Category The History Discipline
Slavery, Capitalism, and the New Moralism
For the past six years or so, I have been researching American slavery, just at the time when this topic has become a political hot potato. I’ve become worried that moralistic language and attitudes, however well intended, will interfere with scholarship and make it more difficult to research certain aspects of slavery, or relate certain […]
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 […]
History’s Footnote Problem
According to a newly published article, a quarter of all citations in peer-reviewed works on history “do not substantiate the propositions for which they are cited.” The authors call this an “error rate” or “quotation error.” No historian’s writing is perfectly free of such errors. Sometimes we write down the wrong date of a source, […]
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 […]
Venture Capitalists and Venture Academics
Some academics spend their whole lives focused on just one topic, but others branch out in many directions. Here is my attempt to coin the term “venture academics” to explain the growing phenomenon of academics who invest in many, and varied higher-risk, higher-reward research topics.
How many “reads” does a typical academic article get?
I frequently hear that academic scholarship is less important than writing for the public because only two reviewers and the author ever read the typical academic article. Certain articles in pay-to-play journals probably are subject to that criticism. And articles in very niche journals might also be poorly read. But if you are writing for […]
Should an academic agree to write an article for an encyclopedia?
When evaluating a CV, an encyclopedia article should count as negative one publication. (This doesn’t apply of course for something like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). My reasons: (1) No one reads encyclopedias anymore. (2) The editors of encyclopedias are usually washed up Associate Professors who don’t publish peer-reviewed materials any more, or who never […]
What is “Dad History”? Giving a Label to a Popular Genre of History Writing
About a week ago, there was an active post on the r/History subreddit about “Dad History.” Some of the responses suggest that the original post had just coined the term “Dad History”, and this may very well be the case, because I find little use of the term elsewhere online. Dad History is mostly “Blokes, […]
Michael J Douma 