Colleagues In History Research Articles

Cliometrica after 10 years: definition and principles of cliometric research

‘‘[...] cliometricians have been explaining to their colleagues in history the wonderful usefulness of economics. It is time they began explaining to their colleagues in economics the wonderful usefulness of history. [...] It is no accident that some of the best minds in economics value it highly. What a pity, then, that the rest have drifted away.’’ (D. McCloskey, ‘‘Does the Past Have Useful Economics?’’Journal of Economic Literature, 1976, p. 455).

Architectural History’s Futures

> You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath. > > — Haruki Murakami , 1Q84 What is the future of architectural history? The very question embodies an inherent contradiction, since historians are particularly skilled at studying the past; our aptitudes for predicting the future are far less honed. Nevertheless, important anniversaries invite introspection, reflection on our past, and speculation about our future. What pressures are coming to bear on our field that are most likely to cause significant change? Who will be our audiences in the decades to come? How will they find our work, and what will be the forms of our scholarship? In what follows, I examine three aspects of the architectural historian’s practice, casting stones into the pond of our field to see, as Murakami writes, what might come out of it after that. Until very recently, architectural historians generally conducted research in mostly the same manner as their colleagues across the humanities, which is to say, they did so largely working alone in libraries, museums, archives, and special collections. The single factor differentiating our work from that of scholars studying largely text-based or pictorially based subjects was our need for on-site investigation. Examining architectural, urban, and landscape spaces themselves has always been—and will no doubt continue to be—a crucial distinguishing aspect of our research culture, and there is little doubt that we will continue to perform solitary investigations with a range of primary and secondary sources. However much our methods of inquiry may remain constant, the archive, the library, and even the museum have changed. What does “the archive” now mean? In our current era of increasingly massive amounts of digitized …

INTRODUCTION: DECADENCE (OR NOT) IN THE MING DYNASTY

This volume arose as a selfish exercise: I wanted to know, really and truly, what my colleagues in History thought about the late Ming period. Did they understand it to be a period of decadence? And if so, why? These questions were prompted by my increasing discomfort with established art histories in light of new investigations into late Ming discourses in the arts. What my research was revealing was that artists, critics, theorists, and collectors were championing the new age and its opportunities to be new and different; they seemed to act happily released from the burdens of the past. Close examination of their texts and images showed that none of these authors was remarking on decadence in their era. What, then, was it about the late Ming that made my distinguished art historian predecessors stake this claim in their studies? Since we in Art History rely on the research of our colleagues in History, I thought to turn to them to provide some answers. An inquiry was sent to the Society for Ming Studies 2010 leaders, Yonglin Jiang, Lucille Chia, Ken Hammond, and Katy Carlitz: Would the Society for Ming Studies consider having a panel or roundtable at the next AAS meeting which would discuss the issue of “Ming decadence” (or not), and examine philosophical, literary, art historical, and so on, shifts and differences between sixteenthand seventeenth-century thought and production? I explained that it seemed to me that the centuries are often blended together, when in fact they represent distinct periods with significantly different worldviews. I hoped that an organized roundtable discussion during the Society for Ming Studies annual meeting would be helpful because it would encourage conversation and varied perspectives from the myriad talents in the room. This query was met with enthusiasm: both a panel and a roundtable should be formed. Further consultations suggested a number of fine minds who might be induced to participate in these exercises. From this larger pool, a smaller group of scholars agreed to participate. Proposals were drafted and then accepted by the AAS review committee in 2011. We were in business. The panel, So How Bad Was It? Comparative Decadence of the Jiajing and Wanli Eras, was sponsored by the Society for Ming Studies, and presented at the AAS Annual Conference in Toronto in 2012, with this writer as Chair, and Ken Hammond and this writer as Co-Organizers. In our proposal, we asked what was so damnable aboutMing society?Wanli had not yet completely turned his attentions away from the court. Li Zhi had not yet been strongly endorsed by the leading intellectuals. Still, as the Jiajing and theWanli periods were viewed as corrupt, we wanted Ming Studies, 71, 3–4, May 2015

Max Weber in America by Lawrence A. Scaff (review)

Book Reviews 143 society. Ghosh argues that Weber did know it and in this way proves how useful such scrupulously historicist reading can be: 'Here then is further confirmation of what we know of Weber's sympathies for both Jews and for "Puritan" America; equally importantly, it reminds us that, even in an author whom we may suppose to be well-documented, there is a great deal of subterranean life of which we are hardly aware, and that any discussion of Weber's intellectual evolution must take account of this fact.' It will be most interesting and promising to see the eventual results of the transla tion-project of Peter Ghosh—one of several one-man enterprises in the international Weber research. His strategy of 'translation as a conceptual act' might lead to a very new understanding of the PE. His forthcoming publication of the translation, as also this collection of essays, cannot be without effect on the two relevant of the MWG, which have been announced for (too) many years. In particular, the accurate histori cal reading of these momentous texts—which are today an unquestionable part of the intellectual canon, and not only in social science—can be taken also as a test of German Weber scholarship, especially when one considers that one of its principal components is a major research project that started almost 40 years ago and is run at an enormous expenditure of money and personnel. It should be remembered that Max Weber himself deliberately avoided profes sional discussion with his contemporary colleagues in history. When he was invited to present his PE studies at the Stuttgart assembly of the German historians in February 1906 and to defend them, he cried off and referred instead to the 'expert', his friend and theologian Ernst Troeltsch. After the tragic death of Wolfgang J. Mommsen (1930-2004), who had played the critical role of the historian within the MWG, it seems fortunate that through the work of Peter Ghosh we are reminded once more that the bar has risen higher than ever before. One of his most incisive footnotes makes it clear what Ghosh intends in the end: 'theory plus a dash of history (the reading of a canonical author from the past according to a present-day theoreti cal agenda) does not produce history.' Dirk Kaesler Philipps-Universität Marburg Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univer sity Press, 2011), pp. 326. ISBN 978-0-69114-779-6. $35.00 (cloth). In the preface to his book, Lawrence Scaff promises to address the 'American dimension to Weber's work and experience'. The author accomplishes this task in a beautifully written and masterfully crafted study that provides illuminating insights into Weber's thought, as well as, on a more limited scale, new information about the reception of Weber in the United States. The well-measured tone of the narrative and its deliberate presentation are indicative of the author's strategy to seek a readership beyond academic scholars by pitching the book to an educated public without in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. Whether made solely by the author, or perhaps under consideration of the publisher's concerns as well, this choice greatly decreases the chances of the book ending up in the dustbin of obscure Weber scholarship; however, for Weber aficionados it may have a few drawbacks as well.© Max Weber Studies 2012. 144 Max Weber Studies The study essentially contains two books in one. The first book comprises a series of topic-driven mini-studies of Weber's engagement with the early twentieth century American experience, based on his 1904 American journey. More or less all of these mini-studies chart new territory and could stand on their own as self-contained analy ses with a rich texture. In contrast, the second book within the book, titled part 2, 'The work in America,' is more of an unfinished, technical, booklet-sized assessment of the beginnings of Weber's recognition as a scholar in the United States and the develop mental history and early impact of Talcott Parson's translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism on sociology and...

Introduction

Introduction:Alternative Print Culture Wayne A. Wiegand (bio) I sometimes tease my colleagues in history, English, and other traditional humanities disciplines that they have consistently undervalued the importance libraries have played in their own scholarly lives. To prove my point, I refer to Name of the Rose, an award-winning novel published in 1980 in which author Umberto Eco constructs a world of mystery and murder in a fictitious thirteenth-century European monastery. Contained in the monastery is an Aedificium, which houses one of the largest collections of multilingual book manuscripts in the then known world. At the conclusion of the novel, the Aedificium burns to the ground because a disgruntled monk worried that the contents of one particular book he was hiding there would change the world he knew. What if, I ask my humanities colleagues, that Aedificium had actually existed, survived to the present without loss of any materials, and was only recently discovered? Medieval studies would be significantly different; so would all historical studies that grew from it. This is an excellent example of what Michel Foucault calls the influence of the "archive" on "discourse." Any collection of information materials preserved through the generations will inevitably influence how we interpret the past. Conversely, the absence of information material silences historical voices, which are then lost to history. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Photo of Jim Danky, as published in volume 2, number 4 (August/September 1981) of Columns, the membership newsletter of the wisconsin Hisstorical Society That really was the premise grounding my decision to ask Jim Danky in the fall of 2005 how he felt about being sent into retirement in 2007 with a symposium in Madison, Wisconsin, that assessed the influence of the collections he had amassed at that venerable institution, the Wisconsin Historical Society,1 where he had been employed since 1973. At first he hesitated; he has always been uncomfortable with praise, and he knew how academics like me could mix it into a thick frosting that masked what in his mind was considerably more important, the work he had accomplished at the Society. Before giving me his approval, he decided to consult his [End Page 567] most trusted advisor—wife Christine Schelshorn. She would know if this was a bad idea, he reasoned, that is, one that was more self-serving than productive. A week later Jim said Christine approved the idea. Together, they authorized me to move ahead with the project as long as it concentrated on work Jim had done at the Historical Society. Together, Jim and I then crafted a plan for the symposium that would be entitled "Alternative Print Culture: Social History and Libraries." On the one hand it would consist of presentations addressing areas of studies influenced by the collections Jim had put together as Newspapers and Periodicals Librarian at the Society, including women's studies, African American history, Native American studies, radical and labor history, zines, and the periodicals and serials of the radical left and right. On the other hand, two essays would evaluate the influence of Jim's own scholarly writings, and the Center for Print Culture History in Modern America, a joint project of the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin–Madison that he helped establish and then codirect with me between 1992 and 2002, and after I left Madison in January 2003, he directed himself until October 2006, when Christine Pawley took over as his successor. Finding authors for these essays was easy; they would be drawn from the scores of scholars who had come to Madison to study the very collections Jim had amassed, and whose own scholarship referenced these collections repeatedly. Not only were these scholars lifelong friends, they also knew how, as one scholar put it, "those odd periodicals and books" Jim had been collecting for decades gave voice to historically marginalized groups on the periphery of dominant cultures, and thus influenced the directions of scholarly study in their own research areas. Once we put an initial plan together, I contacted the editors of Library Trends. With the understanding that the essays would concentrate on Jim's work, they quickly agreed to publish...

Chaucer and Medieval Studies in Canterbury

Chaucer and Medieval Studies in Canterbury Peter Brown University of Kent Canterbury is a natural home for Chaucer studies. Ever since the Board (now School) of English was founded at the University of Kent in 1965, undergraduates in their second and final years have had access both to a core, or survey, module that includes the Canterbury Tales (currently Medieval and Tudor Literature) and to a more specialized option focusing on particular aspects of Chaucer’s works (e.g., Troilus and Criseyde and its cultural contexts). Chaucer has also featured in a first-year module, Explorations in Reading, which ran from The Pardoner ’s Tale to Waiting for Godot (or from Becket to Beckett). It follows that the department has always maintained a post for a medievalist (preferably one with broad sympathies), while other academic staff with different but related specialties have been prepared to make common cause. One example is a highly successful first-year module, Early Drama (from the liturgy to Dr. Faustus), which has run for many years Most of the texts have a Canterbury connection, and the module (current enrollment 118) is available to all students of English but is not compulsory. It challenges students’ preconceptions about literature and dramatic representation, introduces them to key images and ideas in biblical mythography , and allows them to undertake a practical project. The end of the spring term sees a veritable mini-festival of medieval and early modern plays performed on campus and in the city. If students are at first discombobulated by the extent to which they are encountering a Christian culture (an early guided tour of the cathedral as theatrical space is a baptism of fire), the majority rise to the challenge and end as apologists for the literature of the period. Whatever their high school background (where the teaching of Chaucer, let alone of other medieval literature, is in decline), many students of English do come to the UniPAGE 261 261 ................. 11491$ CH10 11-01-10 14:02:10 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER versity of Kent at Canterbury with the reasonable expectation that Chaucer, and medieval literature more generally, will be on the agenda. However, this contribution to the colloquium is not primarily about undergraduate studies as organized by individual departments, but about cross-departmental postgraduate studies; and not just about Chaucer, but about medieval (and adjacent) studies. Specifically, it is about a recent crisis that engulfed the Canterbury Centre for Medieval & Tudor Studies. Although the issues raised are not Chaucer-specific, they are relevant insofar as the teaching of Chaucer at the postgraduate level frequently takes place within the broader context of a medieval studies program. The issues concern interdisciplinarity, collegiality, the place of medieval (and Chaucer) studies in the curriculum, the impact of government and University funding policies, and the emphasis placed on departmental research ratings and teaching quality assessments as modes of evaluating the worth of staff. Just as the enthusiasm generated in a first-year medieval module generates good recruitment into second- and final-year core and special modules in medieval literature, so well-received undergraduate modules in turn generate a thirst for postgraduate study in the same area. Colleagues in History at Kent, teaching a similar undergraduate program structure, and with the added benefit of more staff in the medieval and early modern periods, had experienced similar demands. So it seemed appropriate to join forces and mount an M.A. in Medieval and Tudor Studies, drawing on the resources of both disciplines, and with additional input from Drama and French. The M.A. enjoyed modest success throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and was helped on its way by the loose interdisciplinary structure of the Faculty of Humanities and the collegiate structure of the University. However, in the early 1990s, under pressure from the Thatcherite philosophies of accountability and line management, the University adopted more dirigiste policies toward both Faculties and colleges: ‘‘Boards of studies’’ became fully-fledged departments, located in a single place, and, as a consequence, colleges ceased to be sites of interdisciplinary interchange. The formation of the Canterbury Centre for Medieval & Tudor Studies was a direct response to these developments. It became, in effect, a postgraduate department...

Reading America Reading

A stepchild of European grandparents, for whom histoire du livre and Geschichte des Buchwesens long ago acquired the status of legitimate fields of study, the history of the book in America finally is emerging into its own. Indeed, the potential conflation of such disciplines as the new social history and the history of technology, as well as the history of literacy, readerresponse theory, bibliography, and ideological criticism, among others, could mark a genuinely new interdisciplinary effort to discover what people in America thought, and how and why they thought it. Thus, at a time when many theoretical orientations toward literature are giving way to ideological criticism grounded in the New Historicism, history of the book offers the opportunity for literary historians to reinvigorate their scholarship as they reestablish a working relationship with colleagues in history from whom they have been estranged. But therein lies the rub, for the methodology and conclusions of the most sophisticated historians of the book-and they are primarily in departments of history-derive very strongly from the new social history of the 1970s, which raised all sorts of questions about America's rank and file and rejected as naive and elitist the efforts of Perry Miller and other intellectual historians to relate literature to society. Although such issues as canon revision through the recovery of African-American and women's voices or the politics through which authors' reputations are made are of interest to historians of the book, these scholars often dive to a still lower layer of culture, where questions of value are not a concern in the way they were to Miller and still are, say, to David S. Reynolds or Lawrence Buell, whose recent books offer examples of what literature scholars can contribute to history of the book. To historians like David D. Hall or Robert Gross, the simplest doctrinal tract, reprinted a score of times in eighteenth-century New England, or the bawdy humor of a hill country almanac is potentially as significant as anything in the Heath Anthology of American Literature (not to speak of the venerable Norton Anthology of American Literature itself) for what it tells us about the culture in which it was produced and consumed. Reading in America: Literature and Social History Edited by Cathy S. Davidson Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989

Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History

Donald Worster is surely right when he asserts that environmental history, at its most basic level, deals with role and place of nature in human life. And yet even so seemingly straightforward a definition suggests difficult challenge this new field poses for scholars. Environmental historians perform a delicate interdisciplinary balancing act in trying to reconcile insights of their colleagues in history, ecology, geography, anthropology, and several other fields. Like ecologists, they are more committed than most historians to proposition that natural world has an autonomous place in history. For them, story of prairie bluestem, for instance, or smallpox virus, or common barnyard pig, may be no less important than story of a presidential administration or a war. And yet unlike most ecologists, they share with other historians belief that nature can only exist in time, that particulars of historical environmental change are no less important than timeless abstractions of ecological processes. To make matters worse, they understand that very term they use to describe environment nature is itself an astonishingly complex human construction: as Raymond Williams once remarked, the idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.' This historical complexity of nature may be why Donald Worster's Transformation of Earth leaves me feeling both excited and uneasy. Like everything else Worster has written in his distinguished career as a founder of environmental history, essay is bold and richly suggestive. Its general research agenda I can embrace wholeheartedly, and I would be loath to critique it if my remarks tended to

History and the Novel: Mentalite in Modern Popular Fiction

Distanced from the culture or deprived of the sources that must inform their work, many social historians of modern Europe have been unable to resist using easily accessible novels as documents.' Fiction by the great British and French realists resembles the achievements of many responsible nineteenthcentury historians; in this way it has suggested material for more recent historical research. Yet because of this tempting convenience and apparent resemblance, historians have sometimes mistaken a novel's observations for journalistic reporting, or more often considered its perspective as a simple literary transcription of political or social ideologies. Moreover, specialists in literature concerned mainly with the tradition and aesthetic of the text have failed their colleagues in history. In spite of, or perhaps because of the many extrinsic issues raised by literary sociologists, here and abroad, critics often stress the special self-contained world of the novel, whatever its contents or implications of interest to the historian. This unfortunate situation has not only divided scholarly interest in literature; it has further undermined the use of fiction as an historical source now that there are more social scientific approaches to the past. How then have social and even cultural historians misread the novel? In this

Arrowsmith and the history of medicine in America

Author's note: As will be obvious from reading Professor Trautmann's article in this issue of MOBIUS, she is the expert on the subject of medicine and literature. A mere historian ventures afield only to underscore the point that I believe literature has much to offer my own colleagues in history as well as to everyone concerned with education in the health sciences.

Recent Studies on Newman: Two Review Articles

RECENT STUDIES ON NEWMAN: TWO REVIEW ARTICLES I. REAPPRAISING NEWMAN ON DEVELOPMENT* FEW READERS OF Newman have ever been neutral in reacting to his writings: devotees frequently succumb to the convincing appeal of his arguments; adversaries usually seem unduly controlled by their own biases. Nor have Newman's works been particularly favored by the climate of theological opinion. During his Roman Catholic years (1845-90), for example, Newman frequently labored under a double cloud of suspicion-among members of the church he had left as well as among members of the church he had entered. Then at the turn of the century, the ambiguous appropriation of Newman's writings by various Modernists effectively dimmed his reputation in Roman Catholic theological circles for several decades. Not surprisingly, the earliest attempts at a theological reassessment of Newman tended to be both cautious and distorted. The caution was double-pronged: few theologians wanted to criticize a cardinal too stringently; even fewer relished attracting the attention of still vigilant anti-Modernists. The distortion frequently came through compressing Newman's terminology into conventional scholastic categories without attending to his quite varied meanings; again, distortion arose from utilizing Newman 's response without sufficient attention to his original questions and purposes. In contrast to the extensive work of their colleagues in history and literature, it is comparatively recently that theologians have re-discovered and attempted to restore the portrait of Newman the theologian.1 *Newman on Dooelopment. The Search for an Explanation in History. By Nicholas Lash. (Shepherdstown, West Virginia: Patmos Press, 1975), Pp. xii, ~64. $17.50. 1 For a bibliographical guide to Newman studies, cf. M. Svaglic, "John Henry Newman, Man and Humanist," Victorian Prose (edited by D. DeLaura; New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1973). pp. 115-165; C. Dessain, "Newman's Philosophy and Theology," ibid., pp. 166-184. On the emergence of Newman studies in Europe, see the articles by W. Becker, B. Dupuy, and A. Boekraad in The Rediscovery of Newman (edited by J. Coulson, A. Allchin; London-Melbourne: Sheed and Ward I London: S. P. C. K., 1967), pp. 147-194. 424 NEWMAN STUDIES 425 In particular, readers of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine have tended to be more concerned about extracting a ready-made, orthodox theory of development than with understanding either Newman's personal view of diverse developments or the complex paths of doctrinal history as such (cf. pp. 145-156) .2 Given Newman's penchant for cumulative, inter-locking argumentation the apparently modest concern of Lash's study is then really more challenging than might first appear: " to understand, as fully as possible, the multiple themes and patterns of argument in the Essay so as to be able, without unfaithfulness to Newman's thought, to provide the materials on the basis of which theologians may tackle the further question: what light can the Essay cast on the significantly different situation in which christian theology today attempts to come to terms with the problem of change and continuity in christian doctrine? " (p. 4) .8 If all might agree that" Newman's aim in writing the Essay was apologetic" (p. 10), readers' expectations do not necessarily coincide with its author's purpose. First, the Essay is more practical than theoretical: Newman's quest was to locate where the apostolic church is at present, rather than to delineate what the church is or should be. Secondly, the Essay is more personal than probatory: " it was not the ' evidence ' which he was watching, but his own state of mind in regard to that evidence" (p. 11). Accordingly, readers who expect a logical demonstration of the truth of catholicism may be puzzled by the persuasive presentation of " the fruit of a complex, personally acquired appreciation of the concrete facts of christian history " (p. 17) . And theologians who are searching for a systematic theory of doctrinal development may be disappointed that Newman's so-called" theory" is really more tentative and problematic than is conventionally recognized. "What Newman needed, and what he sought to provide in the Essay, was a 'view' of christian history" (p. QO) .4 For an ecumenical revaluation, cf. J. Coulson, A. Allchin, M. Trevor, Newman: a...