I enjoyed reading Katherine C. Epstein’s article “Historians Killing History” in the fall 2024 issue of Liberties, but as a fellow historian, I’d like to offer a friendly dissent. Epstein argues that the historical profession is currently suffering from a “collapse of scholarly standards” that has had grievous consequences, both for the field of history itself, and for the broader culture. In particular, she asserts that “too many historians,” and the authors of “far too many dissertations and monographs” are eschewing the difficult task of serious, time-consuming primary-source research in favor of quick trips to archives “to anoint their argument with a few references for a patina of authenticity.” The result is “pseudo-scholarship.”
I understand why Professor Epstein came to the conclusions she did. Respect for truth standards in the culture is at as low an ebb as ever. And there is no shortage of sloppy, poorly sourced work being published in our field as in many others. But has this sort of work become the norm, to the extent that it is “killing history”?
I cannot resist mentioning that when, in my own draft Ph.D. dissertation, I wrote “many people,” one of my readers, the great historian of early modern England Lawrence Stone, would circle the phrase in red ink and add the indignant comment “who?! How many?!” I suppose that there is no easy way to quantify the collapse of standards and the rise of pseudo-scholarship, so we must fall back at least in part on subjective impressions. But, for what it’s worth, my own subjective impressions of what is happening are different from Professor Epstein’s.
Put simply, as a practicing historian and teacher of graduate students for some thirty-four years now, I haven’t observed a collapse of scholarly standards. Historical writing certainly suffers from problems at present, including tendentiousness and trendiness (please, no more monographs on the global circulation of a single commodity, or on international organizations in the interwar period!). But work can be both tendentious and trendy, and still be based on serious primary-source research.
My own graduate advisees without exception devote a tremendous amount of time and effort to hard digging in European archives. My most recent Ph.D. graduate spent two years visiting more than forty separate repositories, consulting documents in six different languages, and wrote a brilliant thesis that earned him a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship. And while it might be flattering to think that my students and I are fighting a last-ditch effort to preserve scholarly standards while all around us lies wrack and ruin, that’s not the case. It’s not the case with the other graduate students at my university whose work I read. It is not true of the scholars around the country whose work I regularly review, either in book reviews, manuscript reviews for journals and presses, or tenure and promotion reviews. It’s not true of (most of) the many conferences papers I hear and (most of) the many journal articles and monographs I read each year. There is plenty of work that I am critical of—deeply so in some cases—but my criticisms mostly concern the interpretations of the research, not the research itself. Which is as things should be. Vive le débat!
These days, despite deteriorating and precarious working conditions and employment prospects, the field of history remains enormously competitive. As a result, I see graduate students and recent Ph.D.’s doing ever more exhaustive (and exhausting!) research in what sometimes seems like a primary-source arms race. They know that they are going to be judged on the quality of that research (perhaps the quantity, too), as well as on the arguments they spin out of it. This is hardly the ideal way to have scholarly standards reinforced, but that has been the effect, nonetheless.
Sincerely,
David A. Bell
As a long-time admirer of David Bell’s work (including his two wonderful essays in Liberties), I’m grateful to him for taking the time to engage with mine.
I have no doubt that Professor Bell trains his own students rigorously. And some dissertations and first monographs by Princeton graduates that I have read have deeply impressed me. But others — none supervised by him — have dented my confidence in the Princeton brand. I don’t mean to single out Princeton here. Off the top of my head, I can think of a number of Ivy League history departments (three, to be exact) whose institutional imprimatur would cause me to read dissertations in fields that I know well with extra scrutiny.
Professor Bell rightly calls attention to the intense competition and precarity confronting historians, especially recent graduates, in the job market. He suggests that these pressures have led to something like “a primary-source arms race.” But surely the opposite is just as likely to be true: a race to the bottom, as doctoral students seek to cut corners and costs while escalating their claims for originality and significance in a desperate search for fewer and fewer decent jobs. Indeed, my impression is that hard times have exacerbated, not counter-acted, scholarly shrinkflation.
Professor Bell might have left one Stone unturned. After quoting my reference to “too many historians,” Professor Bell notes that when he referred to “many people” in his dissertation, his supervisor liked to ask “how many?” But he is not comparing like with like. My adverb “too” qualifies the adjective “many” and renders the query “how many” inapt. The phrase “too many historians” conveys my sense that the bad apples have grown so numerous as to call the health of the orchard into question.
Kate Epstein