The death of history?

[Bogie]

You know, history is a BITCH to search for on the interwebz... You can find current events easily enough... But try to go back in time. I'm figuring that fairly soon, there won't be a lot history "books" produced. And instead, we'll have the net... Where it is a LOT easier to photoshop out the faces of disloyal astronauts...

[BridgeWalker]

History is alive and well and living on the intarwebz.  Here's some random links in medieval and early medieval history and sources I've used in the past.

http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/christian-history.html

http://www.deremilitari.org/

http://omacl.org/

http://www.boydell.co.uk/EETS.HTM

http://libro.uca.edu/

http://www.stoa.org/sol/

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/incunabula/

No lack of history books being published either.

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/?view=usa&ss=title.asc&sf=all&submit=Sort&com.hesketh.taglib.autoform.formName=default.autoform

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryWorld/?view=usa&ss=title.asc&sf=all&submit=Sort&com.hesketh.taglib.autoform.formName=default.autoform

http://www.boydell.co.uk/

http://www.press.umich.edu:80/history/index.jsp

Some of the problems with history today:

1) Relativism and the expansion of multiculturalism to the point where some people are beginning to regard history as little more than literature.  "It isn't really history unless you talk about the women.  And the peasants.  And the foreigners.  And everything.  All at once.  Any discrimination in subject matter makes an analysis less historical because it doesn't talk about *everything*.  The pendulum swinging away from the nineteenth century, when some historians believed that all of human history was knowable if only they gathered enough documents.

2) The crunch on higher education.  Most instructors are lecturers, part-timers with no benefits and little pay.  It is very, very difficult for these people to produce quality work since they only get paid for classroom teaching hours and are pretty disenfranchised from the university.  Not to mention they are horribly overworked, often teaching and two or three or more schools.

3) A glutted market.  In many areas of history, actually most, there are way, way too many qualified people.  So, you need a book to get an interview.  Another book to get tenure.  A steady succession of publish-or-perish challenges run amok which means too many books and not enough of them masterpieces or even terribly well thought out.

But, record numbers of historians and college students and communication venues means more history than ever, even if it is harder to sort the wheat from the huge overgrowth of chaff.

[Bogie]

Ah, there's the established "academic" stuff... Joe's going after a Ph.D in medieval stuff, the interwebz gets stuffed...
 
But go back 25-30 years, and things are all over the place.
 

[wooderson]

Google is rapidly getting to the point where AltaVista and Hotbot were in the late '90s - there's too much noise on teh Intarwebz to sort through to find good information on just about any topic. You either get morons, astroturfers (search for anything semi-political) or places trying to sell crap.

[French G.]

Stop hating the Google memory hole, just hit "I'm feeling lucky" and Believe!     Thank god for libraries, wish i could talk to more very old people before they passed on.

[roo_ster]

Some of the problems with history today:

1) Relativism and the expansion of multiculturalism to the point where some people are beginning to regard history as little more than literature.  "It isn't really history unless you talk about the women.  And the peasants.  And the foreigners.  And everything.  All at once.  Any discrimination in subject matter makes an analysis less historical because it doesn't talk about *everything*.  The pendulum swinging away from the nineteenth century, when some historians believed that all of human history was knowable if only they gathered enough documents.

2) The crunch on higher education.  Most instructors are lecturers, part-timers with no benefits and little pay.  It is very, very difficult for these people to produce quality work since they only get paid for classroom teaching hours and are pretty disenfranchised from the university.  Not to mention they are horribly overworked, often teaching and two or three or more schools.

3) A glutted market.  In many areas of history, actually most, there are way, way too many qualified people.  So, you need a book to get an interview.  Another book to get tenure.  A steady succession of publish-or-perish challenges run amok which means too many books and not enough of them masterpieces or even terribly well thought out.

But, record numbers of historians and college students and communication venues means more history than ever, even if it is harder to sort the wheat from the huge overgrowth of chaff.

BW:

What you wrote, with bells on it.

My second, "fun" major was history.  I met many of the, "But, it doesn't comprehend the entirety of the blahblahblah because it leaves out the <insert group of choice>."

I was wise enough to lean on my physics major, not my history major, for employment purposes.

Also, there are great swaths of history left un-studied by heavy-hitters due to political reasons, military history being but one example.

I lucked out and latched on to two instructors (one for US history, one for late antiquity) who were both good historians and good instructors.

[BridgeWalker]

My second, "fun" major was history.  I met many of the, "But, it doesn't comprehend the entirety of the blahblahblah because it leaves out the <insert group of choice>."

I was wise enough to lean on my physics major, not my history major, for employment purposes.

Also, there are great swaths of history left un-studied by heavy-hitters due to political reasons, military history being but one example.

I lucked out and latched on to two instructors (one for US history, one for late antiquity) who were both good historians and good instructors.

Smarter than me.  I started a double major, biochem and history.  Ended up turning a biochem major into a bio minor and getting the degree in history.  Could never seem to get the bio labs to work with my jobs.  At the time it didn't make much difference.  I was gonna teach in religious Jewish schools, and my degree didn't matter.  Then I stopped being an Orthodox Jew.  Oops.  So, I went to law school.

But, yeah, I know what you mean about historians.  I *really* lucked out.  As Steve over on THR would say, I found "Elders and Mentors".  One prof had been my father's favorite prof and he took a shine to me right away.  He taught intellectual history of the Renaissance, and got me started learning about early printing.  He was close to retirement, and dismayed by current trends in history, and spent the bulk of a semester-long research seminar having us explore the gamut of historiographical approaches, from Ranke to the post-feminist "it's all literature" crap, and warned us extensively against abandoning history for ideology. 

He retired and my next prof, a Late Antiquity guy and an incredible lecturer, became not only my mentor, but eventually my closest friend and my daughter's godfather.  And he taught me to shoot revolvers.  Not bad at all.

But, here I sit, in law school.  Because I couldn't fit biochem labs around my work schedule.  Oh well. I like the law.

[MechAg94]

I wouldn't say military history is left out just maybe not as widespread.

[ilbob]

History has always been pretty subjective, ergo the adage that "the winners get to write the history books".

These days there seems to be a lot of re-writing going on.

I am not necessarily opposed to talking about the bit players here and there, but it needs to be put in the context of them being bit players.

George Washington is an historical figure, and the things he did helped shape history. His slaves were not significant figures, and while it may be noteworthy to point out he had slaves, its not especially relevant when studying the revolutionary war period. You need to get the big picture first.

I think it is CA that has a textbook that portrays American Indians as being mostly peaceful farmers. There were some peaceful farmers among the Indian tribes, but they certainly in the minority.