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Showing posts from November 15, 2009

What Should I Read Next?

Educated readers and students often ask, “How do I select a good history book?” Michèle Lamont, in her new book How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts), 2009, explores how various disciplines evaluate scholarship within their fields. Drawing upon her research on grant proposals, she suggests that within the “humanities”, historians as a professional group are more likely to agree on the quality of a particular research proposal or its product, a book, than are other fields. That is to say, historians know a good history book when they read it. Understanding how historians agree on what are good books helps the non-historian in selecting books. Why do historians have a wider agreement on superior scholarship than do scholars in political science, sociology, or literature? Dr. Lamont’s answer is no surprise to historians: history is evidence based where other fields are theory based. For the historian