Sad History, 12/14
The trend among academic historians to focus on Woke topics
I wasn’t surprised, of course, by the enormous growth since 1992 of women’s history. Women’s history has made up the largest subfield in the profession for over a decade, and since 2015 specialists in that field have numbered 10% of all historians. Historians today are also much more interested in gender, gay, and trans history as well as the history of race and ethnicity. A good third of the 2022 sessions are given over to such subjects. No surprise there.
He sees this as an opportunity for the start-up University of Austin to carve out a niche teaching history the old-fashioned way. Instead, I see it as a reason to de-fund academic history and instead support more old-fashioned historians. Of course, each of us is dreaming.
Note that academic economics is following the trend toward greater focus on gender and race, as Jeremy Horpedahl and I documented.
Haha, that reminds me: I knew a woman a few years ago who was a history professor at a small college in PA. She was writing a "Women's History" book at the time about how Betsy Ross was the first American intersectional feminist or something like that. She was a walking caricature of the miseducated American college professor, really. She was also one of the most unhappy people I've ever met. I always wondered which came first: was she depressed from having spent too long in academia, or did she opt into academia because its worldview validated her depression?
I am at least encouraged that there are educators who push back against the postmodern approach to history. For example: https://voegelinview.com/history-forgotten-and-remembered/