Departments

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historiography

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    9/21/2021

    Fin de Siecle Vienna: Art and Culture in Schorske's Century

    by Thomas Bender

    Carl Schorske's work on 19th Century Vienna was a masterwork of intellectual history that incorporated interdisciplinary approaches to politics and culture to model new approaches to scholarship in the humanities. A colleague traces his intellectual development.

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    9/7/2021

    History Won't Judge: Joan C. Scott and Passing the Buck

    by Kirsten Weld

    Poor Clio, the muse of history, has been tasked with the passing of retrospective judgments that we in the here-and-now are unwilling to make. Unfortunately, that's not how history works. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    8/30/2021

    Racism's Roots and Branches

    by Barbara Ransby

    "Racism as we know it has not existed forever, but it was embedded in the formation of this nation."

  • SOURCE: U.S. Intellectual History Blog
    7/24/2021

    Burning It All Down

    by L.D. Burnett

    Louis Trouillot's commentary on historiography and the slippage between history as fact and history as narrative shows how academic gatekeepers who resist revisionist challenges to their fields play into the hands of bad faith actors who would prefer to silence historians entirely. 

  • 7/11/2021

    The Girders of Steel City's History

    by Ed Simon

    The author of a new book on Pittsburgh considers the first written history of the city and reflects on what preceded and what might follow the steel era. 

  • SOURCE: Perspectives on History
    7/6/2021

    You are Only as Good as Your Sources

    by Bobby Cervantes

    Can researchers reexamine the boundary between journalism and historiography while maintaining the integrity of both? A researcher with a background in both explains how. 

  • 3/14/2021

    The Big Ideas History Syllabus

    by Andrew Joseph Pegoda

    Good teachers consider their method, communication, and sources carefully. What about our subject, as teachers of history? How do we communicate what history is as a "big idea"? 

  • SOURCE: Perspectives on History
    1/27/2021

    Racist Histories and the AHA

    by Sarah Jones Weicksel and James Grossman

    "By undertaking this project, the AHA seeks to understand and document the complexity of its role in the evolution and persistence of American racism in order for the organization, and for historians, to use our knowledge and professional resources to chart pathways to a more just and equitable future."

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    1/25/2021

    Against the Consensus Approach to History

    by William Hogeland

    Current debates about the historiography of slavery and the founding mistake the authority claimed by past generations of historians for scholarly integrity instead of recognizing that writing history has always been a political act (that often works to conceal its politics).

  • 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.