Happy New Year! We took last week off while so many of us were in New Orleans for AHA, so the set of links covers just a bit more than the past seven days. From here on we should be back to our regular schedule every Sunday morning.
Tag Archives: academia
The AHA and the Future of the Profession
This past weekend, historians from all over the country invaded the Big Easy for the American Historical Association’s 2013 Annual Meeting. Thanks to Twitter, those of us unfortunate enough to not be in attendance were kept abreast of the discussions occurring regarding the state of the field. Most notably, the traditional AHA Presidential Address by outgoing President William Cronon has sparked much debate among historians as well as articles in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Before that, Cronon oversaw a panel entitled “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age,” which explored academic historians’ failures to reach the general public and the profession itself failing to sufficiently adapt to the rise of digital technology. Changes to the profession discussed included a renewed focus on storytelling and narrative to better engage the general reader in academic history, weighing digital history equally with print history (when of equal value), and rethinking the monograph as the standard mode of delivery of academic historians’ work. Due to my lack of attendance, I am indebted to the excellent Twitter and blog coverage of these events by John Fea, Lincoln Mullen, and others, as well as the History News Network‘s video recording of Cronon’s address (see below). Continue reading
Interviews with Historians: Edwin G. Burrows
Note: This post initiates one of our first special features, “Interviews with Historians.” The series is meant to give established historians a chance to discuss their work and share their thoughts on a range of topics with the next generation of early Americanists. The Junto would especially like to thank Ted Burrows for agreeing to be the subject of the series’ first interview.
Edwin G. Burrows is the Pulitzer-Prize winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, a narrative history covering the city’s founding by the Dutch through consolidation. After receiving his BA from the University of Michigan in 1964, Burrows received his PhD from Columbia University in 1972, where he worked with Eric McKitrick. Soon thereafter, he took a position in the History Department at Brooklyn College, where he has remained for the last forty years. Over the course of two decades, he co-wrote Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 with fellow Columbia PhD, Mike Wallace, which won them the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1999. In 2008, his second book, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War, was published by Basic Books and won the 2009 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award for the best book written each year on the American Revolution. In the interest of full disclosure, Ted served as my “faculty mentor” in the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies. Continue reading
Jeffersongate: The Case of Henry Wiencek
On October 16, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Henry Wiencek’s third book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. His previous works both dealt with slavery, most notably his well-received An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. By contrast, his latest work has come under fire from leading Jefferson scholars around the country. Within days of the book’s release, highly critical reviews by academics appeared in online magazines. These reviews started online exchanges that have played out over the last two months and continue to do so.
Historians much more up to the task than myself—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Jan Lewis, and Lucia (Cinder) Stanton—have called into question Wiencek’s use of sources (both primary and secondary), his overall interpretation, and his motives. Therefore, I will not recapitulate all of them here. I have included a chronology with links to all the relevant articles below, with J.L. Bell’s posts at Boston 1775 providing excellent summaries of the most contentious points. Instead, I want to touch on two things: the main part of Wiencek’s argument and how it reflects his broader approach to history and the effects of Wiencek’s treatment of the historiography, both having to do with the larger relationship between popular and academic history. Continue reading
The Junto 