Category: General History
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Patrick Johnston has a point about historians as leaders
Queen’s University vice-chancellor Patrick Johnston wants to create leaders and the historical community has missed this point. Johnston made an offhanded comment in an interview last week and he’s been paying the price since. Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian. It needs a 21-year-old who really understands how to analyse things,…
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Between Niche and Broad History Subjects
I have now read two different historians recently taking different positions on niche and broad-focused histories. In the realm of niche subjects, in Historiography (2012), Jeremy Black points out, [Academics] have sought out hole-in-the-corner subjects that, a critic might imagine, they can invest with meaningless complexities, as defensive walls against penetration by the initiated (16). The…
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Save Historiography for the Last Year?
In trying to understand why students dread historiography, I came across several works by Jeremy Black, a prolific military historian. In his recent Historiography: Contesting the Past; Claiming the Future, Black describes the current approach to teaching the subject and why it often fails. The conventional pattern at present is that of a compulsory first-year…
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Getting Past Memorizing Dates for History
A friend shared this with me, because I am a historian or something. In history, there is what happened and then there is how cultures interpreted what happened. The former tends to be straightforward, but the latter is murky. In terms of our interpretation, we struggle with the availability of information and popular belief. Again,…
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Why do Students Dread Historiography?
Historiography is not a popular topic among students. A Classics undergrad at Temple received a B on her paper, with a comment by the teacher on the lack of secondary sources. The student responded, “I cited all primary sources. Why do I need secondary sources?” At AMU, graduate history students are required to take a…
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A $0.22 Book, a Private Letter, and Vietnam
I love buying old books about war. While they may be dated, I enjoy seeing how conceptions and mindsets differed over the years. One of my more recent purchases, War: A Historical, Political and Social Study (1978), is a collection of essays, offering a post-Vietnam perspective from a variety of academic fields. While my copy…
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“More and more research into less and less”
Whenever I come across a book where a seasoned historian talks about the historical profession, I snatch it up. This past weekend, I came across Page Smith’s The Historian and History (1964). Smith is no longer with us and this writing speaks to us from the post-World War II era before the Vietnam War soured American’s…
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Thoughts on Sharing History with Coworkers
As I am roughly 3/4th of the way through my military history degree while working a fulltime job, I find it difficult at times to transition from deep, historical thought into the real world. Consider my Monday night. First, I came home from work, ate dinner, and watched a 22-minute sitcom with my wife. Next,…
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Where I was on September 11
I have retold this story so many times that I struggle to recall all the details as opposed to the most salacious highlights I can rattle off in a room full of friends or coworkers struggling to tell their story. When I remember that day, the feelings remain prominent giving me only about 10 minutes…
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Fonthill Castle and Mercer Museum
Henry Mercer was rogue anthropologist, a control freak, and had an extreme case of obsessive compulsive disorder. And he has left a fascinating legacy in Bucks County, Pennsylvania that My wife and I had the pleasure and touring this summer. Fonthill Being funded by his aunt who was worth approximately $1,000,000, Mercer built a 44-room…
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Introduction: The Top Ten Dictators of All-Time
There are several “lists” out there that try to rank dictators, conquerors, and rulers. The problem I’ve found is that the lists are nothing more than sensationalism or they’re just plain inaccurate. There are many books written with the theme of listing the most evil people. The Most Evil Dictators in History and The Evil…