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Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe "Length of the average dissertation," from FlowData . This chart initiated a round of chest thumping by academic historians. Apparently we historians write the longest dissertations. Now, according to this chart, philosophers and classicists do not write dissertations, when in fact they do. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the chart is correct. What does it tell us about historians? Either we do more research than scholars in any other field (unlikely from my interdisciplinary vantage point), or we are less able to articulate our findings in a pithy manner than our colleagues in other departments on campus. When I made a snide remark about length on Facebook, my historian friends jumped to the defense of 325 page dissertations as the necessary length for a monograph. Other fields publish articles rather than books. Thus, the argument went, they can get away with less. This perplexed me. A doctoral dissertation no matter the field shoul...

Randall Stephens Over at the Religion in American History blog I have a short piece on publishing.  Here's an exce rpt and link to the full piece. Few could have accused Ernest Hemingway of being too subtle. “The first draft of anything is shit,” he once quipped.  True.  And still we plod on, hoping to spin that dross into gold. We spend hour upon hour crafting, redrafting, proofing, worrying, and rewriting. Several years back the historian Stephen Pyne wrote in a forum I put together for Historically Speaking that "History is a book culture. We read books, we write books, we promote and award tenure on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. We’re a book-based discipline." *   But figuring out how to land a publisher, what press to go with, and answering a range of other questions can be daunting.  And so, I was happy when my colleague Brian Ward at Northumbria University organized an afternoon session on publishing las...