Live-Tweeting #AHA2014

Craig Gallagher

In anticipation of going to my first American Historical Association conference this past weekend in Washington D.C., I sought out a range of senior colleagues who had attended past AHA meetings for advice on what to expect. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate who is about to start writing a dissertation, I was regularly advised that many aspects of the AHA meeting did not yet apply to me, such as the Job Center, where interviews for academic positions are conducted, or the Book Exhibit where publishers meet with scholars and teachers to discuss manuscripts or books for use in the classroom.

My first AHA, therefore, was largely confined to the scholarly panels (and, I should add as a brief aside, various receptions, where I shamelessly handed out business cards and tried to score five minutes of chat with some of my favorite scholars. I was mostly successful). I attended six different panels over the four days, enjoying some immensely and others not-so-much. On the whole, I was impressed with the range of questions posed by various luminaries in my field, and – especially in the Atlantic History panels I was most interested in – the sweeping state-of-the-field discussions most papers engendered.

Will Blog Posts and Tweets Hurt Junior Scholars? Part 2

Heather Cox Richardson

Untenured scholars are in a funny place: that gap between the old world and the new. Ten years ago, yes, blogging would convince many senior scholars that a junior person was not a serious academic because s/he was catering to a popular audience. Since then, the old world of the academy is crumbling, and while many departments have not yet caught up, others are aware they must move into the twenty-first century.

So will blog posts and tweets hurt your career? Maybe. But they can also help your career in very practical ways.

The first has to do with publishing. The gold standard for employment and for tenure remains a published book. When most senior scholars finished their doctorates, it was almost guaranteed that their dissertations would find academic publishers. In those days, university presses had standing contracts with university libraries that guaranteed automatic sales of a few thousand copies of each monograph that came out from a reputable press. Budget cuts over the last twenty years killed this system. No longer can an academic press be certain that libraries will buy their monographs. This means that they can’t accept everything that comes over the transom, making it harder than ever to get a book contract.

Should Historians Use Twitter? Part 1

Heather Cox Richardson

Yes.

But since I still have more than 136 characters left, here’s my take on the Twitter question:

I have had many conversations lately with historians based in America about whether or not they should use Twitter. There are three complaints about it. First of all, there is a general impression that Twitter users are narcissists who feel obliged to inform the world every time they eat a bagel. Second, there is a sense that it is a waste of valuable time.  Third, younger scholars are concerned that presence on social media might hurt them on the job market.

These are valid concerns, but they are, to my mind, vastly outweighed by the advantages of Twitter both for individual historians and for the profession.

Let’s start with the profession. Yes, there are plenty of people who use Twitter to issue a play-by-play recap of their most mundane activities. But there is no law that says that’s the only way to use the medium. Twitter works best for historians when participants use it to direct followers to content. This works in two ways. Tweets can mention a new archive or recently discovered source or the significance of a date. They can also be used to call attention to a longer blog post or article—or even a book—on a historical topic. Imbedded links make the longer format instantly available.

Henry Steele Commager on America during the Cold War

Randall Stephens

The November 24, 1954 episode of Longines Chronoscope featured Henry Steele Commager (video embedded here).  That was not unusual for

the news and views program, which regularly featured heads of state, intellectuals, novelists, and other notables.  But the subject of the discussion is particularly interesting all these years later.  Maybe that's especially poignant because Commager was one of America's foremost historians at that time. Here he weighs in on American identity, the pressures of conformity, the post-war economic boom, and freedom of expression.  

This was filmed in the wake of the Korean War, the hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll, and not long after the historic Brown vs. Topeka Supreme Court decision.  Red Scare paranoia remained strong. The coming month of December would see the US Senate reprimand Joseph McCarthy, by a vote of 67–22, for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute."

Mitch Daniels’ Email Criticizing Howard Zinn Roundup

Chris Beneke
 

Tom LoBianco, “Daniels Looked to Censor Opponents,” The Associated Press, July 16, 2013

“Emails obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request show Daniels requested that historian and anti-war activist Howard Zinn's writings be

banned from classrooms and asked for a "cleanup" of college courses. In another exchange, the Republican talks about cutting funding for a program run by a local university professor who was one of his sharpest critics. … The emails are raising eyebrows about Daniels' appointment as president of a major research university just months after critics questioned his lack of academic credentials and his hiring by a board of trustees he appointed.”

The Mitch Daniels email, February 9, 2010

“This terrible anti-American academic finally passed away. The obits and commentaries mentioned that his book ‘A People’s History of the United States’ is ‘the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.’ It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. … Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”

92 Purdue faculty members, “An open letter to Mitch Daniels,” July 22, 2013

“We trust our colleagues to introduce young people to the facts of history, but also to the much more difficult, much more essential practices of critical thinking. We trust our K-12 colleagues to know how and when to present challenges to received knowledge and how to encourage their students to judge such challenges for themselves. And we trust them to decide how and when to use controversial scholarship such as Zinn’s in their classrooms. This kind of academic freedom is essential to all levels of education, whether within a tenure system or not.”

Memo to America, Re: Welfare in the Olden Days

Gabriel Loiacono 
 
One evening, chatting with friends from church, one asked me what kind of history I focused on. I told him: the history of welfare in early America.  He said: what welfare in early America?

"The drunkard's progress, or the direct
road to poverty, wretchedness & ruin," 1826.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

I find myself having a conversation like that one more and more these days.  Whether on the left or the right politically, high school grads or Ph.D.s, most Americans I talk to assume that welfare is a creation of the twentieth century: midwifed by Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson.  Those hearty, independent minutemen of the Revolutionary period, they assume, either made the poor find work or relied only on churches for charity. 

Occasionally, this assumption is voiced explicitly in national, political discourse.  For example, in a famous September 12, 2011 Republican Presidential Primary debate, Representative Ron Paul described assistance to the poor in the past thus: “Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.”  Less off-the-cuff, respectable-looking websites will tell you that charity was almost entirely private before FDR, aside from a few dark and dingy poorhouses, which were more effective at driving inmates out than keeping them comfortable.  And it is not only critics of welfare who think this; one can find defenders of welfare describing the U.S.A. as essentially without welfare before FDR.[1]

PhD Applicant Beware

Randall Stephens

The July 11-17 issue of Times Higher Education includes a must-read article for the grad school bound.  In "10 truths a PhD supervisor will never tell you" (11 July 2013) Tara

Brabazon writes: "As a prospective PhD student, you are precious. Institutions want you – they gain funding, credibility and profile through your presence. Do not let them treat you like an inconvenient, incompetent fool. Do your research. Ask questions." Some of her ten tips apply more to the UK setting, but most are right on target for students in the US as well.

Prospective PhD students in history should think long and hard about who they want to work with. Ask around.  Get to know something about the scholar you'd like to be your mentor.  Has this individual shepherded other PhDs?  Do his/her students land good jobs? What is your prospective mentor's publishing record like?  Is he/she a good fit for your project? What will it be like to work with him/her?  Will he/she lend a hand or remain aloof and passive reclusive? 

Brabazon offers some dos and don't and, most of all, warns, "don't let the supervisors grind you down."  Here's one of her particularly helpful pieces of advice:

The key predictor of a supervisor’s ability to guide a postgraduate to completion is a good record of having done so. Ensure that at least one member of your supervisory team is a very experienced supervisor. Anyone can be appointed to supervise. Very few have the ability, persistence, vision, respect and doggedness to move a diversity of students through the examination process. Ensure that the department and university you are considering assign supervisors on the basis of intellectual ability rather than available workload. Supervising students to completion is incredibly difficult.   
 

Read more here.

Mothers in the Academy: How to Do It All*

Heather Cox Richardson

Well, first you need a good household staff.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….

OK, now that we’ve got the hilarity out of the way, how really can mothers take on teaching, research and writing, and children—three incredibly labor-intensive jobs—at the same time?

Let’s start with teaching. Here are a few things I picked up along the way, largely by the seat of my pants as I jumped into a job when my first child (of three) was just shy of three months old. Nothing I learned was intentional, but some of it has stood me in good stead.

The key concept for enabling mothers to survive in the academy is efficiency. And here are some things that helped me to achieve it:

Teach big courses with a wide scope. That sounds counterintuitive, I know. Most people think it takes less energy for junior scholars—and most people with small children will be junior scholars—to teach smaller classes in their specialty. The problem with such specific classes is that they tend to be under enrolled, which means you will constantly have to come up with new courses to keep your numbers up. Repeatedly writing courses from scratch is a huge time-sink.

Mothers in the Academy

Heather Cox Richardson

A recent study shows that having children hurts women in academia at every stage of the profession. This will not be news to any woman who has had to sneak out of a meeting to pick up a child before the daycare fine system kicks in, who has had to explain to an older male colleague that his insistence on scheduling his pet seminar from 4 to 6 guarantees she can never attend no matter how angry it makes him, who has worked all night in the office because search files could not leave the premises and there was no time during the day to get enough time to read them all, and who has heard those chilling words: “You can have tenure or children, but not both.”

There is a push to change the mechanics of university life to address this problem, offering maternity leave to graduate students, for example, and extending tenure clocks for mothers. (More first-floor bathrooms wouldn’t come amiss either, by the way; two flights to a bathroom when you’re eight months pregnant is no picnic.) These steps are important, to be sure. But for historians, even more important to remember is that, by cutting more than half the population from the study of humanity, we are skewing our scholarship so badly it threatens to lose all meaning.

This is not a theoretical argument; it has real-world meaning for the study of history. Having a family—and nurturing it—is crucial for historians. (And this does not seem to me to have to be birth or adopted children, by the way. Investing in community does not require youngsters who actually live in your home.)

Accurate History for Activists

Dan Allosso

I spent last weekend in the Twin Cities, doing a radio interview about my book and giving a talk on freethought history at the monthly meeting of the Minnesota Atheists.  At roughly

the same time, Susan Jacoby was a featured speaker at the second annual Women in Secularism conference in Washington, DC.  A couple of people live-blogged Jacoby’s talk (here and here). Reading these transcripts and thinking about my own weekend as a presenter has changed my perspective on the role of historians in public discourse.

According to a bio produced for Bill Moyers’ website on PBS, Susan Jacoby

began her writing career as a reporter for THE WASHINGTON POST, is the author of five books, including WILD JUSTICE, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, she has been a contributor to THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE NATION, TomPaine.com and the AARP BULLETIN, among other publications. She is also director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York and lives in New York City.

Staying Positive

Craig Gallagher*

It's likely that if you have already applied and been accepted to graduate school to study history, you’ve heard it at least once. You’ll hear it plenty more times before you get that masters or Ph.D. in history you’re putting aside a lot of time and/or money to acquire.

In fact, if your decision to continue your education isn’t just about putting off the working world for a few years and is driven by a desire to change direction and start a new career, you’ll hear it so often that it will feel as though everyone thinks you’re running away to join the circus instead of pursuing another professional qualification.

I’m talking, of course, about that constant refrain that hangs over graduate school like a surly cloud at the moment: “There are no jobs!” Now, I don’t wish to debunk this statement with a much rosier picture of the job market than has hitherto been offered, because I can’t do that.

Not when respected publications like the Atlantic and the Chronicle of Higher Education have lined up to inform us that even seeking a degree in the sciences offers little economic advantage anymore in these straitened times, adding as an afterthought that the outlook for those who hold humanities degrees is downright bleak.

What I suggest, however, is that staying positive in the face of such bleak prospects is essential.

Stressed Much? You’re In Good Company

Eric Schultz
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Earlier this month, the American Psychological Association released a study called Stress in America, concluding that Millennials, 18 to 33-year-old

From "Science Nation - Teens and Stress" (NSF)

Americans, along with Gen Xers (34-47), are the most stressed generations in America.  On a scale of 1-10, the average American defines a healthy level of stress as 3.6 but feels a level of 4.9.  Millennials and Gen Xers are at 5.4, a level the study concludes is “far higher than Boomers’ average stress level of 4.7 and Matures’ [67 and over] of 3.7.”

Thirty-nine percent of Millennials say their stress has increased in the last year, while 52 percent report having lain awake at night in the past month due to stress.  “Millennials and Gen Xers are most likely to say that they are stressed by work, money and job stability, while Boomers and Matures are more likely to be concerned with health issues affecting their families and themselves,” the study concluded.

Dressing for the Academic Job Interview

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, I learned that students—especially female graduate students—spend a lot of energy thinking about the question of appropriate clothing for a job interview. It says something that I didn’t even know this was something graduate students worried about.

The standard advice for job candidates in any field is to dress as if you already had the job. But in academia, that could mean just about anything. So perhaps a better approach is to remember two things. First, your clothing should be unremarkable. And second, you should be comfortable. (Which means your clothing will be unremarkable.)

By “unremarkable,” I simply mean that you do not want your interviewers to notice your clothing. You want them to notice your ideas, your skills, your presentation, your enthusiasm. Ideally, you would be happy if, the day after your interview, they could not recall what you were wearing. You do NOT want the department discussion of your interview to focus on your clothing.

‘Tis the Season for Letters of Recommendation

Lisa Clark Diller

Actually, most of my letters were written last fall, but in late December as I labored over several of them while also trying to enjoy my holidays, I wondered how other people approach the crafting of rec letters.  Since I only teach undergraduates, I don’t have a sense of what graduate schools are really looking for.  I spend a good bit of time at conferences trying to pick the brains of people I meet who sit on admissions committees.  What needs to be included in letters of reference?  What attributes in general are people in grad programs looking for in their graduate students?

I also write many letters of reference for law and medical schools, as our history majors are more likely to go into those fields than they are into social science or humanities programs.  But the letters for the latter types of degrees require more crafting, in my opinion.  It seems like there is some sort of mystery involved in this process—we weren’t taught how to do it in our doctoral studies and yet I have to write dozens per year, whether for internships, jobs or further education.  I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one suffering from a sense of “referee-inferiority.”  I know that these letters can sometimes make a huge difference in whether a student makes it into a program and I want to do justice by them.

Here are some of the specific tactics I’ve taken, often shaped by conversations with those who are in charge of reading such letters of recommendation.

From the Pages of Historically Speaking: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr. on Being a Historian

"On Being a Historian: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr."
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa
Historically Speaking (September 2012)

Historian James Banner's new book Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is an insightful and often provocative overview of the current state of the discipline of history. Drawing on more than fifty years experience both within and outside academic walls, Banner argues that while there is much to celebrate, the discipline needs to acknowledge and confront a number of serious challenges. Banner, the author of many books and essays on history, education, and public affairs, is currently working on a book about revisionist history. Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed Banner in July 2012.

Donald A. Yerxa: For the benefit of our readers, would you briefly summarize your central argument in Being a Historian?

James M. Banner, Jr.: The basic one, from which the book descends, is that history is a discipline—a distinct domain of knowledge— pursued in many professions. That is, there's no "history profession," as we colloquially call it, as such. That argument's corollary is that academic history, while still the center of gravity of the discipline, does not embody all of historians' knowledge, institutions, or practices. Of course, we know this, but our terminology and the way we relate the history of the discipline haven't caught up with the facts—much to the cost of reputation, reward, self-respect, and, most importantly, the training of historians. I thus also argue that, while the preparation of historians has substantially improved in recent decades, it remains deficient. That argument, that we have farther to go in preparing historians, is like an organ point in a passage of music, the rumbling contention of the entire book. Finally, I argue that historians (like, I must say, sociologists and biologists, attorneys and engineers) must seek more guidance, not from the idols of the tribe—academic professors—or from within the conventional template of graduate student preparation—how principally to become an academic scholar-teacher—but from within themselves, from their particular dispositions, gratifications, aims, and gifts.

Advice for the Job Season: Interviewing

Heather Cox Richardson

My primary advice for interviewing is to tell candidates that THE SEARCH COMMITTEE MEMBERS WANT YOU TO DO WELL!!! Please, please hear that. It is excruciating to have candidates treat an interview like a comprehensive exam before hostile examiners.

I promise you, we did not just slog through hundreds of pages of recommendation letters and your prose, pick you out of hundreds of applicants, fly to some god-forsaken icy city, and swill cheap coffee and bagels in a cold hotel room waiting for you because we are eager to humiliate you. While it is possible that there is someone in that room who doesn’t like your work, the majority of the committee has gone to the mat to get you onto the interview list, and those search committee members are secretly praying that you will hit a home run. They are on your side.

You may well not know which members those are, though, so do not make any assumptions about who are your friends and who are potential enemies on a committee. Treat everyone as interested colleagues. Even the old jerk in the corner asking impossible questions might be on your side. And if not, the chances are good that everyone else in the room recognizes that s/he’s an old curmudgeon, and are hoping that you will handle her/him with aplomb.

Advice for the Job Season: How to Think About Applying for a Job, Part 1

Heather Cox Richardson

The academic job market is in full swing. That’s the good news.

And as usual, there are way too few jobs. That’s the bad.

At this point, I’ve spent significant time on both sides of the hiring equation, and have a few suggestions for navigating the job search.

First of all, you almost certainly will not get your dream job. But please, please hear this: THIS IS NOT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A GOOD CANDIDATE!!! It is because there are too few jobs. The C.V.s that come in for a search these days are frighteningly impressive. Yours is one of them. When committees have to choose whom to interview, I promise you they do not look at your materials and say: “Gee, why did this loser apply?!” They say: “And yet another terrific scholar. Fortunately for us, his work doesn’t quite fit what we’re looking for.” And they put your application aside.

While this is incredibly depressing when you’re going through it—and many schools contribute to the darkness by ignoring you, announcing the interview schedule before informing you you’re not on it, and so on—there is one important light to remember. YOU DO NOT WANT A JOB THAT IS NOT A GOOD FIT FOR YOU. I know, I know, you want any job right now. But actually, you really don’t. Unlike many professions, it’s very hard for academics to change institutions. Try moving your family across the country for a job only to tell your partner six months later you hate your department and are going back on the job market to apply for a job on the other side of the country. Not a good idea. If a search committee doesn’t jump at the chance to interview you, you don’t want to interview them, either. The fit would have been a bad one.

Often, by the way, you won’t be able to tell whether or not your work is a good fit with a department. A scholar of the Taiping would seem, for example, to be a good candidate for an advertised job in nineteenth-century Asia. But that same (hypothetical) ad will not have mentioned that the department has a European scholar who is fiercely protective of his favorite course on world revolutions that highlights the Taiping. So even if you look at the description and think the fit should have been perfect, remember that there could have been a wide range of internal reasons you were not.

So if you’re almost certainly not going to get the job you want, or maybe any job, what’s the point in applying? You should consider jobs outside of the academy (more on that later), but you will have a better relationship with the academic job market if you reorient how you think about it.

If you can, try not to see applying for a position just as a job application. It is advertising. You are letting people who are in a position to appreciate the importance of your work know who you are and what you do. Until now, you have interacted primarily with just a handful of scholars, and most of them are at your own university. It’s the right time for you to take your scholarship to the world, and there is no better way to get an audience for it than to hand your materials to specialists around the country who are on search committees. They may not be able even to interview you because you do not fit the job at hand, but they may still be impressed with your materials. They might well remember you when someone asks for a recommendation for a conference panelist, or tell their editors that you have written an interesting manuscript and should be on their radar screens.

The only way to navigate such a bleak job market is to recognize that historians are a large community of scholars—to which you already belong—and that we are eager to hear what you’re bringing to the table.

Lessons From the Archives

Philip White

This past weekend, I spent a pleasant morning at the research room of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum in Independence, Missouri. It was my third trip there, and the first for a new Book Project That Cannot Be Named. In the past couple of years, my research has also taken me to the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri (the town where Winston Churchill delivered his "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946), University of Missouri-Kansas City and, more exotically, the Churchill Archives Centre (yes folks, that’s the British spelling) in Cambridge, England.

I am far from a master researcher, but I have picked up some tips from others who’ve been on the road, and through sheer, exasperating trial and error. Here are a few of these:

1) Take a Digital Camera, Extra Battery, Tripod and Clicker Thingy

The days of me taking my crappy old Canon point-and-shoot camera, with its tiny lens that can’t take in a full legal size document even if I was suspended from the ceiling (think Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible) and manually adjusting the angle each time, are over. I’m going to invest in a "superzoom" model, tripod, extra battery and the clicker thingy that lets you take pics without touching the camera. I saw two guys using this technique recently and one told me that creating such a setup was the best advice a professor ever gave him. Bravo, prof! By using it, the guy avoided using the photocopier (you’re only allowed to photograph the first page of original, multi-page docs) and took each snap quickly, almost like he was some kind of hyper-efficient researching humanoid. Me? My POS Canon ran out of battery half way through, and I had to resort to reproducing multi-page letters through shorthand. Aaarrghhh! Never again.

2) Form a Relationship with an Archivist

I’m not suggesting a romantic dalliance, but rather a courteous professional exchange between the seeker of knowledge and the one who knows where it resides. If the archivist is on your side they can suggest boxes and folders (and sometimes even specific documents), pull these for you in advance so you can get going as soon as you arrive, and follow up with further suggestions later. Just don’t treat them like Google or act imperious, and do send follow up thank you notes and e-mails. Archivists are there to help respectful researchers, but they’re not part of a servant class. 

3) Avoid Rabbit Holes

This is a case of "do what I say, not what I do." Even going into an archive room with a tightly focused, organized wish list is no guarantee of a successful session. The trouble – or, at least, my trouble, is that every document, memo and letter is interesting in its own way. It’s all too easy to get sidetracked and look up at the clock to find you’ve burned an hour going down a fascinating yet completely useless path that in no way advances your project. Focus, I say, focus!

4) Process Your Materials ASAP

When you’ve worn your brain to a frazzle with several hours or, if you have a forgiving spouse/partner/whatever, days of intensely focused research, it’s tempting to throw your hard won materials in a box and forget about them for a few weeks. The problem with this is that even if you’ve taken solid notes and prioritized your harvest, you will forget certain intangibles and details that you’d recall if you knuckled down for a while and scanned and/or filed what you’ve found in the appropriate manner. Following the first two steps of an efficient research and writing process – capture and organize – in quick succession makes it easier to get to the third step – retrieve – in the best possible way. The same goes for online research and the use of tools such as Evernote, which I find most useful if I create folders and use tags/keywords.

5) Keep Your Research Away From Small Children

Let’s just say that you’ll only let your five-year-old and two-year-old get into your archival materials once. Hopefully they won’t tear, eat or throw away what they find. Research commandment # 5: Thou shalt lock thy office door at all times.

David L. Chappell Responds to Ross Douthat on Religion and the Civil Rights Movement

.
On April 8 the New York Times published Ross Douthat's op-ed "Divided by God." In part Douthat argued that "religious common ground has all but disappeared" in modern America. (In response, Mark Silk penned a step-by-step rebuttal here.) Toward the end of Douthat's op-ed he discussed the common theological ground that blacks and whites once shared, which he thinks helped end desegregation. In an aside Douthat mentions the work of David L. Chappell, Rothbaum Professor of Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma.

In this guest post Chappell responds to Douthat's reading of Chappell's A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (UNC Press, 2003). Along with that award-winning book, Chappell has written a number of articles and essays (some with the Journal of the Historical Society and Historically Speaking) on religion in modern America, the civil rights movement, politics, and race. He is also the author of Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). His next book, Waking from the Dream: The Battle over Martin Luther King’s Legacy (Random House), will be out in 2013.

Setting the Record Straight
David L. Chappell

I am grateful that Ross Douthat mentioned my book, A Stone of Hope, favorably. ("Divided by God," April 8.) With the best of intentions, however, Mr. Douthat got my story wrong. According to him, I claim that civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s used "moral and theological arguments to effectively shame many [white] southerners into accepting desegregation." That is a familiar version of the story, but the record does not support it.

Civil rights leaders did not shame white southerners but rather undermined their social foundations. The white South's churches could not defend segregation with a straight face, and that hurt the segregationist cause. There is a big difference, however, between being unable to muster a unifying and inspiring defense of an institution and being "shamed" into dismantling it. From beginning to end, I argued in my book, the civil rights movement used political coercion: with boycotts and mass demonstrations, the movement forced white southerners to give up their special privileges against their will.

The civil rights' leaders religious fervor inspired their own black, southern, Christian ranks to rise up out of their despair, fear, and in many cases resignation. But that is as far as the persuasive power of the leaders’ words carried. Rank and filers in the movement earned the respect, and often the awed admiration, of northern black and white liberals, because they were willing to risk their lives, to do jail time, and to endure the clubs, dogs, and fire hoses.

The organized force of black southerners' collective economic power produced the movement's first great victories. Further sustained demonstrations induced the federal government to apply the full force needed to end Jim Crow. The government realized that the only way to restore order and a good investment climate in the South was to enforce the Constitution, nearly a hundred years after it was amended to include black southerners. Thus religion played a key role, but political force carried the day. (So I wrote in my book, at any rate, and I felt I had to correct the record.)

Superabundance

Chris Beneke
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NPR recently aired a story on the tower of 7,000 Abraham Lincoln-centered books (they’re actually replicas and amount to roughly half of the 15,000 total Lincoln volumes in existence) that now extends 34 feet above the floor of Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. It’s an arresting sight, a soaring tribute to our most important president and the historians who have written about him.

What this immense stack portends to a graduate student considering a career in Lincoln studies, I can only dimly fathom. It’s worth noting that there was no foundation of journal articles here; just books. Most of us won’t have reason to find the Lincoln book tower so daunting. We spend our professional lives erecting theses upon much less imposing and much more manageable stacks of historiography.

Still, the Lincoln Tower heralds an increasingly universal condition among historians that we might term superabundance. The problem derives from the formidable supply of primary sources—thanks to Google Books and other online repositories of historical texts—as well as our output of monographs, journal articles, and dissertations. As a result, what often makes historical research challenging today has less to do with the scarcity of primary sources or their geographic dispersal than the mini-towers of primary and secondary sources that we need to sort through on our way to an original argument. Superabundance is a first-world-type problem in that it mainly afflicts the comfortable and its direct consequences, which may include regular bouts of ennui, are far from catastrophic. Still, it’s an “issue,” as Americans like to describe their non-fatal maladies.

Historians aren’t alone in confronting the scholarly challenges posed by superabundance. Nearly every other academic field is afflicted by its own prodigious production. In a 2009 issue of Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein reported that “[f]rom 1986 to 2008, Wordsworth collected 2,257 books, chapters, dissertations, etc. Faulkner came in at 2,781, Milton at 3,294, Whitman at 1,509, Woolf at 3,217, and Shakespeare at 18,799.”

No doubt many thousands of illuminating volumes on Lincoln and Shakespeare are yet to be written. But how many more—and at what rate? This is the weightier question posed by our own scholarly superabundance. The good embodied in that indomitable stack of Lincoln volumes is not the profit that some ideal reader might reap from digesting every single one of them, because no sane person would—and certainly not a person who hoped to ever write anything themselves. Moreover, and this warrants more than passing mention, only a handful of libraries can now afford to own more than a fraction of the total.

Recognizing that humanities research contributes a great deal to the public good and that every teaching historian should have extensive and regular experience with it, would higher education be any worse if only 2000 works on Lincoln were produced over the next decade, as opposed to 2500? Would our public culture suffer? Over the last three years or so, Mark Bauerlein has been unsettling Chronicle readers with questions of just this sort. In particular, he asks: Might there be diminishing marginal returns in humanities scholarship? And might the sheer volume of this production bury high quality work under a heap of scholarly mediocrity?

Last May, Stephen J. Mexal countered Bauerlein with a stout defense of research quantity, arguing from the twin premises that 1) “we cannot know in advance which projects will matter, or in what way. The easiest way to account for this uncertainty is to produce as much work as possible and let the future worry about quality or utility” and 2) the peer review process is indefinitely scalable and “a larger community of active scholars means a stronger, more democratic community of ‘peers’ to perform the valuable work of peer review.” (For another astute consideration along these lines—comparing scholarly projects to the risks inherent in new business enterprises—see Johann Neem’s post, “The Value of Useless Research.”)

Mexal and Neem make a convincing case for generous funding of a wide-range of humanities research, which I’m pretty sure Bauerlein also favors. But Bauerlein’s argument is really about priorities. It assumes a resource-neutral environment in which the superabundance represented by the tower of Lincoln books is not a reason to halt, or even significantly curtail research, but simply to reevaluate our priorities as scholars and teachers. Perhaps wary of too close an association with market economics, Bauerlein calls it “redistribution.” What he’s really pointing to is the need for a realignment of incentives. It boils down to this: If we’re going to improve the quality of higher education and expand its impact, we may need to reward interaction with students more generously and reward individual research quantity less so.