Departments

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historiography

  • SOURCE: Aeon
    12/16/2021

    What "Big History" Misses

    by Ian Hesketh

    "Big History" has become established in the popular media and in some academic quarters, telling global-scale narratives of human and even planetary history. After 30 years, it's time to evaluate its successes and failures. 

  • SOURCE: New York Magazine
    12/14/2021

    The Right's 1877 Project

    Helen Andrews's recent "American Conservative" column revives the myths that Reconstruction was a "tragic era" and that Black disenfranchisement was a force for progress, troubling indicators of the current right's views of democracy. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    12/8/2021

    The 1619 Project and the Demands of Public History

    by Lauren Michele Jackson

    "In spite of all of the ugly evidence it has assembled, the 1619 Project ultimately seeks to inspire faith in the American project, just as any conventional social-studies curriculum would."

  • 12/5/2021

    On Writing The Bright Ages

    by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

    The authors of a new book reconsidering the history of the medieval world describe how the project came about and how the work of writing history benefits by collaboration.

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    11/18/2021

    The Storm over the American Revolution

    by Eric Herschthal

    By shoehorning his recent book on the Revolutionary War into the space of the debate about slavery and the founding, critics of Woody Holton are missing important points about the importance of indigenous land to the founding and the global context of colonial independence.

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    11/10/2021

    The Changing Same of U.S. History

    by David Waldstreicher

    Historians have returned to the question of whether the Constitution is the problem or the solution with renewed vigor and high stakes. Those accusing ideological rivals of "doing politics, not history" are not innocent of the same charge. 

  • SOURCE: Slate
    10/30/2021

    The Historians are (Still) Fighting

    by Willam Hogeland

    Inside the recent Massachusetts Historical Society dustup between Gordon Wood and Woody Holton over the significance of slavery to the American Revolution, and what it means for the public perception of history. 

  • 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.