Re: Lies

Dargan_W · Mon, 19 Nov 2001 07:22:37 -0800

My esteemed former teammate stated:
There's a
lot of biography questions that count as history, and
the study of "great men" is a part of historical
investigation, but what historians actually do a lot is study
theory and other historians' works. Historians are not
generally asked about, though, and the ones that are part
of the "canon"--Gibbon, Thucydides, Einhard, and the
like are as much literature as history. Not too many
of the French Annales School bigwigs tend to come
up--Bloch, Braudel, Legoff, and so forth, and when was the
last time you heard a good Edward Said bonus?

I
haven't posted on here in a long time, if ever, but I
think some of you remember me from the old list.
Anyway, here is a topic which both interests me and on
which I can speak with at least a bit of knowledge.

First of all, Mike, you just need to widen your
medievalist prejudice hehe -- I saw an excellent Isaiah
Berlin toss-up in the questions from the St. Louis open.
However, Mike is correct that professional, modern
historians tend to come up much less often than
practitioners of the other social sciences, e.g. anthropology,
psychology, philosophy, sociology, economics. This disparity
is, however, made up for by the fact that history
receives such a large proportion of the
distribution.
My problem is that the historians who DO come up are
often fringe folks or people who are more famous for
other stuff: Martin Bernal, Stephen Ambrose, Ken Burns,
even Bart Giamatti wrote a work of history ... also
Michel Foucault if he's in your history distribution ..
perhaps Schlesinger in this category too. These are not
good questions. 

There are, however, some
legitimate, modern historians who should be admitted to the
canon.
Here is my (By no means comprehensive or perfect)
list:
The Annales School, as mentioned above (and Edward
Said for that matter)
James Scott (_Weapons of the
Weak_, theory of everyday resistance)
E. P. Thompson
(_The Making of the English Working Class_)
Eric
Hobsbawm (_Primitive Rebels_ and a host of other
works)
Eugene Genovese (_Roll, Jordan, Roll_)
Ian Kershaw
(_Hitler_ and _Public Opinion and Political Dissent in the
Third Reich_)
Natalie Z. Davis (_The Return of
Martin Guerre_)
Peter Brown (_The Cult of the Saints_
and _Augustine of Hippo_)

There is a long list
of other historians who are on the edge of being
here. I really think all of these are askable as
tossups, there are some others who are legitimate bonus
fodder.

Anyway, there's my bucketful of drachma... fire at will