Blogs > Cliopatria > 3 Series, 2 Personal Appearances, & a Quibble

Mar 31, 2009

3 Series, 2 Personal Appearances, & a Quibble




At Notorious Ph.D., Judith Bennett responds to the March roundtable discussion of her book, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism.

Errol Morris,"Whose Father Was He?" Zoom, 29 March, is a five-part series this week, in which Morris interrogates an American Civil War era photograph of three children.

At TPM Café this week, Peniel Joseph of Brandeis, Columbia's Todd Gitlin, Penn's Thomas Sugrue, and Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation join Clay Risen, the author of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, to discuss his book.

You can hear our former colleague, Manan Ahmed, discuss"Obama Lays out New Policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan," on Chicago Public Radio's Worldview.

Finally, on a less serious note, Historiann points out that the OAH convention may go down in history as"the one where Tenured Radical hurled into a trash can in the Seattle Convention Center." More seriously, Rick Shenkman has done yeoman service in presenting videos of major sessions of the convention on HNN's mainpage. Still, I wonder about the composition of panels at our conventions. How could a panel on the state of the study of recent American conservatism not include a conservative historian? Donald Critchlow, for example, should have been there to respond to Rick Perlstein's criticism. I've seen this happen again and again at our conventions: major panels dealing with major issues and there's not a dime's worth of difference in what or the ways the panelists think about them.



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Manan Ahmed - 3/31/2009

Ralph raises a significant and important point. Panels are almost exclusively a set of mutually affirming papers with (mostly) a praising discussant. I overheard a conversation this past weekend at the AAS meeting between two senior historians. One was describing to another a very "mean" discussant who had ripped a paper to shreds. This was being commented on as a "Look What the World Has Come To".

But, I think the problem really begins at the inception. Panels are often put together by friends or folks who work on the the same themes - in a similar mode. We really have to address that somehow, somewhere to get a dialogue - a critical dialogue, in fact - going ON the panel and not just between the panel and the passive audience which is lucky to get 10 minutes to respond after sitting through 110 minutes of posturing.