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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...

Heather Cox Richardson As the school year winds to a close, incoming graduate students have been asking me what they should read to prepare for the fall. That question has an obvious answer, and the answer brings up what strikes me as an oddity in the way we handle graduate education in history. Boston Public Library. Photo by Randall Stephens. It has always seemed to me bizarre that we treat graduate education as if it has little connection to undergraduate studies. A brilliant undergrad will understand facts, argument, and, with luck, historiography, as well as how to write. But one of the first things that brilliant undergrad will do in graduate school is to take a seminar in historical theory, where s/he’s supposed to converse intelligently about historical theories of which s/he has never heard. First year grad students are lost and frightened. (Except for that One Guy who throws around Foucault's name like they're long-time tennis partners.) My antidote to tha...