20th Century Notes

by Cliopatria

Chris Blattman,"PhD production as a process of self-discovery," Chris Blattman, 21 December, challenges"The disposable academic," The Economist, 16 December.

John Gray,"What Rawls Hath Wrought," National Interest, 16 December, reviews Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

Dwight Garner,"The Curies, Seen Through an Artist's Eyes," NYT, 21 December, reviews Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout.

Jed Perl,"Newsprint and Transcendence," TNR, 22 December, reviews"In Giacometti's Studio – an intimate portrait," an exhibit at the Eykyn Maclean gallery in Manhattan.

Ian Johnson,"Finding the Facts About Mao's Victims," NYRBlog, 20 December, interviews Yang Jisheng, a Chinese historian who is the author of Tombstone (Mubei). It is a major work on the Great Famine (1958–1961), which appears to have been"one of worst human disasters in history."

Rick Perlstein,"What Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us," War Room, 22 December, takes a hard look at the Mississippi governor's memory.

Oleg Gordievsky,"Spooked Out," Literary Review, Dec/Jan, reviews Andrei Soldatov's and Irina Borogan's The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB.

Sim Chi Yin,"Lens, 20 December, reproduce A Yin's photographs documenting an end of nomadic life in Inner Mongolia.

George Chauncey,"Last Ban Standing," NYT, 20 December, celebrates the end of the American military's"don't ask, don't tell" policy.

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Chris Bray - 12/25/2010

"But I don't know that either of those things is the rule in graduate school."

It seems to me to be the rule, but with substantial exceptions. Job listings and conference announcements always suggest this to me: hey, look, a dpeartment wants to hire someone whose research interest is "America in the world."

Innovation is possible, but you're more likely to get a job if you carve out a spot for yourself in a familiar niche. The fact that someone can, for example, disagree with their advisor about the place of the United States in the Atlantic World seems to me to suggest both a possibility for innovation and a limit to that innovation.

You could look, also, at the number of history professors who've tut-tutted in comment threads at Cliopatria about tone, a choice that suggests a particular professional and social training: there is a way to speak, and we must all speak that way.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/25/2010

Chris,You've cited the example of Dunning's students before. It's a clear case of students reproducing the work of their major professor. I'm not sure that it happens primarily because that's what a professor does, i.e., teach students to reproduce his or her results. Isn't it just as likely that Dunning's students gravitated to him because they already agreed with him. But I don't know that either of those things is the rule in graduate school. The other day, I was having coffee with a recent Ph.D. from the same department that conferred mine. We agreed that the best thing that our major professors did for us was to allow us to reach our own conclusions in our research. In my case, at least, they explicitly disagreed with published findings by my major prof.

Chris Bray - 12/23/2010

Chris Blattman:

"Assumption 1: Innovation, including academic research, is the fundamental driver of long term health, wealth and happiness for the human race. (The 'including academic research' bit is the biggest leap.)"

It's an enormous leap, because academic training is about anything but innovation. I'm repeating myself, but it's not an accident that the Dunningites held on for fifty years, and that William Dunning's students produced books with titles like "Reconstruction in South Carolina," "Reconstruction in Texas," and "Reconstruction in Mississippi" (that confirmed Dunning's findings in a book titled "Reconstruction").

A PhD program is designed to socialize and professionalize. It's designed, in many ways, to train students to think alike. Is that in dispute?