Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Death of the Page

You can see it coming: “pages,” as a form of citation, are dead. And you can see why. With an electronic text, the reader can change the font size almost without limit. That makes pagination useless, and probably obsolete. In English “page” has multiple related meanings. The word can mean a young male servant as […]

March 31, 2011 – 3:40 pm | By admin | Posted in History, teaching | Comments (14)

The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

The United States spends 663,255,000,000 on defense. It’s 43% of world military spending. To put it in perspective, our nearest rival,  China, accounts for only 6.6.% of world military spending. We spend over seven times more per year than our nearest rival. We were spending that much, roughly, before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan–despite […]

March 14, 2011 – 1:56 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Tagged , , , | Comments (12)

Guest Post: Defending Current Practice

My friend and colleague Matt Karush has consistently argued that the present system has more merit than people like me want to recognize. I asked him to write a post describing his concerns, and so below, the first guest blogger at theaporetic.   As I have listened to some of my colleagues press for the […]

March 10, 2011 – 3:34 pm | By admin | Posted in History, teaching | Comments (15)

Academic Editor, 2.1

My post on “academic editing 2.0” generated some heat in the comments, and some misunderstandings. What I was proposing is actually really conservative, and aimed at preserving and strengthening the profession. Among the gamut of digital possibilities it would have to be counted as timid, modest and cautious. Let me try to be more clear. […]

March 4, 2011 – 3:02 pm | By admin | Posted in History, teaching | Comments (13)

Academic Editor 2.0

Continuing thoughts on what would professional associations 2.0 look like, what would the job of editing look like? Let’s look at what it’s like now. Right now the editor of, say, the American Historical Review gets lots of submissions. He/she reads them ( I assume) and then decides whether or not to send them to […]

March 3, 2011 – 3:03 pm | By admin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (22)

The New Libertarian Mercantilists

“Mercantilism” describes the economic philosophy prevailing at the time of New World Settlement. One of the key idea of mercantilism held that wealth was finite. “Wealth” consisted of tangible physical goods, especially land and precious metals. The world contained only so much gold or silver, only so much fertile land or forests; only so much […]

March 2, 2011 – 8:18 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Comments (0)