Dargan sez: "Like I said before, some of these would replace some of the semi-historian questions out there now. Personally I think Peter Brown is quite gettable, and Natalie Z. Davis even more so since they did make a movie out of Return of Martin Guerre.In general, I think there are some really obscure history questions out there which aren't any better than questions on historians, and in the other social sciences we tend to focus on practitioners, so why not the occasional historian q?" They also made a worse movie out of _La Retour de Martin Guerre_--_Sommersby_ starring Richard Gere, as Gerard Depardieu, er Sommersby/Guerre. I fell asleep to it on an airplane once. I think maybe the reason there are not as many questions about historians is because in writing questions to fulfill a tournament's history requirement, unlike in other social sciences like anthropology and economics, you can write questions on what (may have) actually happened. It's difficult to write questions about transitions from hunter-gatherers to farmers or about stuff other than various Panics. You're almost forced to write about people's opinions and research. This leads to an overemphasis of the importance (at least in quizbowl terms) of many social scientists, when academics in other fields such as history, who may have as much or more clout in their particular discipline, often go unasked about. Mike Wehrman
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