Some Stuff I've Read Recently

So I ended up a bit disappointed by Slate's history week, especially the conversation between Ravitch and Wiener that just sorta ... ended. Thud. And most of the articles on specific topics just weren't very gripping. But that's the problem with history - most stuff that doesn't relate to your field of interest is boring. For instance, in grad school, I had a couple articles published in the school history journal. But when the issues actually came out, mine were the only articles I was interested in reading (and I bet most of the other contributors felt the same way).

Anyway, there was one stand-out history article at Slate - David Greenberg's two-part essay (here's part one and part two) on the difficulty of bridging the gap between academic and popular history writing. Academic writing tends to be dull, jargon-ladened, and obsessed by topics that no one cares about (see the paragraph above). Popular writing, on the other hand, often lacks original research or any familiarity with preceding work in the same field (historiography). Greenberg's suggestion, then, is to marry accessible writing on interesting topics with solid historiography. He cites Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (a book I loved) as a prime example of this style of history. Here's to hoping that historians in and out of academia follow Greenberg's advice.

Finally, today I read an interesting article on gender-imbalance in Asia. The economist Amartya Sen has argued that this imbalance is caused by the misogyny of Chinese, Indian, et al. societies and the resultant neglect and infanticide of females. However, as the article details, Emily Oster has discovered that a large part of the disparity can be explained by the high incidence of Hepatitis B in Asia, which for unknown reasons, causes women carriers of the disease to be more likely to give birth to boys than girls.