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Dana Hamlin The History Section of the Reference and User Services Association ( RUSA) of the American Library Association, recently announced that the association's Board of Directors approved a set of information literacy guidelines and competencies for undergraduate history students . A project more than four years in the making, these guidelines were developed by a committee of reference and instruction librarians, the majority of whom are subject specialists in history. One of the members of the committee writes in an email sent to various history- and library-related listservs: "it is [the committee's] hope that the Guidelines will be used by librarians, archivists, and teaching faculty to guide teaching and learning throughout the undergraduate curriculum." Indeed, the introduction to the guidelines states that the document is intended to "provide a framework for faculty and librarians to assess [students' historical research] skills" ...

Lisa Clark Diller I will admit to having been a re-enactment virgin until the weekend of September 21, 2013.  As readers of this blog are well aware, we are in the midst of all things Civil War in the United States. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is marking its own big battles all this fall.  Specifically, the engagements at Chickamauga occurred 150 years ago, September 19-20.    As someone whose research reflects a great deal on another civil war (one in England in the 1640s), I have tended to smile blithely through local history enthusiasts’ explanations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the role played by East Tennessee in that conflict. However, as a teacher of a first year seminar who is always looking for the required “bonding experience” for my students, this year it seemed appropriate to participate in some local history.  I don’t think this was one of the most effectively executed re-enactments (others with more experience have confirmed this opinion)....

From Puck magazine, 1912. Benjamin Railton In the final stages of my work on The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (Palgrave Pivot, June 21, 2013) I found myself struggling with a challenge that I believe faces all of us who seek to produce works of public scholarship. Much of the history on which my book focuses is well known to academic historians, but is (to my mind) almost entirely unknown (if not indeed often misrepresented) within the broader American community. For example, the first of the three main “lessons” I seek to draw from the Chinese Exclusion Act has to do with the history of legal and illegal immigration, and more exactly with the commonplace phrase “My ancestors came here legally.” Academic historians are likely to know that there were no national immigration laws prior to the 1882 Exclusion Act (or at least its immediate predecessors/starting points such as the Page Act), that prior to 1921 there remained no laws that affected any immigra...

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...