Historical Inquiry in the New Century: The Historical Society's June 2010 Conference

Below is the call for papers for our 2010 conference, chaired by me, past president Eric Arnesen. The conference will be at George Washington University's Marvin Center, within walking distance of the Library of Congress, the Mall, the White House, and the shops and restaurants of vibrant Georgetown as well as Dupont Circle. We hope to see you there! The call for papers focuses broadly on the future of history, but we welcome proposals on all manner of historical subjects. There is plenty of time to get organized--the deadline for submitting a proposal is January 31, 2010. So if you're working on something you'd like to talk about, please do send in a proposal.

HISTORICAL INQUIRY IN THE NEW CENTURY

The Historical Society's 2010 Conference
June 3-5, 2010, George Washington University, Washington, DC

We invite participants to address a wide range of questions and issues, including: What are the current historiographical debates? Where do particular fields now stand? What's changed for the better--or the worse--in specific areas? What are the truly big questions historians face, and are we adequately grappling with them? How will historical inquiry change in the 21st century?

We especially encourage panel proposals, though individual paper proposals are welcome as well. And our interpretation of "panel" is broad: 2 or more presenters constitute a panel--chairs and commentators are optional. As at past conferences, we hope for bold yet informal presentations that will provoke lots of questions and discussion from the audience, not presenters reading papers word-for-word from a podium followed by a commentator doing the same.
Please submit proposals (brief abstract and brief CV) by January 31, 2010 to
Eric Arnesen, 2010 Program Chair, at jslucas@bu.edu

We look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,
Eric Arnesen

Writing American History Textbooks and Teaching Religion: An Interview with Paul S. Boyer

Randall Stephens

What to cover? What not to cover? What makes an event, individual, or movement worthy of our attention?

History professors and high school history teachers spend quite a bit of time thinking about those questions. If you have to get through the sweep of American history (pre-Columbian to 1865) in just one semester, then you're going to need to make some cuts. Goodbye obscure Puritan theologian. Hello slave insurrectionist. Hardly enough time in class to talk about how each colony took shape. King Philip's War is interesting, but how much time on center stage does it deserve? For those who teach Western Civilization or the West in the World, good luck figuring out content and coverage. The same questions about scope and range occupy the time of history textbook writers.

Last weekend I caught up with the historian and general bonhomie Paul S. Boyer at a conference on Adventism in Portland, Maine. Boyer, Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of a number of American history books, like Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968); Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), co-author with Stephen Nissenbau; Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); By

the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (NY: Pantheon, 1985); When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter With Nuclear Weapons (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). He's also written articles for the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, American Literary History, The History Teacher, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the William & Mary Quarterly. But he may be best known as the author of a couple of very successful textbooks: The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (6th edition, 2007); and The American Nation (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 4th edn., 2002).

In the 2-part Youtube video embedded here, I ask Boyer about the writing of history textbooks and how he thinks about the role of religion in history. He comments at length on how religion has shaped American history and considers some of the major questions textbook writers ask as they go about their task.

Anglo-Saxon Treasure: The Border of History and Prehistory

Randall Stephens

In late September the NYT reported on a massive Anglo-Saxon find: "LONDON — For the jobless man living on welfare who made the find in an English farmer’s field two months ago, it was the stuff of dreams: a hoard of early Anglo-Saxon treasure, probably dating from the seventh century and including more than 1,500 pieces of intricately worked gold and silver whose craftsmanship and historical significance left archaeologists awestruck."

More recently in the October 14, 2009 issue of the TLS, Alex Burghart writes about "The 1,500-piece collection unearthed from the Staffordshire mud" which is "the richest collection of gold from Anglo-Saxon England ever found." This find brings up all sorts of questions about Anglo-Saxon England. The date of the find is already being debated along with the circumstances and context. Burghart observes: "There is always a temptation to link any rich Anglo-Saxon archaeology with a king. Sutton Hoo has often been called the grave of Raedwald of East Anglia (d.616–627), and the burial chamber from Prittlewell, Essex, has been linked with early kings of Essex, though the associations are far from provable. Some authorities, no doubt, will look at the bent crosses of the Staffordshire Hoard and claim it as the booty Penda of Mercia (d.655), the last great pagan King of Anglo-Saxon England. Such guesswork is good fun, but it is also slightly disingenuous."

The whole can of worms opened by the discovery is particularly interesting to historians. Questions it brings up are fascinating: What can or can't we know about the past? What are the limits and boundaries of history? When and where does the archeology come to the aid? Burghart concludes: "At present it seems unlikely that we will ever know who buried it, why they did, when they did, or where they got it." Bummer.

See also this piece in the National Geographic.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part X: A Word to Athletes (or Musicians, or Artists, or Anyone Who Has a Significant Interest Outside of the Classroom)

Heather Cox Richardson

Sometimes it seems as if athletes feel as if they’re not welcome in academic classrooms; that they’re in college to play a sport, and the classes are only to keep them eligible. Somehow, they seem to feel that good athletes cannot also be good students. THIS IS RIDICULOUS! I don’t believe it, and you shouldn’t either.

The years you have spent perfecting your sport (or your music, or your art…) have given you a skill set that makes you an ideal student, in many ways. You know how to work hard for a long-term goal. You know how to push yourself. You know how to look at the larger frame of a race, or a game, to get the best end result. From working with a team, you know how to look at a goal from a number of different perspectives and to chart your own course to see it through. You know how to budget your time and energy. You have rare skills that translate precisely to a classroom. Many of your classmates don’t have these skills and, rather than feeling unwelcome in a class, you should recognize that your perspective is imperative.

You should do the work for class discussions and then take part in them. Your unique perspective is welcome in class. Yes, you might feel like you’re approaching things in a very different way than your classmates, but this is exactly why your view is so important to the class.

It is true that the years you have spent on the playing fields or in the pool may have shortchanged your writing or reading skills. But those skills can be acquired quite easily with practice. That practice doesn’t necessarily mean tying yourself to a desk and suffering through moldy old books. Stop IMing or picking up your cell phone and instead write emails to your friends and family using good English. Keep a journal. Write to elderly relatives (often nursing homes will print out emails for patients, so don’t say you can’t get to the post office!). And read… anything, so long as it’s grammatically correct. Read blogs, the sports pages (some sports reporters are brilliant writers), the latest Stephen King novel. As you read, think about what you’re reading. Do you agree with the latest predictions about the upcoming baseball season? Why or why not? What makes an argument on a blog convincing? When do you tune someone out? Why? These are the same skills you will use to write term papers and to evaluate arguments. Like anything you do, practice at reading and writing will make it come easier. If all you read are the scholarly books listed on a syllabus, of course it will be difficult. (Imagine trying to play in a golf tournament with no practice, first!). But with a modicum of talent (and everyone in this classroom has a modicum of talent at the very least), practice will achieve a respectable outcome.

Don’t forget, too, that your professors are here to help you, and that there are also a number of academic services on campus.

You don’t have to see yourself as an athlete only, or even as an athlete first. There’s no reason you can’t be both an athlete AND a scholar. Yes, you spend a block of time every day at your sport, but do you really think the students who don’t play a sport spend those hours at the library? They have jobs, other interests, and often just hang around. And you have significant time in buses—enforced work time, when you’ll miss nothing by settling down with work—as well as time spent doing repetitive activity like running, during which you can be reviewing your work in your head. Sports require you to organize your life, but they don’t demand that you ignore everything else.

Nostrum Fatum: Humanities on the Downward Slope

Randall Stephens

This will be an outside scoop item for those of you who saw William M. Chace's "The Decline of the English Department," American Scholar (Autumn 2009). But for those who didn't, Chace raises some interesting questions for English and other departments now fighting it out with fewer students and less support than in decades past. His essay goes along with similar topics Chris Beneke discussed here in recent months.

Here's Chace:

During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened. . . .

Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

Off-campus, the consumer’s point of view about future earnings and economic security was a mirror image of on-campus thinking in the offices of deans, provosts, and presidents. . . .

Well worth a close read.

An Interview with Mark Noll on American Religious History

Randall Stephens

Earlier in October I interviewed Notre Dame historian Mark Noll on his work and the field of American religious history. I

spoke to him up in Wenham, Mass, as we were hosting an Eastern Nazarene College-Gordon College conference on Noll's groundbreaking book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The conference brought to the fore certain historical, philosophical, and sociological questions about one of America's largest mass religious movements.

In the Youtube clip here (in two parts) I speak to Noll about his research and writing as well as his views of the field as it has developed since the 1960s and 1970s. Noll discusses the influence of Henry May, Perry Miller, Timothy Smith and other predecessors and also lauds the work of early-career scholars, like Heather Curtis, Ed Blum, Rachel Wheeler, Charles Irons, and Wallace Best.

See a fuller post on the conference at Religion in American History.

Further Discussion of State of Intellectual History at U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Randall Stephens

Over at U.S. Intellectual History Tim Lacy and others have been commenting on the forum Historically Speaking ran in September on the state of intellectual history. This is a great ongoing discussion about some of the issues raised in the forum and some of the matters left out of it. Lacy writes:

I first received word of Historically Speaking's forum in August. The prospect excited me both for its topic (of course) and the participants: Daniel Wickberg, David A. Hollinger, Sarah E. Igo, and Wilfred M. McClay. It is not every day that advanced and senior historians in intellectual history choose to wrap their minds around this peculiar subfield, whether assessing the United States variety or otherwise. I am grateful for each contributor's effort, and that Historically Speaking took on the topic. The forum did not disappoint. The contributions touched on a great many issues for the U.S. branch of intellectual history. Apart from simple topical relevance, every essay held persuasive points. Indeed, Wickberg noted in his final rejoinder that one can "scarcely address all the issues that were discussed" (p. 22). My colleague Paul Murphy called the forum "engrossing." As such, I believe the endeavor already qualifies as required reading for all graduate students and working professionals in U.S. intellectual history. Just the books and articles cited in each forum essay should be on required reading lists across American graduate programs. read on>>>

Many thanks to Tim Lacy and other commentators for picking up the thread!

On Constructedness and Historiography

Randall Stephens

The September 24 issue of the NYRB contains a review essay on the limits of the "social construction of reality" school. In "Why Should You Believe It?" John R. Searle writes:

Relativism has a long history in our intellectual culture, and takes several different forms, such as relativism about knowledge and truth, ethical values, aesthetic quality, and cultural norms, to mention a few. Paul Boghossian's book concentrates on the first of these. The basic idea he opposes is that claims to objective truth and knowledge, for example the claim that hydrogen atoms have one electron, are in fact only valid relative to a set of cultural attitudes, or to some other subjective way of perceiving the world. Furthermore, according to relativism, inconsistent claims may have what he calls 'equal validity.' There can be no universally valid knowledge claims.

His insightful critique takes on some of the more woolly notions of social constructedness. "The currently most influential form of relativism," Searle notes, "is social constructivism, which [Paul A.] Boghossian defines as follows: "A fact is socially constructed if and only if it is necessarily true that it could only have obtained through the contingent actions of a social group."

One particularly Rococo application of constructivism that Searle points out made me laugh. In 1998 Bruno Latour famously argued that the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II could not have had tuberculosis, as recent researchers claimed, because the tuberculosis bacillus was only discovered by Robert Koch in 1882. Such conclusions make it seem like we live in a world woven completely from our wild imaginations. To what degree do individuals or groups actually make reality?

Social constructivism along with a focus on agency has had a profound influence on the history profession over the past two decades. And in my area of specialization, American religious history, it looms large. But it is not always an accurate or helpful lens through which to view the past. Dismissing critics of the theory as hapless modernists is not the same thing as engaging that criticism. I'll stop right there before I get too specific.

I would like to see what deep history scholars and those who work at the intersection of biology and history think about social constructivism.