Category History Job Market
Half way to Winning my Bet
A little over 5 years ago, I made a bet against conservatives in academia. I suggested that it would be near impossible for an Ivy League history department to hire a conservative in a tenure track position. Jeffrey Miron, senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University, took me up on the bet. The terms are […]
Tracking the 66 Fulbrighters who Studied History in the Netherlands
The Fulbright program preserves a list of all previous recipients of its grant, and this data is searchable on its website here. So, I selected for all Americans who received Fulbright grants to study history in the Netherlands during their doctoral program of study. I did not include persons whose grants were awarded specifically for […]
Book Review: David Kaiser, A Life in History (Mount Greylock Books, 2019)
David Kaiser, A Life in History (Mount Greylock Books, 2019) This autobiography is organized around a central question that preoccupies the author’s life: “Why could I not get tenure in a history department at an elite university?” The answer, Kaiser suggests, is two-fold. First, generational conflict between the Silent Generation and his own Boomer Generation […]
Book Review: Marshall T. Poe, How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History of History (Zero Books, 2018)
There have been a rash of history books recently with incorrect titles. Sam Weinburg’s Why Study History when its Already on Your Phone has very little to do with justifying learning of history in the age of the smart phone, and Alex Rosenburg’s How History Gets it Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addictions to Stories […]
The State of the History Discipline (and where have the good history blogs gone?)
A new report has historians in a tizzy. The history discipline has lost more undergraduate majors than any other discipline in the country. Meanwhile, over at the History News Network half of the lead articles (1, 2, 3, and 4) and almost every blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ) is about Trump […]
The Vanishing Academic Conservative Historian (Part 2: the bet is accepted)
Alright, folks, I’ve received quite a few reactions to my post from July 4th. It seems that all you have to do is mention politics in academia and everyone gets into a tizzy. If only Dutch history were so popular. At any rate, someone has taken me up on the bet, that within the next […]
The Vanishing Conservative Academic Historian
Let’s say you are a young conservative undergraduate, and you would like to go to grad school in history. Where would you look for a friendly advisor? If you are considering an Ivy League school, you might want to think again. According to research by Langbert, Quain, and Klein, available data indicates a ratio of […]
Interview with a Historian
In my ramblings through historical materials on youtube, I came across this fantastics Interview with historian Sir Brian Harrison. Harrison, former Professor of History at Oxford, talks about coming up as a history student in the 1950s in elite British circles. He reflects a bit on the uniqueness of his situation, and his surprise at […]
History job market experiences: the un-read application
As a historian, I try to focus my attention on the deeper past (say more than 50 years ago) and not dwell on my own history. The history of my experiences in grad school and on the job market might have something to teach others, however. With this post, I’m initiating a new category on […]
Graduate Students and Elite Historian Networks
It is my intuition that the best-placed young historians today come from a small set of elite universities. But, as Lavar Burton would say, don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the 2015 article by Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore, “Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks” which shows that the […]
Michael J Douma 