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Craig Gallagher In anticipation of going to my first American Historical Association conference this past weekend in Washington D.C., I sought out a range of senior colleagues who had attended past AHA meetings for advice on what to expect. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate who is about to start writing a dissertation, I was regularly advised that many aspects of the AHA meeting did not yet apply to me, such as the Job Center , where interviews for academic positions are conducted, or the Book Exhibit where publishers meet with scholars and teachers to discuss manuscripts or books for use in the classroom. My first AHA, therefore, was largely confined to the scholarly panels (and, I should add as a brief aside, various receptions, where I shamelessly handed out business cards and tried to score five minutes of chat with some of my favorite scholars. I was mostly successful). I attended six different panels over the four days, enjoying some immensely and others not-so-much. On the whole...

Randall Stephens Michael Kammen It is with heavy hearts that historians, former students, and others are reporting on the death of the Pulitzer Prize -winning historian Michael Kammen.  He leaves an enormous legacy as an inspiring teacher, mentor, and scholar. H. Roger Segelken of the Cornell Chronicle writes that Kammen focused "his scholarship at first on the colonial period of American history."  He then "broadened his scope to include legal, cultural and social issues of American history in the 19th and 20th centuries." Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991), says Segelken, "helped to create the field of memory studies."  (See a short biography of Kammen here .) Indeed, Kammen won high praise as a writer. In a New York Times review of Mystic Chords of Memory Thomas Fleming conceded that "not everyone will agree with all his conclusions, but they are presented with superlative style la...

Randall Stephens In the coming weeks Historically Speaking subscribers will receive the latest issue.  In it we have essays on American political history and reform (John Frederick Martin and F. S. Naiden), objectivity in the study of history (Judith Walzer Leavitt), Atlantic World history (Trevor Burnard), photography and the Great War (Von Hardesty), an obituary of Pauline Maier (Chris Beneke), and Evangelical Catholicism (Mark Edwards).  Alongside those are interviews with scholars concerning American religious history (Larry Eskridge), and the critical years of 1979 (Christian Caryl) and 1913 (Charles Emmerson). The September issue also includes James M. Banner 's fascinating essay "The Almost Nonexistent History of Academic Departments."  Writes Banner: "Department histories are almost nowhere to be found."  Why is that so?  Says Banner: The history of education has never found a strong place in history departments. Those aspiring historians seeking entry ...

Randall Stephens Today is the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington "For Jobs and Freedom." So, to continue with the theme of Monday's post --concerning history/historians, activism, and civil rights--I excerpt below part of Sheldon Hackney's 2009 essay in Historically Speaking , "C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter." Here Hackney discusses C. Vann Woodward's political outlook, civil rights work, and the parameters of dissent in the 1960s. Hackney is the Boies Professor of U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the former president of the University of Pennsylvania (1981-1993) and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-1997). He is the author of a variety of books and articles, including Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton University Press, 1969) and Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (Transaction Publishers, 2005): One of t...

Chris Beneke Pauline Maier passed away Monday . Her academic title was William Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s a distinguished position, but hardly does justice to the person who filled it. I didn’t know Professor Maier was ill. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine her in a non-effervescent condition. Every other observation I’ve encountered since Monday affirms the testimony of my own experience: Maier was irrepressibly charming, ceaselessly brilliant, and blessed with a thunderous, seminar-shaking laugh. Professor Maier published important books at a stately pace. There were four major monographs, one per decade. The first two changed our understanding of pre-Revolutionary politics ;  the third upended standard interpretations of the Declaration of Independence ;  the fourth provided the first full account of how the U.S. Constitution was ratified . Each was definitive, the sort of book that every early American historian n...

NPR Staff, "The Voting Rights Act: Hard-Won Gains, An Uncertain Future," NPR, July 21, 2013 . . . . Congress also noted, however, that the Voting Rights Act was still needed, and it had Fort Scott, Kansas, Tribune , August 6, 1965, p. 1 From the Google News Archive . been used hundreds of times since 1982 to protect against discrimination. But in his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested it is a new era. "Our country has changed," he wrote for the majority. But Rep. Lewis says race is still very much at the forefront. "I think there has been a deliberate and systematic effort on the part of certain forces in our country to take the whole idea of race out of public policy," he says. "Race is involved in everything that makes up America, and we cannot escape it. We have to deal with it face on." >>> John Paul Stevens, "The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent," New York Review of Books , August 15, 2013 In Bending T...

Vox Tablet, "The Dreyfus Affair Holds a Sacred Place in French History. Is There Room for Debate?" Tablet, July 11, 2013 Nearly 120 years after the Dreyfus Affair shook the world, you would think we know all there is to know about the seminal case involving a French Jewish officer falsely accused of treason. Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty and deported to prison on a small, remote island, and it was only after his family, joined by leading intellectuals of the time, rallied in protest that he was acquitted, his case becoming a cornerstone of the democratic French republic. >>> Mark Feeney, "Edmund Morgan, 97; professor, leading historian of Colonial era," Boston Globe , July 10, 2013 A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications, Dr. Morgan strove to appeal to the interested layperson as well as fellow historians. “In writing about the past, there’s more of an aesthetic dimension than people realize,” he told the Globe. “Yo...

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...