Departments

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historiography

  • SOURCE: Perspectives on History
    12/15/2020

    Working With Death: The Experience of Feeling in the Archive

    by Ruth Lawlor

    A researcher of sexual assault against women by American troops in World War II confronted the problem that the archive captures only a traumatic event and leaves the human being affected in the shadows. 

  • SOURCE: ArcDigital
    10/31/2020

    Is History Now Our Judge?

    by L.D. Burnett

    "Warning someone that they will face the judgment of history and the shame of opprobrium seems much more rational than warning them that they will face the judgment of God and the fires of hell."

  • SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
    10/28/2020

    The 1619 Project and Uses and Abuses of History

    by Stephen Mintz

    By focusing on narrow questions of fact and interpretive claims in the project in an effort to discredit it, critics of the 1619 Project have mostly failed to engage with big questions about how to do history. 

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    10/23/2020

    Why Do We Think Learning About History Can Make Us Better?

    by Priya Satia

    While historians view their discipline as empirical and secular, its practice has typically enfolded a religious or quasi-religious effort to integrate human action and stories of moral necessity.

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    10/19/2020

    How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life

    The literary scholar Saidiya Hartman's studies of the aftermath of slavery and the African diaspora point to the limits of archival records for understanding historical Black experience. Some historians question whether her methods fill archival gaps too creatively.

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    9/10/2020

    The Wages of Whiteness (Review Essay)

    Hari Kunzru's review essay examines the current vogue for white antiracism (and antiracist training) through the history of whiteness as a political and academic concept, concluding that many  of the most popular books and multicultural pieties strip the idea of its structural elements and reduce it to a question of personal purification. 

  • SOURCE: Society for U.S. Intellectual History
    9/9/2020

    The Interdisciplinarity and Influence of Alan Trachtenberg

    by Jennifer Giuliano and Lauren Tilton

    "The need to interrogate, understand, and even disrupt how we see images is a part of Trachtenberg’s enduring legacy that becomes more important as researchers are distanced from physical archives." The work of Alan Trachtenberg in developing historical methodologies for understanding images is crucial for historians' ability to speak to current affairs.

  • SOURCE: The New York Times
    8/24/2020

    Rethinking Who and What Get Memorialized

    The notion that history can be rewritten is a powerful one. It starts by taking the pen from the authors we’ve always had — and giving it to someone else.

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    8/20/2020

    The Black Freedom Struggle of the North (Review)

    "'The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North' is a major milestone in the growing historical literature on racial discrimination and the civil rights struggle outside the South," writes Joshua Clark Davis.

  • SOURCE: Patheos
    7/23/2020

    Os Guinness, Eric Metaxas, and Their Dangerous Myths of American History

    by Abram Van Engen

    "Only when we begin to see the multiplicity and complexity of history can we begin to understand how God moves in it and through it, and how we, in the present, can and should respond—righting wrongs and attempting to shine a light in dark places," writes Abram Van Engen.

  • SOURCE: The Way of Improvement Leads Home
    7/25/2020

    The New York Times Covers the “Clash of the Historians” at SHEAR

    by John Fea

    An early Americanist reflects on the controversy stirred up by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic's virtual plenary and its coverage in the mainstream media, and asks whether these are the battles historians should be fighting right now.