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Heather Cox Richardson Untenured scholars are in a funny place: that gap between the old world and the new. Ten years ago, yes, blogging would convince many senior scholars that a junior person was not a serious academic because s/he was catering to a popular audience. Since then, the old world of the academy is crumbling, and while many departments have not yet caught up, others are aware they must move into the twenty-first century. So will blog posts and tweets hurt your career? Maybe. But they can also help your career in very practical ways. The first has to do with publishing. The gold standard for employment and for tenure remains a published book. When most senior scholars finished their doctorates, it was almost guaranteed that their dissertations would find academic publishers. In those days, university presses had standing contracts with university libraries that guaranteed automatic sales of a few thousand copies of each monograph that came out from a reputable press. Budge...

Randall Stephens  Oh, my autumn almanac Yes, yes, yes, it's my autumn almanac. I like my football on a Saturday, Roast beef on Sundays, all right. I go to Blackpool for my holidays, Sit in the open sunlight. - Ray Davies, The Kinks, "Autumn Almanac" (1967) An American version, "Fall Almanac," just wouldn't have cut it.  Ray Davies has long been an observer of the differences--linguistic, cultural, and otherwise--of the American and English scenes.  Sure, The Kinks were as English as clotted cream, cricket, Yorkshire pudding, and bad weather.  But Ray and brother Dave spent quite a bit of time living or touring in both countries.  I've spent my share of time in both countries, too. I live in Newcastle Upon Tyne. (Which, in itself, is almost like another country compared with the Kinks North London stomping ground.)  So I look forward to getting my hands on a copy of Ray Davies new book Americana: The Kinks, the Riff, the Road: The Story (October, 2013...

Dan Allosso So I’m thinking very seriously about getting to work on my story about a British radical named Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891).  Bradlaugh is the British equivalent of America’s “Great Agnostic,” Robert Ingersoll, only more so.  Unlike Ingersoll, Bradlaugh was extremely political—he was even elected to Parliament and prevented from taking his seat for six Charles Bradlaugh years by the conservative opposition because he could not take the religious oath of office.  I’ve been researching him, off and on, since about 2006.  In that time, I’ve tried on the idea of writing a straight biography of Bradlaugh, but Londoner Bryan Niblett recently wrote a very good account of Bradlaugh’s adult years (especially the Parliamentary struggle), called Dare to Stand Alone .  I was thinking of writing the story of Bradlaugh’s youth for a young adult audience.  Bradlaugh was thrown out onto the streets of East London by his parents at age 16 for declaring himself ...

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...

Randall Stephens For about the last five years the historian Alex von Tunzelmann has composed short pieces at the Guardian on history films .  "Reel History," so reads the description, focuses on "classics of big screen history and prises fact from fiction ." D oes the plot square with historical realit ies ?  What about the acting? The costumes ? Do anachronisms abound ?  Here's a bit from her recent piece on Northwest Passage (1940) . Writes Tunzelmann: The search for a northwest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has little to do with what's going on in this film. At the end, Rogers announces his intention to find one. This was supposed to be the sequel, and indeed its own title card announces it as Northwest Passage (Book I - Rogers' Rangers). Though it was a hit with audiences, it had cost too much to make. MGM canned Book II – and, just as in real life, no northwest passage was ever found. Verdic t: It's an impressively rough and to...