and the "Age of Contradiction." Here's the opening of Kaiser's piece (bolds mine):

----------------------------------------------------------------
"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America." -- Molly Ivins, great American newspaperwoman

Forty years after they ended, the 1960s remain the most controversial decade of the 20th century. Either you believe that they destroyed America, or they cured it.

Put me down as a fervent believer in their success as a cure. ...
----------------------------------------------------------------

And these passages will be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians:

----------------------------------------------------------------
A significant factor in all of this progress was the fact that organized religion -- and all of the prejudices and superstitions it embodied -- was at one of its lowest ebbs in our history.

That's the social and political side. Then there's the cultural side.

The liberation that was occurring at the polling places and universities was mirrored elsewhere...

The Vietnam War was the decade's greatest tragedy. ...But those Americans did not die in vain -- because of their sacrifice, the Vietnam syndrome was born.

Wrongly maligned by neoconservatives [read: conservative intellectuals], this was the syndrome that prevented us from repeating anything like that on a similar scale for more than 30 years -- until George W. Bush and his henchmen embarked upon the equally disastrous and unnecessary invasion of Iraq.

The idealism embodied by John and Robert Kennedy and the Martin Luther King Jr. inspired a whole generation to change the way America was governed, and how millions of Americans would get to live their lives.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Sure, it's just an opinion piece. But it references intellectual history topics, and takes strong stand (e.g. "cured") in terms of pre-1960s wrongs. When I composed this post Kaiser's article had 265 comments and 2661 Facebook 'likes'.

And if you think that interpretations of the Sixties are not still relevant, see this. Apparently the leadership of a institution with roots in antiquity was deeply corrupted by the "tumult and change" of the decade.


2. New in Paperback

Andrew Hartman's Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) will be out in paperback this coming December. For the unfamiliar, Andrew's book is an intellectual and political history of American schools during the era of John Dewey's influence (both directly and indirectly) and the early Cold War.


3. JHI Articles of Interest

The April 2011 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas (Volume 72, no. 2) has two articles that may be of special interest to USIH readers:

(a) "William James’s Ethical Republic," by TRYGVE THRONTVEIT

Few have systematically analyzed William James's ethics. But examining James's moral philosophy in light of his epistemology and metaphysics demonstrates its coherence and robustness. James provided a metaphor succinctly expressing his ethics in terms of its purpose: an "ethical republic." No fixed set of principles, the ethical republic was an ideal of private and public interests converging through widespread commitment to three virtues: intellectual experimentalism, historical wisdom, and empathy. These sustained democracy as James understood it: a culture of deliberative discourse facilitating negotiation and organization of values. Recognizing deliberation's power and limits, James's ethics have implications for modern-day interdependent societies.

(b) "How Old Are Modern Rights? On the Lockean Roots of Contemporary Human Rights Discourse," by S. ADAM SEAGRAVE

This article critically assesses three recent attempts by Brian Tierney to extend the historical analysis he provides in The Idea of Natural Rights to contemporary human rights discourse. These attempts tend to exaggerate the conceptual continuity between early medieval "rights" and those claimed in contemporary contexts. In particular, Tierney's interpretation of Locke as a central example of historical continuity in rights thinking largelyf misses Locke's distinctive contribution to contemporary ideas of human rights. It is, rather, in Locke's writings that human rights first become recognizable to the modern eye.


4. Debating Obama's Political Legacy

Cornell West thinks Obama will be remembered as the "black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs... black puppet of corporate plutocrats...and [proud]...head of the American killing machine.” Ta-Nehisi Coates disagrees.


5. Rock 'n' Roll and USIH

No one I know attended this NYC conference on Ellen Willis. But Michael Bérubé was there, and he reproduced his paper at Crooked Timber for your enjoyment and pleaasure.


6. A Personal Note

A dear friend of mine is leaving academia. I've only gotten to see him sporadically over the past 3-4 years, and I didn't know him as well as I would've liked when we had more time together in Chicago during the late 1990s. He is leaving higher education for a private school in a major metropolitan area. Read his reflections on the process that has led him to this point. It's heartbreaking, though this particular post looks mostly at the lay of the land in higher education. I particularly hope that senior professors will read it, perhaps in conjunction with this article from The Nation that has received some positive play. Best of luck to "Werner Herzog's Bear" as he embarks on a new adventure!

A truly canonical U.S. history list

A little over a month ago, I posted what I claimed was a canonical list for U.S. history after 1800 and asked readers for their feedback. The suggestions and questions were good, challenging the parameters of the list, questioning the lack of certain subspecialities (particularly diplomatic history), and offering books for addition and deletion.

But my overall take-away from that exercise was that the list was still too large. There was too much room for interest and specialization, for taste and for the happenstance of reading. The only way to get a truly canonical list--by which I realized I meant a list that no one could possibly quibble with, that everyone should have read, that provides paradigmatic exemplars for multiple fields--would be to shorten the list. At first I thought fifty books would be enough, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought that fifty books still left too much room for idiosyncrasy. So I've shortened the list to thirty books, added some that I inexplicably left off before (such as William Appleman Williams) and deleting a whole bunch more.

The general criterion for inclusion on the list is that it is ground-breaking and paradigm creating--that all the books written after the canonical book would feel the subtle force of its magnetic field. Roll, Jordan, Roll might be the quintessential example of the kind of book I have in mind. Even though it is now old and much has been written since then, I don't think that many would claim that its paradigm has been overturned and even those who want to move beyond it must still contend with it. That is a canonical book. There are some others that are not as clear. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson is a less clear example. On the one hand, the force of book is still felt in the way that people understand the antebellum United States, so much so that almost any discussion of the period implicitly begins with assumptions arising from his work. On the other hand, his inattention to women, African Americans, Indians, and his real disinterest in the Whigs, has become so egregious that it is hard to turn to the book as a credible secondary source anymore. Fortunately, the still salient parts of his paradigm have been updated in a new synthesis by Sean Wilentz in The Rise of Democracy, so The Age of Jackson can be dropped from the list.

There are some other questionable choices that I am not entirely comfortable with: contrary to the suggestion of Dan Wickberg, I've left off Hofstadter's Age of Reform. Can I justify this? I'm not sure. My impression is that Hofstadter is widely viewed as wrong in his separation of populism, progressivism, and the New Deal from one another, and in his connection of each with a portion of the population at each movement's apex. I think (and I could be wrong) that Rodgers's book, Atlantic Crossings, has superseded Hofstadter's, by showing how each movement fed into the next and by placing this moment in a trans-Atlantic context. I also could have put on James Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory, so I'm not entirely comfortable with the choice.

The resulting list is somewhat odd, not aiming at chronological coverage, exactly, and not attempting to incorporate all subdisciplines, but simply attempting to come up with thirty books that everyone should have read because of their ability to shape historical writing after them. This is a list of books that a graduate student approaching comps would have heard of and probably would think, based on his or her other reading, that they should have read. But if this fictional graduate student's training was anything like mine, he or she will not have read these books because the books most often assigned in seminars are newer books that are still responding to the canonical books without quite overcoming them.

Since this is supposed to be a fun(?) historiographical exercise, let's keep the rules in place from last time. Whether you think my list is totally wrong-headed, flawed in the particulars, or spot on, feel free to register your thoughts in the comments section. But if you suggest additions, suggest an equal number of deletions. And, of course, we have to keep in mind that there is a certain absurdity to all of this (of which I am aware). As Joe Posnanski pointed out in an article on what he called "The Willie Mays Hall of Fame" (a truly brilliant piece, by the way), in coming up with such a list the principles of selection are still idiosyncratic and, when we are forced to articulate them, verge on the ridiculous. So now that I have undermined the exercise, here is the really, truly, super, duper canonical list in U.S. History!!

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2007).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (2005)
Eugene D Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988)
Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood (1977)
Dave Roedeger, The Wages of Whiteness, Rev. Ed. (2007)
Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1989).
Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998)
David Blight, Race and Reunion (2001)
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1995)
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991).
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (1982)
Robert H Wiebe, The Search for Order (1968)
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 3rd ed. (1974)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings (1998)
T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place for Grace (1981)
Warren Susman, Culture as History
Michael Kazin, Populist Persuasion (1995)
George Chauncey, Gay New York (1994)
John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 2nd ed. (1992)
Henry F. May, End of American Innocence, Columbia University Press Morningside edition (1992).
Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (1990)
John Dower, War without Mercy (1986)
Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority (2006)
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, Rev. ed. (2008)
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996).
Bruce Schulman, The Seventies (2001)
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors (2001)
William Appleman Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959)

A truly canonical U.S. history list

A little over a month ago, I posted what I claimed was a canonical list for U.S. history after 1800 and asked readers for their feedback. The suggestions and questions were good, challenging the parameters of the list, questioning the lack of certain subspecialities (particularly diplomatic history), and offering books for addition and deletion.

But my overall take-away from that exercise was that the list was still too large. There was too much room for interest and specialization, for taste and for the happenstance of reading. The only way to get a truly canonical list--by which I realized I meant a list that no one could possibly quibble with, that everyone should have read, that provides paradigmatic exemplars for multiple fields--would be to shorten the list. At first I thought fifty books would be enough, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought that fifty books still left too much room for idiosyncrasy. So I've shortened the list to thirty books, added some that I inexplicably left off before (such as William Appleman Williams) and deleting a whole bunch more.

The general criterion for inclusion on the list is that it is ground-breaking and paradigm creating--that all the books written after the canonical book would feel the subtle force of its magnetic field. Roll, Jordan, Roll might be the quintessential example of the kind of book I have in mind. Even though it is now old and much has been written since then, I don't think that many would claim that its paradigm has been overturned and even those who want to move beyond it must still contend with it. That is a canonical book. There are some others that are not as clear. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson is a less clear example. On the one hand, the force of book is still felt in the way that people understand the antebellum United States, so much so that almost any discussion of the period implicitly begins with assumptions arising from his work. On the other hand, his inattention to women, African Americans, Indians, and his real disinterest in the Whigs, has become so egregious that it is hard to turn to the book as a credible secondary source anymore. Fortunately, the still salient parts of his paradigm have been updated in a new synthesis by Sean Wilentz in The Rise of Democracy, so The Age of Jackson can be dropped from the list.

There are some other questionable choices that I am not entirely comfortable with: contrary to the suggestion of Dan Wickberg, I've left off Hofstadter's Age of Reform. Can I justify this? I'm not sure. My impression is that Hofstadter is widely viewed as wrong in his separation of populism, progressivism, and the New Deal from one another, and in his connection of each with a portion of the population at each movement's apex. I think (and I could be wrong) that Rodgers's book, Atlantic Crossings, has superseded Hofstadter's, by showing how each movement fed into the next and by placing this moment in a trans-Atlantic context. I also could have put on James Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory, so I'm not entirely comfortable with the choice.

The resulting list is somewhat odd, not aiming at chronological coverage, exactly, and not attempting to incorporate all subdisciplines, but simply attempting to come up with thirty books that everyone should have read because of their ability to shape historical writing after them. This is a list of books that a graduate student approaching comps would have heard of and probably would think, based on his or her other reading, that they should have read. But if this fictional graduate student's training was anything like mine, he or she will not have read these books because the books most often assigned in seminars are newer books that are still responding to the canonical books without quite overcoming them.

Since this is supposed to be a fun(?) historiographical exercise, let's keep the rules in place from last time. Whether you think my list is totally wrong-headed, flawed in the particulars, or spot on, feel free to register your thoughts in the comments section. But if you suggest additions, suggest an equal number of deletions. And, of course, we have to keep in mind that there is a certain absurdity to all of this (of which I am aware). As Joe Posnanski pointed out in an article on what he called "The Willie Mays Hall of Fame" (a truly brilliant piece, by the way), in coming up with such a list the principles of selection are still idiosyncratic and, when we are forced to articulate them, verge on the ridiculous. So now that I have undermined the exercise, here is the really, truly, super, duper canonical list in U.S. History!!

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2007).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (2005)
Eugene D Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988)
Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood (1977)
Dave Roedeger, The Wages of Whiteness, Rev. Ed. (2007)
Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1989).
Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998)
David Blight, Race and Reunion (2001)
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1995)
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991).
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (1982)
Robert H Wiebe, The Search for Order (1968)
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 3rd ed. (1974)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings (1998)
T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place for Grace (1981)
Warren Susman, Culture as History
Michael Kazin, Populist Persuasion (1995)
George Chauncey, Gay New York (1994)
John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 2nd ed. (1992)
Henry F. May, End of American Innocence, Columbia University Press Morningside edition (1992).
Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (1990)
John Dower, War without Mercy (1986)
Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority (2006)
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, Rev. ed. (2008)
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996).
Bruce Schulman, The Seventies (2001)
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors (2001)
William Appleman Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959)

Tim's Light Reading (11/05/2010)

I offer the following as a break from our (excellent!) long posts reflecting on conference matters:

1 (of 5). The Problem of Political Philosophy: Only Links to Offer

Bookforum's excellent Omnivore blog held forth on "The Problem of Political Philosophy" in a post a few days ago. If you're not familiar with Omnivore, its posts are constructed as carnivalesque clouds of links on specific themes. Each link is usually a full story, opinion piece, or book review. My favorite link in this post is to a paper by Francesca Pasquali that brings together political theory, political philosophy, and public philosophy. The last has been a concern to me for some time because it links the work of Walter Lippmann and Mortimer J. Adler. Here's a provocative excerpt from Pasquali's abstract (bolds mine):

Public philosophy detects the shared values grounding political practices and employs them to develop criteria for guiding policy decisions. It is attentive to empirical data and constraints and it provides solutions that are effective in political terms. Political philosophy takes its distance from congiuntural facts and practically subscribed principles. While sensitive to practical problems, it does not aim at elaborating practically viable solutions: it is rather concerned with the theoretical adequacy of its principles. Public philosophy seems better equipped for developing proposals serviceable during hard times, when effective political responses are in need.

2. A Poll: "The Best Quality Journals in the History of Philosophy"

University of Chicago Law School professor (and philosopher) Brian Leiter, who runs Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, recently conducted a poll that should be interest to all intellectual historians. Using CIVS (Condercet Internet Voting Service), he asked readers to rank the best journals, of a list of seventeen, for publication on the history of philosophy. Here are his Top 11:

1. Journal of the History of Philosophy
2. Philosophical Review
3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
4. British Journal for the History of Philosophy
5. Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie
6. History of Philosophy Quarterly
7. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
8. European Journal of Philosophy
9. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
10. Canadian Journal of Philosophy
11. Journal of the History of Ideas

See the rest of his results here.

3. Teaching The Big, Hard Ideas---Online

Writing for the National Association of Scholars (a rather conservative group that advocates "working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges"), David Clemens offers a rather pessimistic assessment of the ability of online courses to relay the essence of the humanities online. Here is a sampling of his reflections (bolds mine):

I recall a college administrator who while cutting literature classes spoke passionately about more “student access to higher education.” I said, “Access doesn’t do them any good if there’s no higher education when they get here. What you are cutting is higher education.”

Between dumbing down and advocacy teaching, peer editing and “student-centered” classrooms, Theory and CorporateU., PowerPoint presentations and courses on Buffy— higher education in the traditional sense has been smothered. ...Instead of seriously examining such eternal questions of the meaning of life, the liberal arts and humanities wither away in favor of pragmatic but less formative pursuits. What do these words have in common: American, leisure, postcolonial, liberal, gender, disability, queer, environmental, animal? Answer: followed by the word, “studies,” all are degree-granting college majors. ...

The Big Question is whether the imperatives of current educational models make widespread embrace of online classes inevitable. It may be a situation of hug or die. ...Conversely, online is ideal for what I call “boutique” courses, classes people take because they are interested in the subject, not because they “need” them. ...That’s online’s proper role—to supplement face-to-face classes for students in special circumstances (pregnant, remote, homebound) and as a lab for exploration of niche topics. Will that prevail? I doubt it.

To bring this home, Clemens piece makes me skeptical that intellectual history courses can be effectively taught---or at least effectively absorbed by students---in an online teaching environment.

4. Defining American's Knowledge of Religion

About a month ago, before the elections heated up, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" was all over the news. Like other "shocking" surveys that make an impression, this one was about how ignorant Americans are. These are usually about history (or those are the ones I remember), but this one covered comparative religion. Because it asked respondents their religious affiliation, it was also able to break down responses by sect. Here's an excerpt from the survey's Executive Summary (to catalyze your memory):

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. ...Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

I'm bringing this to your attention not to replay the results, but to draw your attention to this excellent set of scholarly replies posted at The Immanent Frame, a blog hosted by the Social Science Research Council. Here is a sampling of the first reply by Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University (bolds mine):

Insofar as it aims to grade Americans on their “religious knowledge,” the new Pew survey contains a strongly normative subtext: that there are certain things that every American ought to know about religion. ...In an earlier piece, I suggested an alternative interpretation: that the things social scientists take to be important about “religion”—--in this case, a range of externally available facts about “the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions”—--aren’t all that important to many Americans. This need not imply that Americans are insincere or incapable of successfully orienting themselves in a culturally diverse environment; rather, it suggests that the conceptual maps they use to do this don’t always conform to the expectations of demographers.

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion.

Amesbury suggests the very thing I pointed out to a few friends in a debate about the results: We study epistemology because there are different ways of knowing. And in this case, the creators of the Pew survey did not address practical knowledge in relation to religion---or the kinds of knowledge (i.e. ethics, or how-to navigational skills) that practitioners seek from their chosen faiths. I hope that historians of American religion make these distinctions when they assess how religion operates? And this topic also matters to those assessing how religion fits into the Culture Wars in the United States.

5. A New Journal: History of the Present

Andrew Hartman alerted me to this via his FB page, but History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History should be of interest to U.S. intellectual historians. It relays its avowed purpose as follows:

Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. Its editors want to encourage the critical examination of both history’s influence on politics and the politics of the discipline of history itself. The journal’s object is to showcase articles that exemplify the practice of what might be called theorized empirical history.

I can definitely see some of our regular USIH contributors and commenters taking an interest in getting into this periodical. It seems like this endeavor borders on investigative journalism---which reminds me of a quip I recently heard, relayed by Bill Moyers: "The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference." Humor aside, it looks like History of the Present will be a place for historians to act in the Laschian tradition of social criticism. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (11/05/2010)

I offer the following as a break from our (excellent!) long posts reflecting on conference matters:

1 (of 5). The Problem of Political Philosophy: Only Links to Offer

Bookforum's excellent Omnivore blog held forth on "The Problem of Political Philosophy" in a post a few days ago. If you're not familiar with Omnivore, its posts are constructed as carnivalesque clouds of links on specific themes. Each link is usually a full story, opinion piece, or book review. My favorite link in this post is to a paper by Francesca Pasquali that brings together political theory, political philosophy, and public philosophy. The last has been a concern to me for some time because it links the work of Walter Lippmann and Mortimer J. Adler. Here's a provocative excerpt from Pasquali's abstract (bolds mine):

Public philosophy detects the shared values grounding political practices and employs them to develop criteria for guiding policy decisions. It is attentive to empirical data and constraints and it provides solutions that are effective in political terms. Political philosophy takes its distance from congiuntural facts and practically subscribed principles. While sensitive to practical problems, it does not aim at elaborating practically viable solutions: it is rather concerned with the theoretical adequacy of its principles. Public philosophy seems better equipped for developing proposals serviceable during hard times, when effective political responses are in need.

2. A Poll: "The Best Quality Journals in the History of Philosophy"

University of Chicago Law School professor (and philosopher) Brian Leiter, who runs Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, recently conducted a poll that should be interest to all intellectual historians. Using CIVS (Condercet Internet Voting Service), he asked readers to rank the best journals, of a list of seventeen, for publication on the history of philosophy. Here are his Top 11:

1. Journal of the History of Philosophy
2. Philosophical Review
3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
4. British Journal for the History of Philosophy
5. Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie
6. History of Philosophy Quarterly
7. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
8. European Journal of Philosophy
9. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
10. Canadian Journal of Philosophy
11. Journal of the History of Ideas

See the rest of his results here.

3. Teaching The Big, Hard Ideas---Online

Writing for the National Association of Scholars (a rather conservative group that advocates "working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges"), David Clemens offers a rather pessimistic assessment of the ability of online courses to relay the essence of the humanities online. Here is a sampling of his reflections (bolds mine):

I recall a college administrator who while cutting literature classes spoke passionately about more “student access to higher education.” I said, “Access doesn’t do them any good if there’s no higher education when they get here. What you are cutting is higher education.”

Between dumbing down and advocacy teaching, peer editing and “student-centered” classrooms, Theory and CorporateU., PowerPoint presentations and courses on Buffy— higher education in the traditional sense has been smothered. ...Instead of seriously examining such eternal questions of the meaning of life, the liberal arts and humanities wither away in favor of pragmatic but less formative pursuits. What do these words have in common: American, leisure, postcolonial, liberal, gender, disability, queer, environmental, animal? Answer: followed by the word, “studies,” all are degree-granting college majors. ...

The Big Question is whether the imperatives of current educational models make widespread embrace of online classes inevitable. It may be a situation of hug or die. ...Conversely, online is ideal for what I call “boutique” courses, classes people take because they are interested in the subject, not because they “need” them. ...That’s online’s proper role—to supplement face-to-face classes for students in special circumstances (pregnant, remote, homebound) and as a lab for exploration of niche topics. Will that prevail? I doubt it.

To bring this home, Clemens piece makes me skeptical that intellectual history courses can be effectively taught---or at least effectively absorbed by students---in an online teaching environment.

4. Defining American's Knowledge of Religion

About a month ago, before the elections heated up, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" was all over the news. Like other "shocking" surveys that make an impression, this one was about how ignorant Americans are. These are usually about history (or those are the ones I remember), but this one covered comparative religion. Because it asked respondents their religious affiliation, it was also able to break down responses by sect. Here's an excerpt from the survey's Executive Summary (to catalyze your memory):

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. ...Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

I'm bringing this to your attention not to replay the results, but to draw your attention to this excellent set of scholarly replies posted at The Immanent Frame, a blog hosted by the Social Science Research Council. Here is a sampling of the first reply by Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University (bolds mine):

Insofar as it aims to grade Americans on their “religious knowledge,” the new Pew survey contains a strongly normative subtext: that there are certain things that every American ought to know about religion. ...In an earlier piece, I suggested an alternative interpretation: that the things social scientists take to be important about “religion”—--in this case, a range of externally available facts about “the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions”—--aren’t all that important to many Americans. This need not imply that Americans are insincere or incapable of successfully orienting themselves in a culturally diverse environment; rather, it suggests that the conceptual maps they use to do this don’t always conform to the expectations of demographers.

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion.

Amesbury suggests the very thing I pointed out to a few friends in a debate about the results: We study epistemology because there are different ways of knowing. And in this case, the creators of the Pew survey did not address practical knowledge in relation to religion---or the kinds of knowledge (i.e. ethics, or how-to navigational skills) that practitioners seek from their chosen faiths. I hope that historians of American religion make these distinctions when they assess how religion operates? And this topic also matters to those assessing how religion fits into the Culture Wars in the United States.

5. A New Journal: History of the Present

Andrew Hartman alerted me to this via his FB page, but History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History should be of interest to U.S. intellectual historians. It relays its avowed purpose as follows:

Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. Its editors want to encourage the critical examination of both history’s influence on politics and the politics of the discipline of history itself. The journal’s object is to showcase articles that exemplify the practice of what might be called theorized empirical history.

I can definitely see some of our regular USIH contributors and commenters taking an interest in getting into this periodical. It seems like this endeavor borders on investigative journalism---which reminds me of a quip I recently heard, relayed by Bill Moyers: "The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference." Humor aside, it looks like History of the Present will be a place for historians to act in the Laschian tradition of social criticism. - TL

History "Reading" In Graduate School

Larry Cebula, of Eastern Washington University, breaks down the infamous---and useful---grad school skim at his Northwest History weblog.

I confess that I have used Larry's method on many occasions, and agree with most of his points. Allow me to add a few more tips.

If you own the book and believe you are likely to keep it, follow some advice I obtained years ago from Mortimer Adler: Do not fear writing in the book. It is as easy to enter short notes and page numbers in a book's endpages as it is to use notecards, or enter information into Zotero or some other (useful) program. But write your notes with a pencil. Don't highlight. When you highlight you're simply delaying both your note-taking and thinking. There's something about the writing utensil that touches your deepest habits as a student.

Reinforcing point #6 of Larry's method, one of my professors told me years ago that there's usually one chapter that makes a book. If you cannot ~not~ spend some time reading in the book, work on this chapter. This will cause your reading to exceed one hour, but at least it will both assuage your guilt and give you more confidence heading into your seminar.

Sadly, I think point #8 of Larry's list usually occurs ~after~ class. If your grad school experience was like mine, most of your friends are not in school with you. And if you happen to have a few who are, usually you are in different courses. Sometimes, however, grad students will gather for a drink or food after a class. That's where you might be lucky enough to actually talk about your reading---provided Lost, Glee, Treme, Madmen, or some other TV program does not dominate the conversation.

I would be remiss if I failed to draw your attention to the last three lines of Larry's post. When you see warnings like this, you know you've encountered one of the dirty, essential secrets of the profession.

Thanks to John Fea for the tip. - TL

History "Reading" In Graduate School

Larry Cebula, of Eastern Washington University, breaks down the infamous---and useful---grad school skim at his Northwest History weblog.

I confess that I have used Larry's method on many occasions, and agree with most of his points. Allow me to add a few more tips.

If you own the book and believe you are likely to keep it, follow some advice I obtained years ago from Mortimer Adler: Do not fear writing in the book. It is as easy to enter short notes and page numbers in a book's endpages as it is to use notecards, or enter information into Zotero or some other (useful) program. But write your notes with a pencil. Don't highlight. When you highlight you're simply delaying both your note-taking and thinking. There's something about the writing utensil that touches your deepest habits as a student.

Reinforcing point #6 of Larry's method, one of my professors told me years ago that there's usually one chapter that makes a book. If you cannot ~not~ spend some time reading in the book, work on this chapter. This will cause your reading to exceed one hour, but at least it will both assuage your guilt and give you more confidence heading into your seminar.

Sadly, I think point #8 of Larry's list usually occurs ~after~ class. If your grad school experience was like mine, most of your friends are not in school with you. And if you happen to have a few who are, usually you are in different courses. Sometimes, however, grad students will gather for a drink or food after a class. That's where you might be lucky enough to actually talk about your reading---provided Lost, Glee, Treme, Madmen, or some other TV program does not dominate the conversation.

I would be remiss if I failed to draw your attention to the last three lines of Larry's post. When you see warnings like this, you know you've encountered one of the dirty, essential secrets of the profession.

Thanks to John Fea for the tip. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (02/3/2010)

1. Studying Reading Reception: The Reception Study Society and its associated annual, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, should be of interest to practicing U.S. Intellectual historians. Why? It seems to me that every single community of discourse that ever existed in U.S. history worked, in some way, around the production and reception of some kind of text. Practitioners of reception history studying recent times have recourse to oral histories. This is an exciting development. In the past, however, reception was studied only through personal or institutional papers, and published accounts. On the last, I believe that book reviews are an understudied and under-explored resource for intellectual historians. While I fully understand the weaknesses of this source (e.g. word limitations, written for money, notoriety, for spite, etc.), the problems in assessing authorial motivations in reviews are no different than for any other publication. In other words, we can correct for those limitations, or publicly acknowledge them, and still pick out relevant nuggets of thought from reviews. Of course there are limits: How do we assess the audiences of reviews? That seems to throw us back into the archives to examine personal papers, diaries, etc.

2. The Weight Of Tradition In Publishing: A Berkeley study, summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, unsurprisingly reports that tradition weighs heavily on authors in considering publication options. This paragraph sums up the situation:

Although the seven fields surveyed have very different cultures, which are explored at length in the 733-page report, the executive summary points to the persistence of doing scholarly business as usual. "Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core," the report states. It found that young scholars "can be particularly conservative" in their behavior, perhaps because they have more to lose than senior scholars, who "can afford to be the most innovative with regard to dissemination practices."

[The report's authors] identified five key needs of faculty members in regard to scholarly communication. Those include developing "more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics," and reassessing "the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review."

Here are the report's findings on its "History Case Study" (p. 388-503).

3. The Effects Of Catholic Higher Education On Catholics: Positive, Negative, Or In-Between?: Some relatively conservative American Catholic organizations criticize Catholic colleges and universities on the historical grounds that Catholics who attend Catholic institutions come out less Catholic (intellectually, socially, theologically) than when they entered. I have not seen a precise starting date put on this trend by critics. In his comprehensive history of American Catholic higher education, titled Contending With Modernity, Philip Gleason identified a turning point as the 1967 Land O' Lakes Conference held in the Wisconsin town of the same name. Here is the famous statement produced at the conference. Conservative critics pointed back to Land O' Lakes during last year's debates about Obama's Notre Dame address. But a new study, underscored by this InsideHigherEd article, forwards that while Catholics do indeed lose ground on specific Catholic teachings, they gain ground on others at Catholic colleges. In sum, the broad claim by some that Catholic colleges are really not functioning as such is questionable at best. It is more the case that Catholic colleges are not doing exactly what the conservative critics want.

4. Book of Interest: Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xiv, 250 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1862-9.)

5. Workshop of Interest: This Harvard University gathering will be of interest to some of our readers:

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 (Bernard Bailyn, Director)

Workshop---Intellectual History: New Findings, New Approaches, in the Study of Religion, Science, and Cultural Identity

April 10, 2010

This Workshop will concentrate on current innovations in the study of the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, the flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas, from José de Acosta to Jonathan Edwards – new findings on Biblicism, alchemy, science, architecture, critiques of idolatry, and approaches to the Enlightenment. The intention is not to present descriptive summaries of these subjects but for leading authorities to identify, from work in progress, innovative points of inquiry and to indicate profitable lines for future study. ... To register, and for additional information, please see our Web site or contact the Atlantic History Seminar [Emerson Hall 4th Floor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Phone: 617-496-3066; Fax: 617-496-8869; e-mail elebaron-at-fas.harvard.edu].

Tim's Light Reading (02/3/2010)

1. Studying Reading Reception: The Reception Study Society and its associated annual, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, should be of interest to practicing U.S. Intellectual historians. Why? It seems to me that every single community of discourse that ever existed in U.S. history worked, in some way, around the production and reception of some kind of text. Practitioners of reception history studying recent times have recourse to oral histories. This is an exciting development. In the past, however, reception was studied only through personal or institutional papers, and published accounts. On the last, I believe that book reviews are an understudied and under-explored resource for intellectual historians. While I fully understand the weaknesses of this source (e.g. word limitations, written for money, notoriety, for spite, etc.), the problems in assessing authorial motivations in reviews are no different than for any other publication. In other words, we can correct for those limitations, or publicly acknowledge them, and still pick out relevant nuggets of thought from reviews. Of course there are limits: How do we assess the audiences of reviews? That seems to throw us back into the archives to examine personal papers, diaries, etc.

2. The Weight Of Tradition In Publishing: A Berkeley study, summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, unsurprisingly reports that tradition weighs heavily on authors in considering publication options. This paragraph sums up the situation:

Although the seven fields surveyed have very different cultures, which are explored at length in the 733-page report, the executive summary points to the persistence of doing scholarly business as usual. "Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core," the report states. It found that young scholars "can be particularly conservative" in their behavior, perhaps because they have more to lose than senior scholars, who "can afford to be the most innovative with regard to dissemination practices."

[The report's authors] identified five key needs of faculty members in regard to scholarly communication. Those include developing "more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics," and reassessing "the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review."

Here are the report's findings on its "History Case Study" (p. 388-503).

3. The Effects Of Catholic Higher Education On Catholics: Positive, Negative, Or In-Between?: Some relatively conservative American Catholic organizations criticize Catholic colleges and universities on the historical grounds that Catholics who attend Catholic institutions come out less Catholic (intellectually, socially, theologically) than when they entered. I have not seen a precise starting date put on this trend by critics. In his comprehensive history of American Catholic higher education, titled Contending With Modernity, Philip Gleason identified a turning point as the 1967 Land O' Lakes Conference held in the Wisconsin town of the same name. Here is the famous statement produced at the conference. Conservative critics pointed back to Land O' Lakes during last year's debates about Obama's Notre Dame address. But a new study, underscored by this InsideHigherEd article, forwards that while Catholics do indeed lose ground on specific Catholic teachings, they gain ground on others at Catholic colleges. In sum, the broad claim by some that Catholic colleges are really not functioning as such is questionable at best. It is more the case that Catholic colleges are not doing exactly what the conservative critics want.

4. Book of Interest: Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xiv, 250 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1862-9.)

5. Workshop of Interest: This Harvard University gathering will be of interest to some of our readers:

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 (Bernard Bailyn, Director)

Workshop---Intellectual History: New Findings, New Approaches, in the Study of Religion, Science, and Cultural Identity

April 10, 2010

This Workshop will concentrate on current innovations in the study of the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, the flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas, from José de Acosta to Jonathan Edwards – new findings on Biblicism, alchemy, science, architecture, critiques of idolatry, and approaches to the Enlightenment. The intention is not to present descriptive summaries of these subjects but for leading authorities to identify, from work in progress, innovative points of inquiry and to indicate profitable lines for future study. ... To register, and for additional information, please see our Web site or contact the Atlantic History Seminar [Emerson Hall 4th Floor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Phone: 617-496-3066; Fax: 617-496-8869; e-mail elebaron-at-fas.harvard.edu].