historiography

• 
• 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
  1/26/2021
  

  Diversity Demands Struggle: Lessons from Lawrence Reddick’s Crusade for Black History

  by David A. Varel

  After working to build the field of Black history at the margins of academe in the middle of the 20th Century, Lawrence Reddick fought against the perception that a wave of white scholars who took up African American history after the civil rights movement were founders of the field. 

• 
• 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."

• 
• 11/1/2020
  

  From a Victorian to a Twenty-First Century Understanding of Why History Matters

  by Priya Satia

  "Churchill was the apotheosis of the historically-minded statesman, committed to the idea of history as progress in which the role of great men was to suppress ordinary moral compunctions about destructive events that forwarded it."

• 
• 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: The Guardian
  10/26/2020
  

  "Time's Monster" by Priya Satia Review – Living in the Past

  Time’s Monster is a book about history and empire. Not a straightforward history, but an account of how the discipline of history has itself enabled the process of colonisation, “making it ethically thinkable”.

• 
• 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: Perspectives on History
  10/26/2020
  

  Partners in Scholarship: A Historian’s View of Trends in Scholarly Publishing

  by Mary Lindemann

  The AHA's president discusses ongoing change in the world of scholarly publishing as historians consider shorter manuscripts and electronic publication media. 

• 
• 10/25/2020
  

  "Refusing to Be Governed Like That": The Dangers of Trusting in History's Judgment

  by Joan Wallach Scott

  If, as the abolitionist Theodore Parker wrote, “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” then why bother to hasten its arrival? Those who don’t believe that history will guarantee a better future will act to bring a different future into being.  

• 
• 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: TIME
  10/20/2020
  

  We All Think History Will Be on Our Side. Here's Why We Shouldn't

  by Priya Satia

  We would do better to listen to today’s historians in order to understand how we got here and recover other guides to conscience, not just look to future historians for consolation.

• 
• 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: The Hill
  8/21/2020
  

  Historian Eric Foner: Broken Promises Of Reconstruction Relevant To Today's Racial Justice Movement

  "Our society has never allowed African Americans to accumulate money and assets the way white families have,” Foner said.

• 
• SOURCE: Society for US Intellectual History
  8/22/2020
  

  Spoiling the Egyptians: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Uses of Racist Scholarship

  by L.D. Burnett

  W.E.B. DuBois recognized that his efforts to write the history of Africa and African peoples would depend on his ability to use sources produced by racists without reproducing their political goals. 

• 
• 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.