My office is filled with books. It's not an especially capacious room, but there are five large bookcases in it, university issue, as well as two smaller ones I bought myself. Each shelf is fully stocked from end to end, and rows of books line the top of each shelf near the ceiling, as well … Continue reading Reverence and Engagement
On Mendacious and Shitty Academic Punditry
[I have meant to write a blog post about this almost since my last one went up, but Twitter threads keep coming out instead. What's below is an amplified version of one of them, so apologies in advance to Twitter followers of mine who tire of harangues. The title repurposes, not unfairly I hope, a … Continue reading On Mendacious and Shitty Academic Punditry
Student-Teachers and the Limits of Academic Freedom
The news that this has been a slightly more abysmal year than usual for academic jobs in history has provoked a lot of justified (if impotent) outrage online. An important part of this has centred on the "adjunctification" of the university -- the replacement of tenure-track positions with part-time, temporary gigs -- and with the … Continue reading Student-Teachers and the Limits of Academic Freedom
The Winter of Our Discomfort: Speech, Debate, and Learning on Campus
November approaches, and with it thoughts of #snowflakes. I was called one not too long ago, for arguing that a history magazine should not have published a letter promoting a debunked myth and defaming one of its debunkers. The use of editorial discretion in such a venue, I was told, would be "censorship". As I've … Continue reading The Winter of Our Discomfort: Speech, Debate, and Learning on Campus
Empathy for the Devil
The idea that "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner" has never convinced me. Explanation is not vindication; it's often the opposite. Historical analysis does not always or even usually result in more sympathetic characters. And scholars who draw on ever more extensive archives to revisit the deeds and thoughts of the great and dead are more … Continue reading Empathy for the Devil
History in the Toilet
My last two posts dealt with a troubling letter and article the appeared a peculiar sort of publication: a history magazine. Perched between the worlds of "pop history", an unwieldy category to which both much good work and a good deal of dreck belong, and the often duller and less accessible world of professional scholarship, such … Continue reading History in the Toilet
How to Change History: William Petty, Irish slavery, and a fake debate
Treating debunked pseudo-history and personal attacks as legitimate criticism of historical research is bad enough on the letters page of a widely-read history magazine. Publishing articles based on spurious sources is worse. In my last post, I discussed History Ireland's publication of Mike McCormack's letter attacking Liam Hogan for exposing the myth of Irish slavery. … Continue reading How to Change History: William Petty, Irish slavery, and a fake debate
Irish Slaves, from Myth to “Debate”
At the risk of stating the obvious, it is important that historians try to get the past right -- to describe it accurately, to base their claims about it on evidence, and to represent the sources from which that evidence is drawn fairly. Historians face mounting challenges in public discourse from dishonest, misleading, or made … Continue reading Irish Slaves, from Myth to “Debate”
Crackpot Historicism
The observation that the Trump era is a good time to be a historian is by now cliché. The routine yet outlandish lies that increasingly puncture public discourse; the proliferation of "fake news" and the appropriation by its makers of the label "fake news"; the appeal to "alternative facts" and the self-fulfilling prophecy of "post-truth" … Continue reading Crackpot Historicism
The Rule of the 20th Century (The Shape of Academic History, Part II)
My last post looked at the geographical focus of academic historians in Canada, and found that it was predominantly Canadian and European. This was not too surprising, though it does make media laments about the neglect of Canadian and "Western" history by the academy seem uninformed if not simply dishonest. But what motivated me to … Continue reading The Rule of the 20th Century (The Shape of Academic History, Part II)
