The Revival of Quantification: Reflections on Old New Histories
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Book Spring 2006.Qxd
Anthony Grafton History’s postmodern fates Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/54/1829123/daed.2006.135.2.54.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 As the twenty-½rst century begins, his- in the mid-1980s to almost one thousand tory occupies a unique, but not an envi- now. But the vision of a rise in the num- able, position among the humanistic dis- ber of tenure-track jobs that William ciplines in the United States. Every time Bowen and others evoked, and that lured Clio examines her reflection in the mag- many young men and women into grad- ic mirror of public opinion, more voices uate school in the 1990s, has never mate- ring out, shouting that she is the ugliest rialized in history. The market, accord- Muse of all. High school students rate ingly, seems out of joint–almost as bad- history their most boring subject. Un- ly so as in the years around 1970, when dergraduates have fled the ½eld with production of Ph.D.s ½rst reached one the enthusiasm of rats leaving a sinking thousand or more per year just as univer- ship. Thirty years ago, some 5 percent sities and colleges went into economic of all undergraduates majored in histo- crisis. Many unemployed holders of doc- ry. Nowadays, around 2 percent do so. torates in history hold their teachers and Numbers of new Ph.D.s have risen, from universities responsible for years of op- a low of just under ½ve hundred per year pression, misery, and wasted effort that cannot be usefully reapplied in other careers.1 Anthony Grafton, a Fellow of the American Acad- Those who succeed in obtaining ten- emy since 2002, is Henry Putnam University Pro- ure-track positions, moreover, may still fessor of History at Princeton University and ½nd themselves walking a stony path. -
Disraeli and the Early Victorian ‘History Wars’ – Daniel Laurie-Fletcher
Disraeli and the Early Victorian ‘History Wars’ – Daniel Laurie-Fletcher FJHP Volume 25 (2008 ) Disraeli and the Early Victorian ‘History Wars’ Daniel Laurie-Fletcher Flinders University The American historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb, once put the question: ‘Who now reads Macaulay?’ Her own reply to the rhetorical question was: Who, that is, except those who have a professional interest in him–and professional in a special sense: not historians who might be expected to take pride in one of their most illustrious ancestors, but only those who happen to be writing treatises about him. In fact, most professional historians have long since given up reading Macaulay, as they have given up writing the kind of history he wrote and thinking about it as he did. i The kind of history and thinking Himmelfarb was referring to is the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ which is one based on a grand narrative that demonstrated a path of inevitable political and economic progress, a view made famous by the Whig politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859). ii In his History of England: From the Accession of James II (1848-1860), Macaulay maintained that the development of political institutions of the nation had brought increased liberties accompanied by the growth of economic prosperity. Macaulay’s study was begun when the educated classes of early Victorian Britain held a widespread fear of a French-style revolution during a time of extensive social, economic and political change. Many, in order to cope with such changes, looked to British history to yield role models as well as cautionary tales of what to avoid in creating a better society. -
I^Igtorical ^Siisociation
American i^igtorical ^siisociation SEVENTY-SECOND ANNUAL MEETING NEW YORK HEADQUARTERS: HOTEL STATLER DECEMBER 28, 29, 30 Bring this program with you Extra copies 25 cents Please be certain to visit the hook exhibits The Culture of Contemporary Canada Edited by JULIAN PARK, Professor of European History and International Relations at the University of Buffalo THESE 12 objective essays comprise a lively evaluation of the young culture of Canada. Closely and realistically examined are literature, art, music, the press, theater, education, science, philosophy, the social sci ences, literary scholarship, and French-Canadian culture. The authors, specialists in their fields, point out the efforts being made to improve and consolidate Canada's culture. 419 Pages. Illus. $5.75 The American Way By DEXTER PERKINS, John L. Senior Professor in American Civilization, Cornell University PAST and contemporary aspects of American political thinking are illuminated by these informal but informative essays. Professor Perkins examines the nature and contributions of four political groups—con servatives, liberals, radicals, and socialists, pointing out that the continu ance of healthy, active moderation in American politics depends on the presence of their ideas. 148 Pages. $2.75 A Short History of New Yorh State By DAVID M.ELLIS, James A. Frost, Harold C. Syrett, Harry J. Carman HERE in one readable volume is concise but complete coverage of New York's complicated history from 1609 to the present. In tracing the state's transformation from a predominantly agricultural land into a rich industrial empire, four distinguished historians have drawn a full pic ture of political, economic, social, and cultural developments, giving generous attention to the important period after 1865. -
University of Oklahoma Libraries Western History Collections Ralph
University of Oklahoma Libraries Western History Collections Ralph H. Records Collection Records, Ralph Hayden. Papers, 1871–1968. 2 feet. Professor. Magazine and journal articles (1946–1968) regarding historiography, along with a typewritten manuscript (1871–1899) by L. S. Records, entitled “The Recollections of a Cowboy of the Seventies and Eighties,” regarding the lives of cowboys and ranchers in frontier-era Kansas and in the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma Territory, including a detailed account of Records’s participation in the land run of 1893. ___________________ Box 1 Folder 1: Beyond The American Revolutionary War, articles and excerpts from the following: Wilbur C. Abbott, Charles Francis Adams, Randolph Greenfields Adams, Charles M. Andrews, T. Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., Thomas Anburey, Clarence Walroth Alvord, C.E. Ayres, Robert E. Brown, Fred C. Bruhns, Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Lotus Belcher, Henry Belcher, Adolph B. Benson, S.L. Blake, Charles Knowles Bolton, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Julian P. Boyd, Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Sanborn C. Brown, William Hand Browne, Jane Bryce, Edmund C. Burnett, Alice M. Baldwin, Viola F. Barnes, Jacques Barzun, Carl Lotus Becker, Ruth Benedict, Charles Borgeaud, Crane Brinton, Roger Butterfield, Edwin L. Bynner, Carl Bridenbaugh Folder 2: Douglas Campbell, A.F. Pollard, G.G. Coulton, Clarence Edwin Carter, Harry J. Armen and Rexford G. Tugwell, Edward S. Corwin, R. Coupland, Earl of Cromer, Harr Alonzo Cushing, Marquis De Shastelluz, Zechariah Chafee, Jr. Mellen Chamberlain, Dora Mae Clark, Felix S. Cohen, Verner W. Crane, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Cromwell, Arthur yon Cross, Nellis M. Crouso, Russell Davenport Wallace Evan Daview, Katherine B. -
Book Reviews and Book Notes
BOOK REVIEWS AND BOOK NOTES EDITED BY NORMAN B. WILKINSON lVe.xed and Troubled Englishmen, T590-i642. By Carl Bridenbaugh. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Pp. 487. $10.00.) In this enormously erudite and lengthy volume Carl Bridenbaugh investi- gates the characters, habits, and activities of Englishmen in the half cen- tury before war erupted between King and Parliament, and during which "The First Swarming" and "The Puritan Hegira" took place. He has explored the visual remains of an earlier England, consulted a vast nunm- ber of archives, libraries, and repositories, and scrutinized the evidence afforded by literature, secular and ecclesiastical records, the Statute Book, pamphlets, tracts and sermons. Purely demographical statistics and analysis are not stressed, nor is any attempt made to compare the condition and motivation of English with other colonial peoples, though an occasional note reveals some interest in this. What has been most successfully achieved is a panorama more vivid and extensive than hitherto available, of the island inhabitants on the eve of colonization. The author's easy command of varied material and lively style make this readily and agreeably perceived and understood. Students of both English and early American history should be grateful for the series of pictures of the people in country and town; their ranks of society, health and disease, daily routine and food, community partic- ipation, and their sins against God and man. Three chapters deal with "The Rulers and the Ruled"; "The Faiths of Englishmen"; and "Educated and Cultured English." The chief concern throughout is the portraying of the vexatious and troubles besetting the everyday life of ordinary people in the early seventeenth century; purely constitutional, political and ideological controversies appear only inferentially. -
The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009
PHILANTHROPY / EVENT TRANSCRIPT The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009 By Irving Kristol Edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb February 2, 2011 Panel Discussion of The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009 By Irving Kristol Edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb Wednesday, February 2, 2011 Table of Contents Ken Weinstein 1 Amy Kass 1 Charles Krauthammer 3 Irwin Stelzer 7 Leon Kass 11 William Kristol 15 Q&A 23 Gertrude Himmelfarb (“Bea Kristol”) 30 Speaker Biographies 31 © 2011 Hudson Institute Hudson Institute is a nonpartisan, independent policy research organization. Founded in 1961, Hudson is celebrating a half century of forging ideas that promote security, prosperity, and freedom. www.hudson.org Ken Weinstein Good afternoon. I’m Ken Weinstein, CEO of Hudson Institute. I’d like to welcome everyone to today’s Book Forum on the newly published The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays 1942- 2009, by Irving Kristol, which has been edited by the redoubtable Gertrude Himmelfarb. The book is available for sale in the back at the discounted price of $20, and I urge all of you to get one before you leave. This is a truly remarkable book, one that shows the breadth and the depth of Irving Kristol’s thought over some 67 years, which you’ll be hearing about shortly. My colleagues and I frankly feel privileged that Hudson Institute is the venue for today’s book forum, and I should thank the book’s editor, Gertrude Himmelfarb, for giving us this auspicious honor. (Applause.) We have a truly distinguished panel, who will offer their reflections shortly, but before we get underway I should note that this is Hudson Institute’s 50th anniversary year, and to mark this occasion, the Institute has begun a 50th anniversary seminar series, and today’s exceptional Book Forum is the second event in this series. -
In 193X, Constance Rourke's Book American Humor Was Reviewed In
OUR LIVELY ARTS: AMERICAN CULTURE AS THEATRICAL CULTURE, 1922-1931 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jennifer Schlueter, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2007 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Thomas Postlewait, Adviser Professor Lesley Ferris Adviser Associate Professor Alan Woods Graduate Program in Theatre Copyright by Jennifer Schlueter c. 2007 ABSTRACT In the first decades of the twentieth century, critics like H.L. Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks vociferously expounded a deep and profound disenchantment with American art and culture. At a time when American popular entertainments were expanding exponentially, and at a time when European high modernism was in full flower, American culture appeared to these critics to be at best a quagmire of philistinism and at worst an oxymoron. Today there is still general agreement that American arts “came of age” or “arrived” in the 1920s, thanks in part to this flogging criticism, but also because of the powerful influence of European modernism. Yet, this assessment was not, at the time, unanimous, and its conclusions should not, I argue, be taken as foregone. In this dissertation, I present crucial case studies of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) and Gilbert Seldes (1893-1970), two astute but understudied cultural critics who saw the same popular culture denigrated by Brooks or Mencken as vibrant evidence of exactly the modern American culture they were seeking. In their writings of the 1920s and 1930s, Rourke and Seldes argued that our “lively arts” (Seldes’ formulation) of performance—vaudeville, minstrelsy, burlesque, jazz, radio, and film—contained both the roots of our own unique culture as well as the seeds of a burgeoning modernism. -
Postmodern Theory of History: a Critique
Postmodern Theory of History: A Critique Trygve R. Tholfsen Teachers College, Columbia University 1. Among the more striking spinoffs of postmodernism in the past fifteen years or so has been an arresting theory of history. On the assumption that "the historical text is an object in itself, made entirely from language, and thus subject to the interrogations devised by the sciences of language use from ancient rhetoric to modern semiotics"1, postmodernists have set out to enlighten historians about their discipline. From that perspective, they have emphasized the intrinsic fictionality of historical writing, derided the factualist empiricism that purportedly governs the work of professional historians, dismissed the ideal of objectivity as a myth, and rejected the truth claims of traditional historiography. Historians have been invited to accept the postmodern approach as a means to critical self reflection and to the improvement of practice. Some postmodern theorists have taken a more overtly anti-histori• cal line that bears directly on important questions of theory and prac• tice. Rejecting the putative "autonomy" claims of professional histo• riography, they dismiss the notion of a distinctively "historical" mode of understanding the past. On this view, the study of origins and de• velopment is of limited analytical value; and the historicist principle of historical specificity or individuality is the remnant of a venerable tradition that has been displaced. It follows that historians ought to give up their claim to special authority in the study of the past. This article will concentrate on the postmodern rejection of the notion that the past has to be understood "historically." 1 Hans KELLNER, "Introduction: Describing Re-Descriptions" in Frank ANKERSMIT and Hans KELLNER (eds.), A New Philosophy of History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. -
Robert C. Darnton Shelby Cullom Davis ‘30 Professor of European History Princeton University
Robert C. Darnton Shelby Cullom Davis ‘30 Professor of European History Princeton University President 1999 LIJ r t i Robert C. Darnton The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once remarked that Robert Damton’s principal shortcoming as a scholar is that he “writes too well.” This prodigious talent, which arouses such suspicion of aristocratic pretension among social scientists in republican France, has made him nothing less than an academic folk hero in America—one who is read with equal enthusiasm and pleasure by scholars and the public at large. Darnton’ s work improbably blends a strong dose of Cartesian rationalism with healthy portions of Dickensian grit and sentiment. The result is a uniquely American synthesis of the finest traits of our British and French ancestors—a vision of the past that is at once intellectually bracing and captivatingly intimate. fascination with the making of modem Western democracies came easily to this true blue Yankee. Born in New York City on the eve of the Second World War, the son of two reporters at the New York Times, Robert Damton has always had an immediate grasp of what it means to be caught up in the fray of modem world historical events. The connection between global historical forces and the tangible lives of individuals was driven home at a early age by his father’s death in the Pacific theater during the war. Irreparable loss left him with a deep commitment to recover the experiences of people in the past. At Phillips Academy and Harvard College, his first interest was in American history. -
Neoconservatism Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative Hberkc Ch5 Mp 104 Rev1 Page 104 Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative Hberkc Ch5 Mp 105 Rev1 Page 105
Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_103 rev1 page 103 part iii Neoconservatism Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_104 rev1 page 104 Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_105 rev1 page 105 chapter five The Neoconservative Journey Jacob Heilbrunn The Neoconservative Conspiracy The longer the United States struggles to impose order in postwar Iraq, the harsher indictments of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy are becoming. “Acquiring additional burdens by engag- ing in new wars of liberation is the last thing the United States needs,” declared one Bush critic in Foreign Affairs. “The principal problem is the mistaken belief that democracy is a talisman for all the world’s ills, and that the United States has a responsibility to promote dem- ocratic government wherever in the world it is lacking.”1 Does this sound like a Democratic pundit bashing Bush for par- tisan gain? Quite the contrary. The swipe came from Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and copublisher of National Interest. Simes is not alone in calling on the administration to reclaim the party’s pre-Reagan heritage—to abandon the moralistic, Wilsonian, neoconservative dream of exporting democracy and return to a more limited and realistic foreign policy that avoids the pitfalls of Iraq. 1. Dimitri K. Simes, “America’s Imperial Dilemma,” Foreign Affairs (Novem- ber/December 2003): 97, 100. Hoover Press : Berkowitz/Conservative hberkc ch5 Mp_106 rev1 page 106 106 jacob heilbrunn In fact, critics on the Left and Right are remarkably united in their assessment of the administration. Both believe a neoconservative cabal has hijacked the administration’s foreign policy and has now overplayed its hand. -
Changing the Narrative
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVIII:3 (Winter, 2018), 313–334. Jan de Vries Changing the Narrative: The New History That Was and Is to Come In the mid-1970s, a broad range of scholars, spanning the ideological spectrum, was actively engaged in what has been called the New History. Some of the participants in this broad movement come under discussion below, but for now it is sufficient to mention the French Annales School, the American New Economic History, the British Marxist Social History, and Historical Sociology in several forms, including modernization theorists, comparative revolutions theorists, and world-systems theorists. The adherents to these different historical orientations disagreed with each other about most substantive matters. Their single point of agreement was a shared feindbegrif—the rejection of narrative history. It inspired Burke to introduce the final volume of the New Cambridge Modern History, which appeared in 1979, with the following declaration: “In the twentieth century we have seen a break with traditional narrative history, which, like the break with the traditional novel or with representational art or with classical music, is one of the important cultural discontinuities of our time.”1 Obviously, no single influence can claim full credit for this historiographical discontinuity, but the most profound factor must be the spread of an uncomfortable feeling that the narrative form greatly restricts the types of possible historical questions and feasi- ble modes of explanation. Narrative history has attached to it, like a ball and chain, the discrete, short-term historical event—l’histoire événementielle. If, by the time of Burke’s writing, several decades of Annales School preaching had done anything, it had undermined the notion that this concept should be the foundation stone of historical explanation. -
History 80020 – Literature Survey – European History Tuesdays, 6:30-8
History 80020 – Literature Survey – European History Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30pm (classroom TBA) Professor Steven Remy ([email protected]) Weekly office hour: Tuesdays 5-6 (room TBA) This course has two purposes: (1) to introduce you to recent scholarship on the major events, themes, and historiographical debates in European history from the Enlightenment to the present; and (2) to prepare you to take the written exam in this field. Each week you will read - and come to class prepared to summarize and discuss - a different title. The titles are assigned below. Each student will write a 700-900 word summary of the book s/he has been assigned and bring a paper copy for me and for each of his/her classmates. I will determine your final course grade as follows: 60% book summaries and 40% in class discussions. Written book summary and class participation requirements are found at the end of the syllabus. A word about the titles I’ve selected: I have selected high-quality scholarship reflecting the temper and direction of current research on and methodological approaches to modern European history. I have also emphasized literature that situates European developments in global contexts. An expanded list of titles for further reading is attached to the syllabus. In addition to keeping up with scholarly journals in your area of interest, I encourage you to stay current by tracking reviews and debates in the following publications: Journal of Modern History, The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, aldaily.com, H-Net reviews, The Nation, Jewish Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education book reviews.