The Perfectly Baked Pie
a. Unlike KC Johnson, I don't in any way mourn or worry about it if a student interested in history, pursuing a knowledge of the past, happens to major in another discipline. (At least, not until such time as an administrator regards that as a problem--but that problem, if it ever came around, would still not be an intellectual one.) But the fact that this happens is testament to the degree to which the discipline of history has spread itself methodologically through most of the social sciences and humanities over the past thirty years. In turn, the discipline of history has benefitted from methodologies and ideas coming from anthropology, political science, economics and literary criticism in particular--but I do think that history's outflow has been greater than its inflow. This is all to the good, except that it may sometimes leave historians whose employment depends on making the case that they do history better than others struggling a bit. What's the difference between a political historian and a political scientist who writes historically? Depending on the cases being compared, perhaps very little. What's the difference between a cultural historian working on 20th Century Africa and a cultural anthropologist doing the same? Depending on the cases, virtually none at all, except that the historian (e.g., me) might be able to get away with vanishing into the archive for far longer periods of time than the anthropologist. The end scholarly product may not be that different, though.
b. I still think that beyond formal, dramatic questions about interdisciplinarity there is a more banal reality, which is that all good scholarly work and good pedagogy of necessity ignores categories like"political history" or"social history" whenever such categories stop being provisionally useful heuristics and become barriers to asking and answering good questions. I once watched a tape designed to help junior professors learn how to teach that was produced (I think) at Harvard University. It showed one example (all of them were frightfully 'stagey' and unreal, but this one especially) of a"political historian" teaching about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the states' rights question. In the tape, an African-American student wants the professor to talk about slavery in the debates, and he replies that that's not what his class is about. The tape was a clear prompt to think about racial sensitivity in the classroom, but I had a simpler response: the pedagogical problem was that the professor was a lunkhead. You can't talk about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and wall off the social historian's interests in slavery as belonging to some other class.
This being said, let's move on to my major question. I once asked students in a class on methodology and history how they would go about systematically deciding how to replace the Swarthmore Department of History if we were all simultaneously run over by a bus.
10 positions. Currenly 1 African specialist (modern, cultural, with a sideline in cultural studies); 1 Chinese specialist (17th-early 20th Century, economic); 1 Latin American specialist (20th Century, social/cultural); 1 medievalist (Iberia & North Africa, social/political); 1 early modern European specialist (comparativist/world history as well, social/economic); 2 modern European specialists (1 Central Europe, 1 Russia; social/political/cultural); 3 US history specialists (colonial to Civil War cultural/social, African-American social 19th-20th, 20th Century social and diplomatic).
How would you bake that pie of 10 positions? More importantly, what principles would you use to justify your allocation of it, keeping in mind that the pie is being served at a small liberal arts college where range and flexibility is something of a requirement?