So this chart, which I made using the numbers in S. Mintz' recent Inside Higher Ed. piece (link and original source below) on the change in permanent faculty for 14 history departments is catastrophic.
— Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) December 16, 2022
We, as a field, as a discipline, should be discussing almost nothing else. 1/ pic.twitter.com/fn2aHAmY9O
As you'd expect, of course someone brings up domination of leftoid/radlib ideologues as the reason for pushing people away.
It was evident two decades ago that academic historians were hollowing out their profession by elevating ideology & fads over the needs of students, public & long-term interests of univ & discipline. These figures are sad but reflect a generation of professional irresponsibility.
And it predictably it casues seethe from a lot of totally not leftist History-cels including a POC historian who says it's due to lack of funding.
This is a completely incorrect account of why the discipline declined in the academy. History’s demise reflects the financialization of higher education & the decline of public/private support for humanities research. It has nothing to do with “ideology.”
Yeah "financialization". History in the past was a field where some talented polymath did all the research as a hobby. There's a very good reason why most people aren't interested in funding mediocre ideologues and their rants.
Goes on a long screed about how it's "finance capitalisms" fault while simultaneously arguing about how they should've convinced more billionaires to donate for their """"""research"""""".
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Some dude suggests offering more military history courses which would be cooler and that doesn't go well.
The popularity of history podcasts show this is self-inflicted. Why don't more colleges, for example, offer military history?
Terrible take. Podcasts are entertainment that might be informative on the side.
And you get +++ military history when studying a specific region/era.
But one teacher can’t cover “every cool battle in all of history” with anything like depth or intellectual integrity.
Anyway. Lots of copium in there as they witness the slow decline of their field.
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Academia is incredibly bloated, how many historians does a country need?
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History seems to be simultaneously bloated while producing increasingly poor research.
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Research into what? Until some submarine-archeology-cel finds the lost library of Mu-Mu at the bottom of the Pacific, there is no more stuff to research. It's all just revisionist hot-takes.
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That guy one guy with the Netflix show was suggesting this and a bunch of historycels were gnashing their teeth saying it anti science and historians should be out there proving that white people didn’t exist before 1800 or something.
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Academicacels seething about new evidence potentially upending their pet theory. What else is new!
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hmmm I think I have figured out why there are no more historycels.
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Your research can counter their revisionist hot takes.
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The point of becoming a historian is essentially to CLEAN IT UP
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Revisionism and synthesis is necessary in history, the guy who wrote the first account is always a biased r-slur so you need a differently-biased r-slur to balance it out and then a third also-biased r-slur to assess who lied more
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There's still plenty of interesting stuff in the small details, especially for niche interests in history. For example that curator from the Tank Museum with the help of other people managed to find the history behind some of the rare vehicles they have there from WWII including finding out how it was captured and who it was fighting. Also things like discovering documents that give the original color codes so you can recreate the exact camo of when it came out of the factory. Not exactly the type of thing that books get written about but still interesting if you're into that sort of shit.
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Things like local history can also be worth investigating.
Perhaps the future of history is not in centralized ivory towers of academia, but local amateurs guided by professionals who work to cherish their community's past.
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Local history is based because they dont care about woke shit or any ideology other than "the people who used to live here were cool"
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The problem is two terrible trends struck history at the same time:
History cannot provide any fundamental truths about humanity (post-modernism)
History should aggressively promote social justice (wokeism)
If it were just one or the other -- history that claimed to not provide any truths, but remained disciplined and unbiased, or history that furthered progressivism but claimed to be true -- perhaps it would have been fine. But in tandem, it just means that history is literally just propaganda.
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I've heard a lot of wordswordswords about how slavery in the Americas was uniquely terrible and how every other empire that practiced slavery was actually heckin good and humane
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Big data plus genetics have lead to a huge explosion of being able to trace populations and languages much better than we were ever able to before. There are are a huge amount of interesting results being dug up right now. The future of history when there is a new generation of data science literate historians looks bright.
Plus big stuff like this is being discovered still:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Hoard
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There's huge advances to be made just from finally having decent maps. A lot of our conventional wisdom about ancient history comes from the 1800s when the Ottoman Empire didn't allow foreigners to survey their territory because they (correctly) believed that anyone trying to was doing it to help a foreign invasion. So there was a lot of guesswork done by people in Europe with terrible maps, leading to lots of confusion and misidentification and "lost cities".
I don't know that much progress has been made yet though, since "Classical Studies" has walled itself off as its own little province that's devoted to sucking its own peepee.
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Yeah but it’s fun though
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I feel like maybe it's because everyone is trying to write an original masters thesis and really there's only so much history to write about so they grasp at increasingly absurd straws
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I think a good number of them are also more interested spreading a narrative than doing proper research. No amount of mental gymnastics can make the "xyz culture in Africa or the Americas was actually advanced and progressive until whitey came along" argument seem convincing.
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Uh oh sweaty those heckin diverserinoos had tribal knowledge. Stop being a Nazi.
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Cause only r-slurs are history majors
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They're lucky you didn't punch your lights out
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As long as they are on the right side of history? As many as it takes.
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At least a dozen
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More in some areas of study, way less in others. Wokism is devastating the field by diverting money into socially convenient but overcrowded areas and topics.
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The duality of chud
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Humanities could be based, if they weren't entirely saturated by leftoid parasites who turned them in to pseudosciences. It's unsalvageable.
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There are tons of conservative/centrist historians it's just that most focus on writing actual academic works not posting hot takes on twitter.
Funnily enough in actual academic spaces things like Marxist historiography have actually fallen out of style pretty thoroughly and it's actually a methodology probably more represented on twitter then anywhere else.
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They exist but they have to tiptoe around leftoid hegemony. Take the word primitive for example. It was a good term for all pre civ people but now its been effectively outlawed. Use it and someone will call you problematic
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It’s primitive basically saying ape like? Like a primate? Very problematic sweetie, pls do better
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Come to brazil (any thirdie country really) and youll see thats not true
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Aren’t Brazillian historians mostly coke heads who spent most of their time nailing their big-bootied students?
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Not true, some are weedheads
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Can you blame them?
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Should have specified Anglophone academic spaces.
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Anglos are worse. 1 billion Indians died and lost trillions it seems.
https://mronline.org/2019/01/15/britain-robbed-india-of-45-trillion-thence-1-8-billion-indians-died-from-deprivation/
2022: https://mronline.org/2022/12/14/british-empire-killed-165-million-indians-in-40-years/
All of the above are based on """studies"""
Al Jazeera with actual slaves prints this shit: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/6/rich-countries-drained-152tn-from-the-global-south-since-1960
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from-india
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Thats not Marxist historiography though, thats just being a leftoid
The last time Marxist historiography was popular in the west was like 1992 and the sole area where they did any good work was in studying enclosures and peasant revolts in early modern England
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Monthly review is like the gold standard of Marxist thought in the west. These are the people who do research on peasant revolts and enclosures and such.
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I didnt mean the publication, I meant that particular article. I just skimmed it but it looks like its just boring econ history mixed with leftoid sneed. Doesnt even have buzzwords smh
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Anywhere that copes and sneeds in the world will still believe in dependency theory, the academic equivalent of the tribesman thinking the guy with more yams used black magic trickery to take them from his garden.
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Structuralism and CEPAL as a whole are like malignant tumor on Latin American economics
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What's wrong with structuralism?
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By structuralism I meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralist_economics
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Oh, you're talking about the nonsense that led to import substitution policy. Yeah, frick that noise.
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Marx has almost nothing to do with the modern left. Rightoids stop fighting the last war challenge (impossible).
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Imagine not celebrating your ancestors being based as frick and destroying their enemies, taking land, etc
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There's a reason that happened and only woketarded yuppies get a monopoly on culture now.
Also a lot of rightoid arguments feel hollow and disingenous when every other one is trying to get into a tech job in the same globohomo megacorps they whine so much about.
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Not entirely. Rightoids were the ones who populated the place hence the avtistic studies on some tribe somewhere by an Anglo on a picnic. And the digging up of history, literally
At some point post WW2 we decided to let whiny arabian and curry postcolonialcels. Burger lolberts cashed in true.
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at some point last century everyone kinda convinced themselves that nothing but engineering was worth pursuing anymore and that smart people only study stem, we are witnessing the results of decades of decay and brain drain in culture coming from that mentality.
Sillicon Valley is the worst from both worlds, neurodivergent stemcels trying to do social engineering and drugged out morons pushing their r-slurred theories from decades of internal rot in academia.
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The thing that birthed STEM worship was the US was falling behind the Soviet Union in space. And the recent resurgence is because of 2008, when a frickton of humanities majors realized their degree was useless because they weren’t born multimillionaires.
The problem with anything these days isn’t normal/smart people doing STEM, it’s that the super smart people realized you could make a lot of money in finance and business. So America’s Julius Caesars run stock simulations instead of governments.
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STEM should just be called TE because there's just too many broke Biology and Chemistry graduates now. Everyone gives the arts shit for trying to latch on with STEAM, but Science has been freeriding for a long time.
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Too generous to engineercels. If you want to make money T is the only letter that matters.
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Someone doesn't know what a quant is (or many engineering jobs for that matter)
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Why you dissing math bro we ain’t even do anything
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Sounds like the focus on becoming extremely rich is the problem. Too bad that's considered the ultimate virtue in this country
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The private sector in America has completely destroyed our public capabilities. No point working for the government when Blackrock pays 25x what they do
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I loves researching history in college. I did an entire paper on Sgt. Stubby and then, when I ran out of information on him, covered other war hero animals.
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This is what history in universities could have been like
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Old Abe The Eagle was the greatest American Eagle.
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idk
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Bird “expert” smdh
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GODDAMMIT that bird was a national icon. That bird had a rendezvous with destiny. It's amazing that you're this insensitive during the Christmas/Siege of Bastogne Season.
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sorry
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It’s because academics humanities are more focused on having s*x with modernity vs having s*x with the past. Everyone just getting so hyped up on the cutting edge, invented yesterday pseudosciences and so they don’t really care about anything else. If more people cared about the beauty/mystery of the past it would be different
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Learning about the past is fricking gay
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And being gay is based so
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I do find how people at the past think of science and nature extremely interesting. Or maybe weapons too. But not war.
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🚨 Straggot alert 🚨
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What would you rather learn about? Hype modernity is not making many people that much more happy or enlightened
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I'd rather learn about history, I was just shitposting
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You're implying current humanities actually "preserve" history instead of inserting their own postmodern shit take on it.
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postmodernism is exactly what happens if you let only the biggest r-slurs have complete control of the humanities for over 50 years
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Postmodernism has allowed for a ton of r-slurs to become rich and famous but its development was basically unavoidable and complaining about it is an r-slur trap.
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What’s the difference?
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If you think modern humanities preserve any part of western culture and aren't just post-modernism bug camp, I have a bridge to sell you.
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