PhD Dissertation Lengths

Posted on July 16, 2013 by briansandberg

Marcus Beck, a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, has created a chart demonstrating the varying average lengths of PhD dissertations by discipline.

According to io9, “Beck took the pressure of readying for his defense and channeled it toward an incredibly interesting (if entirely thesis-unrelated) side project. For Beck, that meant coding a data scraper that could gather information about students’ dissertations (page-length, year and month of graduation, research focus, etc.) from the University of Minnesota’s electronic thesis database.”

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Beck’s calculations are based on data from University of Minnesota PhD dissertations from 50 departments, so they may or may not be representative.

But, historians will not be surprised to find that the longest dissertations in Beck’s data are those of history PhDs, with an average of almost 300 pages.

History PhD dissertations are arguably longer than those in other fields because of the discipline’s archival sources, citation formats, historiographical frameworks, and demanding standards of evidence.

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The io9 website reports on Beck’s findings on dissertation lengths. Marcus Beck’s blog discusses his methodology.

For the record, my own PhD dissertation came in at 731 pages.  Given its weight, perhaps we should consider assessing dissertations in pounds?

Posted in Academic Publishing, Archival Research, Education Policy, Graduate Work in History, Humanities Education, Information Management | Leave a comment

New Review of Warrior Pursuits in French

Posted on July 16, 2013 by briansandberg

A new book review by Gregory Champeaud critiques my Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Champeaud’s review was recently published in French in the online journal, Francia-Recencio.

The review is available for download as a .pdf file at: http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/francia/francia-recensio/2013-2/FN/sandberg_champeaud

Champeaud’s review assesses the main arguments in Warrior Pursuits and also identifies three contributions that the book makes to the field of early modern French history.

Posted in Civil Conflict, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern World, European History, European Wars of Religion, French History, French Wars of Religion, History of Violence, Noble Culture and History of Elites, Reformation History, Religious Violence, Revolts and Revolutions, War, Culture, and Society, Warfare in the Early Modern World | Leave a comment

Gates Foundation’s Influence on Higher Ed

Posted on July 15, 2013 by briansandberg

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has enormous influence on universities and colleges  in the United States and it is seeking to fundamentally transform higher education. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “the foundation wants nothing less than to overhaul higher education, changing how it is delivered, financed, and regulated.”

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“The U.S. Department of Education recently allowed Southern New Hampshire to become the first university eligible to award federal aid for a program untethered from the credit hour, the time-based unit that underlies courses and degrees. The move, wrote one advocate, ‘could signal a new era for higher education,'” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at $36-billion the world’s largest private grant-making foundation, has done much to orchestrate that new era. Its largess and sway helped get Southern New Hampshire’s program off the ground, supported a key think-tank report that advocated moving beyond the credit hour, and helped persuade a risk-averse Education Department to open federal coffers to competency-based education.”

Gates claims to be motivated to transform higher education with the aim of “getting more students to and through college, in an effort to lift more Americans out of poverty.”

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This is certainly a noble goal. However, his business and technology interests in changing the American higher education system also seem clear. Gates endlessly promotes the benefits of computer technology and sees faculty members and university curricula as traditional and antiquated.

The Chronicle of Higher Education provides a critical report on the Gates Foundation and its influence on higher education.

Posted in Education Policy, Humanities Education | 2 Comments

French Cuisine and Frozen Food

Posted on July 10, 2013 by briansandberg

French haute cuisine restauranteurs are upset by revelations that many other restaurants are using frozen ingredients and even serving entire factory-frozen dishes. The Washington Post reports that “a chunk of tuna cooked Provencal style with an attractive ratatouille on the side, for instance, can be bought in a restaurant-supply factory for $4, stored in the freezer indefinitely and sold to a diner for $17 after three minutes in the microwave.”

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Some Parisian restauranteurs are spearheading an effort to create a system to distinguish restaurants that use all fresh ingredients from other types of eating establishments. “Alain Fontaine, who runs Le Mesturet restaurant near the Opera in Paris — and who cooks his dishes from scratch — lamented the growing tendency not only because it cheats diners but also because it means that everybody ends up eating the same mass-produced food with the same homogenized tastes,” according to the Washington Post.

The Washington Post reports on frozen food in French cuisine.

Posted in European Union, Food and Cuisine History, French History, Paris History | Leave a comment

The Mental Health Benefits of Reading

Posted on July 6, 2013 by briansandberg

Reading is often seen as an educational pursuit and an enjoyable habit. Now, neurological research suggests that reading has demonstrable benefits for mental health.

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A recent neurological study of 294 people found that “reading books, writing and engaging in other similar brain-stimulating activities slows down cognitive decline in old age, independent of common age-related neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, people who participated in mentally stimulating activities over their lifetimes, both in young, middle and old age, had a slower rate of decline in memory and other mental capacities than those who did not,” according to an article in Smithsonian Magazine.

Those subjects who read actively had markedly fewer memory problems, the study found. The study’s abstract concludes: “More frequent cognitive activity across the life span has an association with slower late-life cognitive decline that is independent of common neuropathologic conditions, consistent with the cognitive reserve hypothesis.”

The Smithsonian Magazine explains the mental health benefits of reading: “Reading gives our brains a workout because comprehending text requires more mental energy than, for example, processing an image on a television screen. Reading exercises our working memory, which actively processes and stores new information as it comes. Eventually, that information gets transferred into long-term memory, where our understanding of any given material deepens. Writing can be likened to practice: the more we rehearse the perfect squat, the better our form becomes, tightening all the right muscles. Writing helps us consolidate new information for the times we may need to recall it, which boosts our memory skills.”

Somehow, I imagine that Saint Augustine would not be surprised by these findings.

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This study is published in Neurology (this site requires a subscription login). The Smithsonian Magazine reports on the study.

Posted in Education Policy, History of Medicine, History of Science, Humanities Education, Information Management | Leave a comment

Interviewing War Criminals

Posted on July 6, 2013 by briansandberg

What is it like to confront evil in a face-to-face encounter? This is a question that James Dawes poses to himself frequently as he interviews war criminals.

Dawes, a professor of English and director of the Program in Human Rights and Humanitarianism at Macalester College, is a scholar of trauma studies who seeks to understand the motivations of perpetrators of war crimes.

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“The man sitting in front of me is a mass murderer,” writes Dawes. “He is a serial rapist and a torturer. We are chatting about the weather, his family, his childhood. We are sharing drinks and exchanging gifts. The man is in his 80s now, frail and harmless, even charming. Instinctively I like him. It is hard for me to connect him to the monster he was so many decades ago. I think it must be hard for him, too.”

Dawes has written an essay on “Understanding Evil” that raises important questions about the moral dilemmas of researching atrocities and war crimes: “By representing atrocity, are we giving voice, and therefore respect, to the victims who have been silenced? Or are we sensationalizing the private stories of those who have already been violated?”

The challenges of conducting oral history interviews of war criminals are related to broader methodological questions about how societies construct the historical memory of war crimes and how historians analyze atrocities and mass violence.

Gaining insights into the dynamics of mass violence is certainly useful to contemporary societies, but investigations of past atrocities can be traumatizing for both the perpetrators and victims of that violence, as well as for the researchers who investigate war crimes.

Dawes’s essay on “Understanding Evil” is published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Japan Times reports on a center on the historical memory of the Chukiren. The photo above comes from this article.

Posted in Civil Conflict, Civilians and Refugees in War, Historiography and Social Theory, History in the Media, History of Violence, Human Rights, Laws of War, Museums and Historical Memory, War, Culture, and Society | Leave a comment

Continuing Egyptian Revolution

Posted on July 6, 2013 by briansandberg

The Egyptian Revolution continues to develop, although the international news media has largely treated it as a process completed after the Arab Spring, which launched revolutionary processes in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lybia, and other countries.

This week, the Egyptian military intervened decisively in the revolution, ousting President Morsi and suspending the constitution in a coup d’état. The arrests of Morsi, his advisors, and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have prompted massive pro-Morsi protests and violent clashes in the streets of Cairo.

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The Washington Post and the BBC report on the escalating violence.

Khaled Fahmy, professor of History at the American University of Cairo, has published a fascinating op-ed on the Egyptian Revolution.

Fahmy concludes that “We did not launch this revolution nor risk our lives only to change the players. We wanted to change the rules of the game. That was the mandate we gave to Morsy. He has failed in this crucial task, so we no longer recognize him as a legitimate leader. He has broken the terms of the mandate. And our revolution continues.”

Historians and social scientists use concepts of revolutions and revolutionary processes to understand the dynamics of social and political revolutions. Khaled Fahmy’s piece clearly utilizes some of these concepts in examining the ongoing revolution that he himself is caught up in. The mix of historical thinking and eyewitness observation in his essay will interest historians of revolutions and civil conflicts.

CNN published Khaled Fahmy’s op-ed.

Posted in Civil Conflict, Civilians and Refugees in War, Comparative Revolutions, History of Violence, Human Rights, Mediterranean World, Religious Violence, Revolts and Revolutions, War, Culture, and Society | Leave a comment

Recreating Early Modern Medicinal Gardens

Posted on July 6, 2013 by briansandberg

The New York Botanical Garden has recreated a sixteenth-century medicinal garden as part of its exhibit on Wild Medicine: Healing Plants Around the World.

The medicinal garden is patterned on the botanical garden that was created in 1545 for the medical school of the University of Padua. European universities began to construct elaborate medicinal botanical gardens in the sixteenth century, as plants were circulating around the world through growing global trade networks. Europeans encountered numerous herbs and medicinal plants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and began to examine their uses. Early printed treatises on botany and gardening also date from this period, indicating the significance of Renaissance gardens for the history of medicine.

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NPR reports on the New York Botanical Garden’s exhibition, but the article makes several errors.

The article mistakenly claims that the University of Padua’s garden was “Europe’s first botanical garden.” The Orto Botanico, or Botanical Garden, of the University of Pisa was created a year earlier in 1544 by Cosimo I de’ Medici and has long claimed to be the first university medical garden. And, of course, many monasteries had medicinal gardens for centuries prior to that.

The NPR story’s caption to one of its photos mistakenly lists the date of the founding of the Padua garden as “1645.”

The New York Botanical Garden maintains a website for their current exhibition.

Scholars and students of the history of medicine, gardens, and globalization in the early modern period will be interested in this exhibition. Mediterranean historians and historians of science have developed a sophisticated historiography on medieval and early modern botanical gardens. For an entry into this literature, see:

Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Sara Ferri and Francesca Vannozzi, eds., I Giardini dei Semplici e Gli Orti Botanici della Toscana (Perugia: Giunta Regionale Toscana and Quattroemme, 1993).

Posted in Early Modern Europe, Early Modern World, Environmental History, European History, Globalization, History of Medicine, History of Science, Mediterranean World | Leave a comment

Collection of War Letters Opens

Posted on July 3, 2013 by briansandberg

A large private collection of American war letters is preparing to open to the public.

The collection is the result of the work of Andrew Carroll, an individual collector who became curious about wartime letters after suffering the loss of his own possessions in a fire.

Carroll assembled “collection of 90,000 wartime letters stretching from the Revolutionary War to modern-day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that will be housed in a new Center for American War Letters opening this fall at Chapman University in Southern California,” according to the New York Times.

The New York Times reports on the collection. Chapman University hosts a program in War, Memory and Society, in which Carroll participates.

Northern Illinois University students in History 491 may be interested in this collection.

 

Posted in Archival Research, History of Violence, Museums and Historical Memory, War, Culture, and Society | Leave a comment

Fellowships at Pritzker Military Library

Posted on July 2, 2013 by briansandberg

Deadline extended!

The Pritzker Military Library is seeking two fellowship candidates to work with its Veterans Information Center and Oral History departments. These are paid part time fellowship positions in partnership with the Mission Continues. All candidates must be OEF/OIF veterans.

Please send resumes and cover letters submitted to info@pritzkermilitarylibrary.org by July 15.

For more information, see the Pritzker Military Library website.

Northern Illinois University history students who are veterans may be interested in applying for a fellowship.

Posted in Careers in History, Graduate Work in History, Grants and Fellowships, Humanities Education, Museums and Historical Memory, Undergraduate Work in History, War, Culture, and Society | Leave a comment