In thinking about what Guy and others have said about art history, I'd like to point out that it applies to history in general. We've had this discussion on here before -- Upper level and grad students in history study events almost as an aside, what we mainly study are other historians and their ideas and theories. Modern historians (as opposed to Herodotus or Edward Gibbon) do come up every once in awhile, but it's rare. I personally think Peter Brown, James Scott, and Ian Kershaw (just to give a couple examples) are as relevant as Cindy Thompson, but let's face it, most rooms would give me blank stares on those names. Anyway, it is very interesting that science questions often tend to ask about practitioners of science, which angers the science folks because that is not what they study... while at the same time, history questions (as opposed to questions in the social sciences, which I emphatically believe history is not) almost never ask about our practitioners, historians, which is what we actually study at least in graduate school. I really am not sure what relevance this has to the way questions should be written, because I think for the most part questions should reflect the desires of the players, and even most history players would rather hear a tossup on Hitler than on Kershaw. Anyway, this was a pretty random rant, but I think it does point to a basic difference in the way we ask about the sciences and the humanities. peace and collard greens, Dargan
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