Category Archives: History

Posts about history and the profession of history

Hating Daylight Saving

Feeling slightly groggy and disoriented this morning? Thank daylight saving, the pet project of A. Lincoln Filene. Daylight Saving was first tried in the US during WWI. It was adopted nationally for one year, in 1918, and then repealed. From 1919 till 1966 Daylight saving was observed by “local adoption.” In 1966, it made federal […]

March 8, 2014 – 10:38 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Tagged | Comments (57)

Why you don’t listen to music

There’s a good reason why you might not enjoy listening to music as much as you used to: It’s gotten too loud. All music has “dynamic range,” variations in volume between the loud parts and the soft parts. People sing and play at different volumes. Individual notes have an initial attack and then a gradual […]

February 4, 2014 – 3:42 pm | By admin | Posted in AHN, History, Music | Comments (0)

Jesus, Santa, and White People

Recently Megyn Kelly, on Fox News, made the argument that both Jesus and Santa Claus were “really” white. Let’s put aside for the moment that fact that one is an entirely fictional character and the other is a character for whom very little historical evidence exists. She’s right about Santa Claus–he was mostly imagined by […]

December 16, 2013 – 2:06 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Comments (2)

the Vinyl Archive

There’s a well known article by the photographer and critic Allan Sekula which points out that from the beginnings, photographs posed a problem of archiving. You’d go on vacation, take some pictures, send them off to be developed, and they’d come back in an envelope, or as slides. Then what? For most people, it was […]

October 17, 2013 – 2:01 pm | By admin | Posted in AHN, History, Music | Comments (6)

The Female Dollar

President Obama is considering appointing, among others, Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal reserve. Predictably, opponents and proponents both take her gender into consideration: she’d be the first female head of the central bank. Yellen’s supporters think having a woman as chair would amount to a breakthrough for gender equality, but opponents have worried […]

September 19, 2013 – 12:47 pm | By admin | Posted in History, Money | Comments (1)

History and Faith

There’s a famous (among academics) essay by Hayden White I often ask suffering students to read, called “the Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” a ponderous title indeed. White reproduces excerpts from the Annals of St. Gall, a medieval manuscript with multiple authors. It looks like this 709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died. […]

September 11, 2013 – 6:23 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Syria and Moral Crusade

Woodrow Wilson is famous for irritating the Europeans. After WWI, when England, France, and the US met to decide the status of post war Europe, Wilson kept insisting on draping practical political objectives and national self interest in the high flown language of moral crusade. Historians always cite as an example George Clemenceau, who when […]

September 4, 2013 – 1:17 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Comments (1)

Why does History Matter?

A friend recently re-posted an old piece from The Onion, in which the nation’s “Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What’s Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions.” I asked my grad class to blog about why they’re taking a history class, and why they think it matters, so it’s only fair that I […]

August 30, 2013 – 1:54 pm | By admin | Posted in History, teaching | Comments (3)

The Illusion of Scarcity

The American Historical Association just called for a six year embargo on the release of dissertations. At the moment, you write a dissertation and it goes to your university’s library, which typically makes a digital copy available to the public, often for free. The AHA argues that if your dissertation is available free in digital […]

July 24, 2013 – 2:17 pm | By admin | Posted in History, research | Comments (3)

What do they think “racist” means?

Jason Richwine got a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard in 2009 He wrote his dissertation on comparative IQ and its role in immigration policy. Richwine’s dissertation argued that Hispanics had consistently lower IQs than other Americans and that this difference persisted over time. He further argued that we must consider this when formulating immigration […]

May 13, 2013 – 4:45 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Tagged , , | Comments (6)