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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Yeah but it’s fun though
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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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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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The research into indigenous cultures in America is essentially going to ask some fire water sippin bum on a reservation how much his culture respected women, take him at his word for it, then publish it saying how wretched white people are for supplanting their utopia with McDonald’s.
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Ideally you would ask multiple bums, but preservation and study go hand-in-hand with history, ever since Herodotus
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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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