Roundup: The Trials and Tribulations of David Barton

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Elise Hu, "Publisher Pulls Controversial Thomas Jefferson Book, Citing Loss Of Confidence," NPR, August 9, 2012

Citing a loss of confidence in the book's details, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson is ending the publication and distribution of the bestseller, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.>>>

Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens, "Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over," Atlantic blog, July 24, 2012

Earlier this month, George Mason University's History News Network asked readers to vote for the least credible history book in print. The top pick was David Barton's right-wing reimagining of our third president, Jefferson's Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. But just nine votes behind was the late Howard Zinn's left-wing epic, A People's History of the United States. Bad history, it turns out, transcends political divides.>>>

John Fea, "What Can We Learn From the David Barton Controversy?" Patheos, Anxious Bench, August 15, 2012

In case you have not heard, last week Thomas Nelson, a Christian publisher based in Nashville, ceased publication of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, saying it has “lost confidence in the book’s details.”>>>

Paul Harvey, "David Barton: Falling from Grace?" Religion Dispatches, August 10, 2012

This has been the summer of discontent with David Barton. First, in a poll taken by History News Network, Barton’s newest work, The Jefferson Lies, topped the list of “least credible history works in print.” The same work met a unanimous chorus of refutations from Jefferson public humanities scholar and radio personality Clay Jenkinson, from religious historians ranging from Martin Marty to John Fea, and (in the full length work Getting Jefferson Right) from Grove City College professors Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter.>>>

Jennifer Schuessler, "Hard Truth for Author: Publisher Pulls ‘The Jefferson Lies’" NYT, August 14, 2012

Last month the History News Network voted David Barton’s book “The Jefferson Lies” the “least credible history book in print.” Now the book’s publisher, Thomas Nelson, has decided to stop publishing and distributing it.

The book, which argues that Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic orthodox Christian who saw no need for a wall of separation between church and state, has attracted plenty of criticism since it appeared in April, with an introduction by Glenn Beck. But the death knell came after Jay W. Richards, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author, with James Robison, of “Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family and Freedom Before It’s Too Late,” began to have doubts and started an investigation.>>>

Popularizing Historical Knowledge Conference, University of South Carolina

Randall Stephens

On the fence about whether or not to attend the Historical Society's 2012 conference?  We have extended the deadline for early registration.  So, head over to the Historical Society site and sign up.  The PayPal setup makes it a cinch to register.

Also, check out the program, with many of the papers now on-line.

Here's a sampling of what will be on offer:

"Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils," University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, Mark Smith, Program Chair

THURSDAY MAY 31

7:30-9:00PM - Belk Auditorium
INTRODUCTION
Lacy K. Ford, Jr., University of South Carolina

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
"Whose History Is It Anyway? Reaching Real People"
Walter Edgar, University of South Carolina

FRIDAY JUNE 1

8:30-10:00am

Session IIB - Room JK
RELIGIOUS HISTORY AND THE PUBLIC IMAGINATION

Chair: John Fea, Messiah College

“Jonathan Edwards Redivivus: Contemporary Reformed Evangelical Uses of Popular History”
Adam S. Brasich, Florida State University

“Rob Bell, News Media, and the Role of Historians”
Charles A. McCrary, Florida State University

“Popularizing the Sacred: Religious History and the Public Imagination”
Jason Wallace, Samford University

1:00-2.30pm

Session IIIB - Room JK
LISTENING IN: MUSIC AND AMERICAN HISTORY

Chair: TBA

“Remixing the Master: Music, Race, and the Central Theme of Southern History Revisited”
Michael T. Bertrand, Tennessee State University

“A Song Is Born (The Public Intellectual)”
Jeff Pennig, Austin Peay State University

Session IIIC - Room 855
POPULARIZING JACKSONIAN AMERICA AND “FRONTIER” HISTORY

Chair: Heather Richardson, Boston College

“Old Hickory Just Got All Sexypants: History and Politics in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”
Mark R. Cheathem, Cumberland University

“Moving West: Migrations of a Yankee Family across the Old Northwest, 1780-1869”
Dan Allosso, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

3:00-4:30pm

Session IVC - Room 855
TEXTBOOKS AND THE POPULARIZATION OF HISTORY

Chair: Linda K. Salvucci, Trinity University

“A Most Successful Case of Historical Popularization: R. R. Palmer’s A History of the Modern World”
James Friguglietti, Montana State University, Billings

“Ideology and Education: Economic Education in Texas Public Schools, 1945-1970”
Jeff Hassmann, Lakeview College

SATURDAY JUNE 2

8:30-10:00am

Session VB - Room JK
LEGAL HISTORY AS POPULAR HISTORY

Chair: Deborah Beckel, Joel Williamson Visiting Scholar, Southern Historical Collection

“Abraham Lincoln’s Suspensions of Habeas Corpus in Public and Scholarly Memory”
Robert Faith, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

“Between Evidence, Rumor, and Popular Perception: Marshal Lamon and the “Plot” to Arrest Chief Justice Taney”
Phillip W. Magness, George Mason University

“The Politics of Habeas during the Civil War and Reconstruction”
Justin J. Wert, University of Oklahoma

“General Thomas Ewing’s Infamous Actions Hostile to Civil Liberties: General Order Numbers 10 and 11”
Timothy C. Westcott, Park University

Session VC - Room 855
POPULAR HISTORY, WOMEN’S HISTORY

Chair: Chris Beneke, Bentley College

“Traveling from the 18th to the 20th Century with Dorothy Quincy Hancock, Margaret Fuller, Sally Baxter Hampton, and Edith Nourse Rogers”
Marcia Synnott, University of South Carolina

“Knowledgeable Human Capital and Education in the Eisenhower Administration: The Role of Women”
Erwin V. Johanningmeier, University of South Florida

3:00-4:30pm

Session VIIIB - Room JK
THE POPULARIZATION OF HISTORY IN BRAZIL

Chair: Martin J. Burke, CUNY Graduate Center

“The Magazine Revista de História: A Brazilian Model of Scientific Spreading”
Luciano Figueiredo, Universidade Federal Fluminence

“The TV Show/Youtube Channel Leituras da História as an Example of Scientific Accountability”
Oldimar Cardoso, University of Augsburg


Session VIIIC - Room 855
LITERATURE AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY

Chair: TBA

“Links in the Chain: William Styron and the Creation of History”
R. Blakeslee Gilpin, University of South Carolina

“The History Behind the Poetry of Natasha Trethewey”
Daniel Littlefield, University of South Carolina

“Confronting and Correcting the ‘Cheap, Popular Edition’: Hemingway, Dorman-Smith, and the Chivalrous Quest for Historical Truth”
Ken Startup, Williams Baptist College

6:00-7:30pm - Top of Carolina
RECEPTION

7:30-9:00pm - Belk Auditorium
CHRISTOPHER LASCH LECTURE
"The Politics of Dead Knowledge: What If the Death of History Is a Suicide?"
Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University

On the Road Again: Dispatches from a Traveling Writer

Philip White

Since the March 6 release of my book about Winston Churchill’s unlikely journey to Fulton, Missouri in March 1946–Our Supreme Task–I’ve been busier than usual on the lecture circuit, not to mention with newspaper, radio and (gulp!) TV interviews. Now we’re not talking a J.K. Rowling schedule here (or indeed royalties), but a fine publicist + the continued fascination in all things Churchill + the local history angle = a few new and formative experiences. And a few terrifying ones.

The first stop was the Big Apple, where I’d never set foot before Saturday, March 3. Fortunately a lifelong friend has lived there for seven years, and proved an informed and gracious host. Within five hours of landing at La Guardia, he’d whisked me to the Met, put up with my sensory overload at Strand Book Store–where I could have happily squandered a year’s wages–and taken me back in time at the Café Sabarsky, with its wood paneling, grand piano and the best chocolat chaud this side of Vienna. Over the next two days, we consumed more spicy, rich Indian food and its buddy, Kingsfisher lager, than I had in the previous two months, and burned it off by traversing Brooklyn, the Garment District and the East Village.

Then the heat was really on. Any time you have to set three alarms it’s gotta be early, and the 4:15 a.m. EST wakeup call on Tuesday, March 6 (the day after the anniversary of Churchill’s "Iron Curtain" speech, which I explore in my book) was certainly that. The chilly morning air and a vacuumed down double espresso shocked the sleep out of me, and my publicist and I walked from the edge of a still-dormant Times Square to the Fox & Friends studio on 6th Avenue, where the following occurred:

5 mins in "green room," which is not green, but is a room.

2 mins in makeup (hey, don’t judge, they made me do it).

2 mins Ron Burgundy vocal warmup. OK, I made that up.

2 more minutes in green room. See on the wall-mounted TV that Iran’s going to let UN nuclear inspectors into one facility, one time.

Taken to studio by friendly production assistant.

9 minutes in studio. First two: sit there staring at the cameras, lights etc that create a hypnotic effect. Remembering how early it is and wishing I had another doppio in hand.

Next 3: Gretchen Carlson walks over, and is very chipper for such an unholy hour. Asks if I saw the news about the UN inspectors. Confirm I have. Tells me they’re going to ask me about that first. Holy crap. Need more time! Nope, gotta run with it (I had at least known about them wanting me to view Netanyahu and Obama’s tête-à-tête and speeches through the lens of Churchill’s "Iron Curtain" metaphor). Breathe. Get heart rate down. Countdown timer is running. And here . . . we . . . go.

Next 4: Answer questions. Tell Carlson that Iran is bringing down a digital iron curtain. Done.

And that was my first national TV experience.

After returning to Kansas City by air later that day, I had just 24 hours until the next port of call: another television interview at the KCTV 5 studio, just a 20-minute drive north of home. This time my good lady wife came with me, and the questions focused on the local side of the story: "How on earth did the president of Westminster College bring Churchill to his tiny town?" and so on. Then, after free-basing my new on-the-move "meal" of a Clif Builder Bar–the mint chocolate flavor only, the others are nasty–and the afore-mentioned java, it was on to the Kansas City Public Library. There, under the auspices of Mr. Crosby Kemper, who fittingly sponsors the current lecture series at Westminster College, I spoke to more than 150 people, only a handful of whom I’d paid to be here. Not to jinx the possibility, but the cameras of a certain book-focused TV station recorded my waffling, which my wife told me afterward went on for an hour and five minutes. Yikes. You’ll be glad to know I’ve since cut the speech down to a more palatable 35 minutes.

The best part of the evening was meeting a gentleman by the name of Art Whorton, who is now in his nineties. 66 years ago, he bluffed his way past Secret Service agents and into the gym where Churchill spoke in Fulton by putting his military ID on the brim of his fedora, slinging his camera around his neck and joining a line of press photographers. I told his story in my book via an account in the Fulton Sun-Gazette and didn’t even know Art was still around. What a treat to meet him and his family (see pic below).

Since that day, I’ve done four radio interviews, two newspaper ones, and delivered the abbreviated address five times. Through the experience, I’ve learned a few things about myself. First, I can actually drive in a downtown area, if not well, then at least without dying. Second, it helps to have the complete speech on the podium, and to never, ever, EVER rely on technology (curse you, embedded PowerPoint video!). Third, it’s nice to confirm that there are still flourishing independent bookstores–Main Street Books and Left Bank Books in St. Louis and The Book Shelf in Winona, MN., to name just three–that provide bibliophiles with years of the owners’ knowledge and passion.

And finally, there is nothing more gratifying than interacting with people who are genuinely interested in my work. Beyond the ego thing, I appreciate that thousands of hours of research, interviews, writing, editing and more than 3,500 miles mean something to at least a few people outside my home. To me, if not my bank balance, that’s more important than advances, Amazon rankings or Nielson Bookscan reports.

Self-publishing Histories?

Dan Allosso

I’ve been pondering the idea of self-publishing history, and I think the time has nearly come.

Say self-published to anyone over about 30, and the first thought they’ll probably have is “vanity press.” It has always been possible to have a manuscript printed and bound, and there are plenty of examples of useful histories that have been produced this way. Nearly all the “Centennial” histories on display or for sale at small-town historical societies were written by local people, mostly without formal literary or historical training, and published in small lots by local printers or specialist publishers. There were once many more local printers willing to take on “octavo” printing and bookbinding. Dr. Charles Knowlton, for example, self-published his 500-page tome Elements of Modern Materialism using a small printer in Adams, Massachusetts, in 1828 (he bound the volumes in leather and stamped the spines with gilt ink himself), and his infamous birth control book, The Fruits of Philosophy was also produced at Knowlton’s own expense and sold by Knowlton out of his saddle-bags to his patients, until Abner Kneeland began advertising an expanded second edition in The Boston Investigator in 1833.

There are a number of companies specializing in reprinting out-of-copyright books, and many old town histories are for sale at historical societies in these reprint formats. But there are many more stories at these repositories than made it into those old histories, and there are often local historians who work for years at these societies, digging up material on particular families, or on political and social movements that interest them. The market for their stories may be very specific (as in the case of town or regional history), diffuse (as in the case of genealogy), or may be too small to be economically feasible for a standard publisher. This is where self-publishing can change the game.

I’ve been watching the self-publishing industry for several years, and it has changed dramatically. When I wrote my first novel, companies like iUniverse were just beginning to offer self-publishing packages online. These companies used the newly-developed print on demand technology that companies like Amazon and Ingram were adopting to produce mainstream titles just-in-time, to print their clients’ work. They offered editorial services, marketing packages, and bare-bones “publishing,” if you wanted to do those other things yourself. For a little over a thousand dollars, you could get your book into print.

The objection to vanity publishing has always been that it’s trash. If you couldn’t get a publisher interested in your book, the wisdom held, it did not deserve to see the light of day. There’s some truth to this argument, but I think it was much more valid when the book trade was big, profitable for small publishers, and the business was widely distributed among thousands of firms. Nowadays, a small number of media giants control nearly all of the titles that “move,” as well as most of the backlists that fill the rest of the shelves in bookstores. These companies, studies and anecdotal accounts suggest, are becoming ever more conservative. The costs of launching a commercial title are so high for them that they would much prefer to get a new book from an established author than to take a risk.

But wait a minute. The major publishers, just like iUniverse, Amazon, and Ingram, print on demand. So, where are the costs? Hint: they’re not in the royalties. The real expenses are pre-production costs and distribution, and overwhelmingly, marketing. This is partly because the publishers’ economic model is still based on bookstores, and the need to put thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of physical copies on shelves around the world. But what about those regional, special-interest, niche-market titles?

There are a number of new small publishers catering to niches. Combustion Books for anarchist steam-punk titles and Chelsea Green for sustainable living and farming titles like Harvey Ussery’s brilliant The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, for example. But I chose in 2007 to buy the bare-bones package and self-publish. I lined up my own editing (author Terry Davis, whose workshop I was attending, for story; my Dad, a master teacher of language and literature, for line-editing), sent in my file and my check, and they printed my book. That was just the beginning. I quickly learned that having a title, even on Amazon, does not make the registers ring. Marketing, getting the word out, getting people to look for it, took some real effort. Luckily, the internet offers people in niches an incredible opportunity to find kindred spirits, wherever they may be. I found teen-review websites where I could have my young adult novel read and reviewed by actual teens (they liked it), and I found a contest I could enter my book in (which it won). It’s still selling well, five years later.

But back to history. I had a delightful conversation this week with a woman in Maine who has written a memoir that should be published. It has humor, conflict, suspense, local flavor, and incredible human interest. But how to get it into print? Well, the good news is that, since I tried it in 2007, the self-publishing industry has gone through another generation of change. You can now publish on Amazon, Lulu, and a variety of other platforms, with much more format-flexibility than was available a few years ago and completely free of charge. And they pay much better than they used to back in the early days. Much better on a per-unit basis, in fact, than traditional publishers. If you know what you want to say, if you’re comfortable with the technical end of putting a book together (I like to remind myself that Knowlton and many of the people who published books in the past didn’t have a professional editor, either), and especially if you know who will want the book and how to reach them, self-publishing might be something to consider.

(For Historical Society members going to the conference this Spring, I notice there isn’t a formal session about publishing options. Maybe we can get an informal thing going, or talk about it over lunch if anyone’s interested . . .)

Just the Facts? Revisions to Our Virginia: Past and Present

Brendan Wolfe

Today’s guest post comes from Brendan Wolfe, Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia Virginia. Here Wolfe returns to the Our Virginia textbook—which we posted on here and here. He asks if the revisions to the volume, implemented after a the controversial first version, make it a good enough text.

A little more than a year ago, the Washington Post reported that Virginia's fourth-grade history textbook was full of factual errors. The big news were those two battalions of black Confederates supposedly under the command of Stonewall Jackson, but there were other errors, too, and the resulting kerfuffle put Five Ponds Press on the defensive and almost out of business. More importantly, it persuaded the folks there to involve actual historians in the vetting of their books.

Now a new edition of Our Virginia: Past and Present has been released, and as one might expect, those historians have made it a much better book. But is it good enough? I'm not yet convinced.

To be clear, the facts are all largely in order. But as for the narrative constructed from those facts, it's a real mess. Facts only get us so far, after all. Textbook authors still must do the hard work of telling us what they mean, why they matter, and how we can put them together so that they begin to make sense.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about from Our Virginia:

The book tells us that the English colonist John Smith was "obnoxious" while describing his adversary Powhatan as "a ruler of great spiritual, mental, and physical strength." It makes no mention of Powhatan's explicit understanding of power and violence: that he ruled some of his people by force, for example, and that he both helped and fought the English.

Why does this matter? Because on the same page the textbook tells us that without Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas, "Jamestown might have ended up as another 'Lost Colony.'" How? Why? The book doesn't say. And what it does say about the Lost Colony at Roanoke doesn't help, because the author never even hints at why that colony might have failed or that it might have been because of fighting with the local Indians.

In other words, even though the facts are in order, a reader would still be left with the inability to draw any meaningful conclusions.

The author later tells us that the Starving Time at Jamestown occurred because the English settlers did not save enough food. While this is partly true, it doesn't explain why Powhatan and Pocahontas had helped them earlier but not this time. Nor does it acknowledge that food was short for everyone, and that this very shortage was causing conflict between Englishmen and Indians.

Food and conflict. These are two important concepts that are perfectly understandable to fourth-graders but are missing here. To make the point earlier that Powhatan understood power and violence is to be able to make it again now, when it truly bears on the students' understanding of the material. In the meantime, to pay respect to Virginia Indians is to make them actors in this drama. And yet during the Starving Time—this moment when they come so close to expelling the English once and for all—they have completely disappeared!

Last year's textbook controversy focused on fuzzy facts and, to a lesser extent, whether you could find quality information online. But now that many of those facts have been corrected, we are still left with . . . just facts. What do they mean? Why do they matter? Our Virginia is still not up to the task.

Scholarly Journals

Dan Allosso

Along with the rest of the subscribers to H-Net’s mailing list, “C19-Americanists,” I got an appeal today from the editors of Poe Studies and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. Washington State University is cutting their funding, and the editors are soliciting support. They admit that the administration’s move “is a fiscal one,” but the editors also suggest there is a bad “climate for higher ed” in Washington, and that administrators lack “awareness about the value of humanities journals,” and by implication, the humanities.

All these claims may be true. And these two journals are probably wonderful, and well worth continuing, even at the expense of cutting other WSU programs—which I assume would be necessary. But in light of the appeal's wide circulation to the mailing list, I think it raises some interesting questions beyond the immediate situation in Washington

Before today, I had never heard of either of these journals. I’ve certainly never held either of them in my hands, or read anything from them. So I’ve got to assume the editors are appealing to people like me in hopes we’ll feel a general sense of solidarity with other Americanists or humanities folks, a sense of antagonism toward clueless administrators, or a fear that our favorite journal may be next in line.

I do subscribe to a few journals (or rather, I get them as a result of membership), but I usually don’t read them in hard copy, even the articles that really grab my attention. Allan Kulikoff’s article in the June Journal of the Historical Society was very interesting (I blogged about it here). I read it online—can’t actually find my hard-copy June issue right now, but it’s still right there if I want to refer to it again.

I’m not suggesting that the Washington journals should be discontinued. Honestly, I think it’s criminally short-sighted how little of 21st century America’s money is invested in education. So yes, the journals should get funding and we should build fewer military drones. But it might also be a good time for those of us who support scholarly communication and refereed exchanges of ideas, to ask ourselves whether the way it’s always been done is the best way to do it now.

Since I don’t think anyone is getting rich writing for or publishing academic journals (correct me if I’m wrong), it doesn’t strike me that there’s an entrenched financial interest resisting change. So the question is, can we find less costly, more effective ways to do the things that journals do for the academy? Many journals are available online as a matter of course, with no increase in cost; so it seems reasonable to assume that online publishing does not add significant expense to the publishing process. I may be wrong, but it seems like a journal’s major expenses would be staff and printing/distribution.

Obviously, you can’t have a refereed journal without referees. But there seem to be important institutional interests supporting this process of validating and professionalizing fields of study. So I suspect there will continue to be ways to get this done—and to get it paid for. The function will be preserved, so it’s the form we’re worrying about.

Is part of the problem a continuing belief in the validation our writing acquires by being printed on paper? Isn’t this belief especially redundant in the case of peer-reviewed journal articles? Would the Washington journals be able to survive in electronic-only form? I don’t know the answer to this (I emailed them the question, and I’ll let you know what they say); nor do I know whether the Washington State administrators would be willing to negotiate, if they were presented with a lower-cost option than the journals’ current budgets. I’m just suggesting that it’s time to think about these issues. As I think the Washington State journal advocates implied in their letter to the list, our favorite journal could be next.

Key Performance Indicators and the Heightening Contradictions of Academia

Chris Beneke

Of what value is your scholarship? Historians in Britain are receiving unsettling precise answers to that question. In case you hadn’t heard the news, British academics are now locked into a quality control regime that forces them to measure up against “Key Performance Indicators” over a 6 to 7 year span. The measures are largely determined by government officials though the actual measuring is done by historians.

Better minds have already suggested that the quantification of humanities scholarship through such mechanisms will dampen creativity, discourage ambitious long-term projects, and lower scholarly quality, while sucking much of the joy out of professional historical work. Randall blogged about funding-driven assessment tools a couple of weeks ago, Anthony Grafton’s AHA President’s column mentioned it in January, and Simon Head recently wrote a more extended analysis for the New York Review of Books. (I did some hand wringing myself in November.) Nonetheless, one paragraph in Simon Head’s account of the system struck me as especially noteworthy:

In the humanities the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) bias also works in favor of the 180–200-page monograph, hyperspecialized, cautious and incremental in its findings, with few prospects for sale as a bound book but again with a good chance of being completed and peer-reviewed in time for the RAE deadline. A bookseller at Blackwell’s, the leading Oxford bookstore, told me that he dreaded the influx of such books as the RAE deadline approached.

In other words, the new British accountability systems seems perfectly designed to heighten the contradictions in the academic world, ensuring that the “research output” that scholars are dourly incentivized to produce is less accessible to the larger public and therefore less likely to contribute to the informed consideration of things that the public worries about—like, for instance, big social, political, and ethical problems. The argument can surely be made that rigorous research measures drive scholars toward more focused and more readily publishable research, which will ultimately makes a greater indirect contribution on the world. But I doubt that it would be convincing, especially when it comes to historical research.

Indeed, the RAE seems well designed to thwart scholars who believe that they should write engaging volumes that people who don’t care a whit about the distinction between social history and cultural history (the common term for them is “general readers”) might actually desire to read. Despite the precarious state of academic publishing, historians have enjoyed the indulgence of academic presses in recent years because of their faith that we will eventually write such books—if not the first time around, then the second, or third. It’s hard to imagine that system holding up if we’re flooding bookstore shelves with carefully calibrated units of research output, rather than, you know, books.

University Press Imprints

Randall Stephens

I just got word from Harvard University Press that my forthcoming book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with Karl Giberson, will be part of the press's Belknap Press imprint. We're elated!

I've always noticed that certain books with HUP list "The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press." Oxford University Press has its Clarendon Press imprint. Though other than the fact that good books come under the banner of various imprints, I didn't know much else about how all this works. Max Hall explains the role of Belknap in his Harvard University Press: A History (Harvard University Press, 1986):

"What is the Belknap Press?" People ask this, sometimes mistakenly voicing the silent "k." The answer: it is an imprint, identifying the books whose costs are paid out of Belknap funds and whose sales receipts are plowed back into Belknap working capital after the parent body has deducted a share for its operating expenses-so percent until 1976, when it was raised to 60. The Belknap Press has no separate staff, only separate accounts. Waldron Belknap himself supplied the name, specifying that the income from his bequest was to
be used for "publishing activities, under the name of the Belknap Press, of the Harvard University Press." . . .

In the will Belknap said that it was his intention "that the relationship of the Belknap Press to the Harvard University Press shall be as closely analogous as may be to the present relationship of the publishing activities of the Clarendon Press to the Oxford University Press." The Clarendon Press imprint was known for books of long-lasting importance, superior in scholarship and physical production, chosen whether or not they might be profitable. Those principles were adopted for the Belknap Press. At first, when the funds were just a trickle, the subject matter was confined to Belknap's own main interests, American history and civilization, but the benefactor imposed no restrictions and in 1961 the scope was expanded to all fields. (140-41)

There are a variety of imprints and series at University Presses. When shopping your MS around it's always a good idea to know what a particular press specializes in. What series will be the best fit for your book? A smaller press like Mercer University Press has wonderful series on religion in the South, Kierkegaard studies, and biblical studies. Whether you are working on Native American history, Medieval devotionalism, or 20th-century military history it's always a good idea to do some real investigating in order to find the press that would best suit your work.

Editors . . . Editing?

Randall Stephens

Last week Alex Clark wrote of the "Lost Art of Editing" in the Guardian. Presses have been cutting back for some time now. "Many speak of the trimming of budgets," notes Clark, "the increasingly regimented nature of book production and of the pressure on their time, which means they have to undertake detailed and labour-intensive editing work in the margins of their daily schedule rather than at its centre." A freelancer Clark consulted told him: "'big companies used to have whole copy-editing and proof-reading departments. Now you'll get one publisher and one editor running a whole imprint.'"

Clark's mostly talking about literary fiction here. But the cutting back on editing--line, copy, content--is something I've heard about repeatedly from historians and editors at university and trade presses.

You can do a thing or two to counter the trend. Have multiple historians, experts in your field, read your work. Getting far more than your two MS reviewers to take a look at your work will be a big plus. And, readers will probably be happy to have you return the favor for them at a later date.

See if you can get a second copy editor to go over your manuscript. I was able to work this out with Harvard Univ. Press for my first book, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. It helped. The two copy editors caught loads of grammatical infelicities, leaps in logic, spelling mistakes, etc. that I didn't have eyes to see. (It's even worth shelling out the money for an extra copy editor, if you can afford the $500 or so.)

And, finally, ask those at the press that you are speaking to if editors do much "editing." How will your editor help you shape your MS? Talk to authors who have worked with that editor in the past to see what goes into the process. Does she have a hands-off approach? Will she help you craft your argument and ask for important revisions?

Presenting History to the Broader Public

Morgan Hubbard

One of Heather's posts from December got me thinking about the challenges of presenting history visually. As a public historian I'm interested in narrowing the gulf that exists between professional historians and the broad reading public. Part of this job involves thinking about how we've always presented our arguments about the past—and how we might make those presentations more engaging, more memorable, and better suited to the twenty-first century.

A historian who wants both job security and to teach people about important things might find herself pulled in different directions. Tenure committees want to see specialized monographs best suited to university libraries, books that expand the boundaries of what we know. The emphasis in these works is on mastery of the subject and relevant historiography, exhaustive research, and a style that puts the book's conclusion first. But the general-interest reader is interested in the story, not what other historians have said about it, and tends to want a narrative that is plotted and paced more than a conclusion that is delivered up front. (I understand these are gross stereotypes and that real life is more complicated, but my goal is just to sketch the outlines of the problem.)

There's no simple way to resolve this tension, but it seems to me we can start to address the problem by conceiving of our projects from the outset as both scholarship and storytelling. Easier said than done, I know. One way to start is by capitalizing on the power of the internet to relay information visually. This doesn't mean “dumbing down” the historical analysis we produce and present. But it does mean realizing that some historical processes are best expressed visually and dynamically. Traditional books can't give us that. But the web can.

One of my projects this semester is a statistical analysis of the ways that themes in American science fiction changed between 1945 and 1965. I'm sampling about a thousand science fiction stories from three of the major English-language science fiction magazines (Amazing Stories, Astounding Science-Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.) After I read each story, I classify it according to a taxonomy of themes, “tagging” the story with as many themes as it takes to approximate its content and tone. When the data set is complete, I'll display it visually, in a short animation that will condense 20 years of historical change into about a minute.

I could use the results of my statistical analysis to write a report that shows how science fiction changed in the first two decades of the Cold War. But if I do a good job, the animation will accomplish the same task more intuitively, in less time, and with more panache. Die-hard fans might read a written report, sure, but most of the people I know wouldn't want to sit down with twenty-five pages of explication and graphs. But picture this: the story of science fiction's evolution, demonstrated instead of merely described, in colors that draw the eye and with an aesthetic that echoes the vintage science fiction in question.

This project isn't guaranteed to work. But if it does, I think it will be good public history.

The Journal Standard

Chris Beneke

Historians are people of the book. We write piles of them—monographs, textbooks, and edited books, strictly academic books and books intended (usually with no foundation in reality) for the bestseller list. Some of our better books are histories of the book; some of our better historians are historians of the book. We cherish books dearly, not least for their narrative artistry. But we also value their utility within the academic world. At research universities and colleges with research aspirations, after all, the scholarly book serves as the elusive ticket to the vastly overrated world of the tenured, Associate Professor, and later to invitations to speak, comment, and publish still more books.

It’s probably safe to say that, as a profession, we are agreed that a series of significant journal articles or book chapters may substitute for “the Book” when it comes to things like tenure and promotion. Harvard probably won’t grant you tenure for such an achievement—to be honest, Harvard won’t grant you tenure under any circumstances—but other research-oriented institutions probably will. Still, “the Book” rules in nearly every history department at every institution that aspires to climb the U.S. News rankings. “How’s your book coming along?” is the haunting refrain that echoes in the corridors of the Marriotts and Grand Hyatts at convention time.

It’s no revelation that different criteria prevail in disciplines such as medicine, engineering, business mathematics, and the natural sciences. For scholars in these fields, books often connote “textbooks” and are therefore of little interest to serious scholars. What matters is journal publication—and not just in any old venue. Hits in so-called A-list journals are coveted. Even in the social sciences and some of the humanities, junior faculty are expected to produce journal articles and book chapters, but nothing in codex with a single author’s name on it.

In short, historians are producing, recognizing, and even celebrating work that runs sharply against the grain of research in other disciplines. To put it in the bluntest terms, we have a Book Standard; they have a Journal Standard. It’s not that we don’t value that other form of scholarly currency. We just don’t value it quite as much.

Nonetheless, the advantages of the Journal Standard to university administrators and trustees who are seeking both transparency and higher, measurable rates of faculty research production is almost self-evident. Journals are ranked according to clear-cut categories, typically from A to C. An article in an A-list journal can be treated like another A-list journal. That isn’t the case with books. To this point, blessedly, we haven’t had to bother with such lists. The unfortunate consequence is that a book’s “impact” may now be more difficult to demonstrate.

Of course, we know that Harvard, Yale, Chicago University Press, etc. are selective and prestigious publishers. But do we know anything more than that? And, if we don’t, aren’t we, the authors of such books, liable to inflate their value? That is certainly the conclusion that an administrator or trustee, especially one trained outside the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, might draw. Even humanists could be tempted by such heretical logic.

We might look upon the situation as analogous to that faced by the United States in the late nineteenth century. To pay for the massive buildup of forces in the Civil War, the federal government issued paper “greenbacks,” which were not directly convertible to specie (gold or silver, etc.). The unsurprising result was inflation. In an attempt to limit price increases, currency fluctuations, and speculation, the United States, along with much of the industrializing West, moved to a Gold Standard.

It’s not hard to see the current evaluation regime in universities as equivalent to a return to the Gold Standard following a massive expansion in scholarly output (we could likewise imagine our books as the equivalent of silver coinage and our relatively balanced treatment of both books and journal articles as something akin to of bimetallism). To historians, of course, books are golden. But that’s not necessarily how the rest of the university will see them in the future, or even now. Moreover, if administrators and scholars in other fields have clear metrics for gauging the impact of non-historical work and ranking their non-historical outlets and we do not, we may find ourselves at a severe disadvantage in the quest for scarce research resources. We may also hurt the very scholarly form that we claim to prize too much to defend in instrumental terms.

Here’s the payoff: To save scholarly historical books and the sustained research efforts that they represent, we may need to think hard about the impact (I won’t quibble now about the use of that term) of such books. That might mean doing things that are unpalatable to humanists, like going beyond the perennial questions asked by promotion and tenure committees (e.g. How many journal articles does it take to equal one scholarly monograph?) and consider ranking book publishers across all fields of history and within them. We might need to find some weighted measure of reviews (determined partially by the journals in which they appear), as well as working to track and recognize citations made many years after publication. We could also tighten up the peer review process, attempt to account for the influence of subventions, and properly credit books that only appear online. In other words, to ensure that our work is fairly judged and equally valued, and to save these often beautiful, extended works of scholarship that we call “books” (whose covers are still adorned with old paintings and sharp modern designs) we may have to set aside our reservations and occasionally treat them as nothing more than well recognized and secure mediums of scholarly exchange.

Know Your Editor: Susan Ferber, Executive Editor, American and World History, Oxford University Press

Randall Stephens

[Cross posted at Religion in American History.]

I liked it when the AHA met in NYC last year. Better yet, this year it’s in sunny San Diego, a nice break from the cold, snow, slush, and raging swine flu of New England. (And I forgot to bring my wetsuit.)

I spent part of Thursday reconnoitering the area and meeting with various friends in the profession. I also

had a chance to sit down with Susan Ferber, executive editor, Oxford University Press, and pose a few questions about publishing.

In the video embedded here I ask her about what she looks for in a proposal and what she thinks about the recent boom in religious history. I also ask her about the matter of converting a dissertation into a book. I was reminded of a piece that appeared in the Chronicle nearly two years ago: “Goodbye to All That” by Rachel Toor. A former editor, Toor summed up a meeting she had with a friend who wondered how her dissertation would fare when submitted to a press:

Wanting to be helpful, and, since I was no longer an editor constantly on the prowl for potentially promising manuscripts, I gave her my honest opinion: Who would be interested in a book like this?

I pointed out that, even in the way she described it to me, she was using coded language, jargon that would be a big flashing red light to warn off anyone outside of her particular academic discipline. What publisher, I asked, was going to want a book on a topic unknown to most people, especially if there was no underlying argument or theoretical framework?

Ultimately, what I wondered was whether anything in the dissertation was worth turning into a book.

I'm not always the most fun lunch date.

True enough. Ferber’s remarks, by contrast, are positively cheerful. So take heart, your dissertation may have a ready audience as a book. Just think carefully about readership and how best to frame your argument.

More on Digitial Books

Randall Stephens

On this blog we have featured posts concerning digital history and the virtues of virtual libraries. A recent review essay in the TLS, now on-line, sheds more light on the matter. Peter Green analyzes Anthony Grafton's Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard, 2009) in "Google Books or Great Books? The Enduring Value of the Republic of Letters, in All Its Forms."

Grafton is well acquainted with the world of digital resources, says Green. Grafton surveys recent developments and looks at the great potential for research and the creation of a new scholarly community. With Google Books, Grafton writes, "you can study many aspects of French thought and literature as deeply in New York as in Paris, and a lot more efficiently."

Though Grafton acknowledges the plus side, he also turns a critical eye on the digital endeavor. Grafton, Green writes, ably points out the glitches and flat footedness of Google Books and other searchable collections. At the same time that Grafton recognizes the inherent promise of digitized texts, he also laudes the dusty, hallowed libraries of the west. In Green's words:

The further one trawls into the past, the clearer it becomes that, as Grafton says, 'whatever happens on screen, the great libraries of the Northern Hemisphere will remain irreplaceable for a long time”, and one of Google’s most excellent services is already as a guide to finding material in them rather than providing that material itself. “The real challenge now”, we learn, in another striking metaphor, “is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating.” The conclusion Grafton reaches is that while the recent present will “become overwhelmingly accessible” online, for the past we still need a painstaking hands-on approach in the archives themselves. The transfer of documentary archives – even those of the US or the UK – to the web is still in its infancy, and Grafton makes a strong case for the need to consult originals rather than digitized images: one researcher traced the history of cholera outbreaks by sniffing letters in a 250-year-old archive to see which had been sprinkled with vinegar in the hope of disinfecting them. Yes, the young scholar is told, take every advantage of the new electronic Aladdin’s cave. But – and here Grafton shows a rare moment of deeply felt emotion – these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate rather than eliminate the unique books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. For now, and for the foreseeable future, if you want to piece together the richest possible mosaic of documents and texts and images, you will have to do it in those crowded public rooms where sunlight gleams on varnished tables, as it has for more than a century, and knowledge is still embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable manuscripts and books. >>>

On Saving LSU Press

Bertram Wyatt-Brown is an acclaimed historian of 19th-century America, professor of history emeritus, University of Florida, and visiting scholar, Johns Hopkins University. He writes below on the value of LSU Press, now facing the possibility of major cuts, and describes the press's historic significance and its vitality up to the present.


On Saving LSU Press
Bertram Wyatt-Brown

With many other academicians in this country, particularly those in the South, I am most distressed that the LSU community is encountering fiscal difficulties that may lead to a diminution or even an abolition of the great publishing institution on LSU’s campus. I am particularly indebted to the splendid capabilities of the LSU Press under the leadership of the late director Les Phillabaum and more recently Mary Katherine Calloway and her editor, John Easterly. For over a decade and a half I was editor of the Southern Biography Series (which was launched in the 1930s), having retired from the position in November 2008. In the course of that period, we produced over 35 volumes, none of which received unfavorable reviews, some of which won literary prizes, and all of which received acclaim in the marketplace.

Authors with subjects in a variety of fields were attracted to our series because of the high quality of the press's operations. The lives of Chief Justice John Marshall and Daniel Boone, for instance, have won widespread praise and high sales. We covered distinguished figures, both male and female, white and black, and a variety of fields-journalists, Civil War and Confederate military and political leaders, attorneys, judges, reformers, physicians, governors, and clergymen—from colonial times to the recent past. The field of southern history would have been sorely diminished if these works had not been published in our series. We have just published Thomas Settles’s John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappraisal. I might also mention that the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, which the University sponsors, has produced a valuable set of works. They have included such notable authors as C. Vann Woodward, David Donald, John Hope Franklin, T. Harry Williams, James M. McPherson, William E. Leuchtenburg, Drew Faust, now President of Harvard University, and many others, including myself. Some of the Fleming lecturers have won Pulitzer Prizes in history.

The Southern Biography series is only one of several highly successful aspects of the LSU Press's contribution to scholarship and sound learning. Literature and poetry are also well represented. In the areas of literature and history, fields I know best, the press holds an enviable position in the realm of academic publishing. It published Confederacy of Dunces in 1980. It won the Pulitzer for literature in 1981. The press’s reputation extends far beyond the confines of the South and has an international standing. It is not a regional or local enterprise by any means. At the same time, it should be noted that the press does offer considerable notice of the Gulf region as well as the history and literary achievements of Louisianans. Only the University of North Carolina Press and the University of Georgia Press, in my opinion, matches it in quality and significance in the field of southern studies. As it is, the press manages its funds with great care; there are no frills in its operations, and many on the staff work very hard for relatively modest financial reward. The press team is thoroughly dedicated to top-notch publishing. In addition, we in history and other parts of the humanities, have to have strong academic presses to support the publications of young, first-book authors in our faculties as they seek to rise in the profession. The LSU Press is particularly adept at attracting such promising scholars to publish under the guidance of the professional staff in Baton Rouge.

For the state of Louisiana to amputate or even obliterate the LSU Press would be most tragic and most shortsighted. Better times will come in due course, but to revive a dormant or vanished operation of this kind would be disastrous. It would take many years to regain what would be lost.

The Book Business, Down and Out

Randall Stephens

Toby Barnard's essay in the May 8th TLS, "Textual Healing—Ireland: Land of Scholars and Publisher Saints," is well worth reading. (Though the on-line version isn't up on the TLS site just yet.) Barnard considers the fortunes of Irish publishing over the last few decades and laments the 2009 demise of Four Courts Press.

In 1925 W. B. Yeats intoned: "We . . . are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country." Even with that illustrious past, Barnard notes: "only one Irish University, Cork, maintained its own press." Why? "[A]lmost from the invention of printing," writes Barnard, "ambitious Irish authors, uncertain how far their words would be spread, preferred to be published outside of Ireland. As well as authorial pride, there were financial incentives.” Turning to the present, Barnard looks at the dire impact of the economic downturn on the industry.

Reading Barnard’s bleak assessment—and his eulogy for Four Courts—I was reminded of a controversial article that appeared about a year ago in Times Higher Education: “Publish and Be Ignored.” Matthew Reisz gauged the shortcomings of British academic publishing that had led a number of “authors to sign up with U.S. and mainstream imprints.” For scholars who churn out specialist monographs, “the only realistic choice is between a British or US academic press. American books tend to be cheaper. British editors, often responsible for far more titles, may adopt a less ‘hands-on’ (or interventionist) approach. But what are the differences in terms of author experience?” The differences were great, said Reisz.

And now, stateside, dark clouds are once again appearing on the horizon. Louisiana, reeling from the financial crisis, may make big cuts to LSU Press, reports the Chronicle: “The Louisiana Legislature wants to slash funds for higher education, and that includes a proposed $40-million cut for the press’s home institution, LSU at Baton Rouge, said Bob Mann, a professor of mass communication there. He also edits a series for the press.” The University of Missouri Press cut half of its staff in the spring. Other state university presses are running behind budget and rethinking financial strategies.

I’ll still keep buying books in some vain hope that my purchases will lend a little help.

See also Ted Genoways’ post at the Virginia Quarterly Review site: “The Future of University Presses and Journals (A Manifesto)”; and Robert B. Townsend, “History and the Future of Scholarly Publishing,” Perspectives (October 2003).