The Dartmouth Observer |
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Commentary on politics, history, culture, and literature by two Dartmouth graduates and their buddies
WHO WE ARE Chien Wen Kung graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004 and majored in History and English. He is currently a civil servant in Singapore. Someday, he hopes to pursue a PhD in History. John Stevenson graduated from Dartmouth College in 2005 with a BA in Government and War and Peace Studies. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He hopes to pursue a career in teaching and research. Kwame A. Holmes did not graduate from Dartmouth. However, after graduating from Florida A+M University in 2003, he began a doctorate in history at the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign. Having moved to Chicago to write a dissertation on Black-Gay-Urban life in Washington D.C., he attached himself to the leg of John Stevenson and is thrilled to sporadically blog on the Dartmouth Observer. Feel free to email him comments, criticisms, spelling/grammar suggestions. BLOGS/WEBSITES WE READ The American Scene Arts & Letters Daily Agenda Gap Stephen Bainbridge Jack Balkin Becker and Posner Belgravia Dispatch Black Prof The Corner Demosthenes Daniel Drezner Five Rupees Free Dartmouth Galley Slaves Instapundit Mickey Kaus The Little Green Blog Left2Right Joe Malchow Josh Marshall OxBlog Bradford Plumer Political Theory Daily Info Andrew Samwick Right Reason Andrew Seal Andrew Sullivan Supreme Court Blog Tapped Tech Central Station UChicago Law Faculty Blog Volokh Conspiracy Washington Monthly Winds of Change Matthew Yglesias ARCHIVES BOOKS WE'RE READING CW's Books John's Books STUFF Site Feed    |
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Schama on contemporary historians Columbia historian Simon Schama is accusing his fellow academics of making the subject dull by publishing works too full of "scientific data" and "obsessive footnotes." Says Prof. Schama: "History's adventure has become a bit lost...It's not as explosive or exciting as it used to be. What we need to recover is our reckless literary courage." One of his critics, J. L. Nelson, misses the point when she says that "History is very much more diverse in the things it covers now...There are more people studying history - it's more popular than ever." Schama is making a qualitative and not a quantitative argument here. Sure, there may be more people studying History nowadays, but just what are they studying? What do they hope to achieve by publishing books that no one except a handful of fellow specialists read? Popularity is not a measure of quality; given the current state of the job market, it may not even be a good measure of how interested people are in the subject. That said, the kind of history that Schama writes and advocates is not without its deficiencies. Popular historians - and Schama is no exception - frequently get stuff wrong and make things up. It's to be expected when you're rushing to meet a deadline and employ armies of graduate students to do research for you. The bottom line is that historians have a dual responsibility: 1) to their material and 2) to their readers, who constitute not just academics but intelligent laymen as well. History, unlike, say, Chemistry, has a sizable public role: it supplies the material essential for democratic discourse, and thus cannot afford to become either overly academic, or overly populist. |