Historical Society Membership and Publications

Randall Stephens



If you are not already a member of the Historical Society, you are missing out! Members receive five issues of Historically Speaking and four issues of the Journal of the Historically Society. The latter "supports the Historical Society's mission to revitalize and reorient the study and teaching of history away from fragmentation and over-specialization toward a universally accessible, fully integrated approach. The Journal presents fresh historical research in a non-pedantic way and provides a genuine opening to worldwide trends in historical research. By publishing scholarly articles that are readily accessible, the Journal reaches out to a broad audience of specialists and non-specialists, professional historians and history enthusiasts alike."



Each issue of Historically Speaking is packed with lively forums, interviews, essays, and reviews. David Hackett Fischer calls it “The most interesting historical journal that is being published today.” Bruce Kuklick says “I read the whole issue cover to cover, as I do every one of them. In fact, it is the only professional publication I really read at all with any consistency.”



A variety of historians, representing a range of specialties, have appeared in the pages of HS, including: Danielle Allen, Mary Beard, David Cannadine, David Brion Davis, John Demos, Richard Evans, Niall Ferguson, David Hackett Fischer, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Rhys Isaac, Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, John Lukacs, Pauline Maier, William McNeill, Joseph C. Miller, Robert Orsi, Geoffrey Parker, Theodore Rabb, Joyce Seltzer, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Gordon Wood, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown.



It's easy to subscribe to Historically Speaking by using the Johns Hopkins University Press website. The same is true of becoming a member of the Society. Just sign up here.



Finally, here's a look at what will be in the September 2011 issue of HS. In the coming weeks I'll post excerpts on the blog.



Historically Speaking (September 2011)

An Innocuous Yet Noxious Text: Tacitus’s Germania

Christopher B. Krebs



History over the Water: The King James Bible Turns 400

Derek Wilson



The Bible and the Victorians: An Interview with Timothy Larsen

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa



Assessing Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence:

A Forum



Ten Years After: Reflections on Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence

Peter A. Coclanis



The Great Divergence after Ten Years: Justly Celebrated yet Hard to Believe

Jan de Vries



Comment on Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence

Philip T. Hoffman



Economic History in the Decade after The Great Divergence

R. Bin Wong



Ten Years After: Responses and Reconsiderations

Kenneth Pomeranz



The Real Herbert Hoover

Glen Jeansonne



Whose Choir? Which Gospel?

Christopher Shannon



Erik Larson on Historical Non-Fiction and In the Garden of Beasts

Conducted by Philip White



Carthage: A Mediterranean Super-Power

Richard Miles



An Interview with Richard Miles

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

John Wilson Praises Historically Speaking in Podcast

Randall Stephens

We're thrilled to hear that over at Books and Culture John Wilson has devoted a podcast to the April 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. Wilson, as many of our readers will know, is the editor of the intellectual feast Books and Culture. Launched in 1995, this literary magazine "contains in-depth reviews of books that merit critical attention, as well as shorter notices of significant new titles." You may notice that some of the authors you see now and then in the pages of HS also appear in B&C: Paul Harvey, Don Yerxa, Peter Coclanis, Tal Howard, Tommy Kidd, Bruce Kuklick.

Wilson highlights the forum on Daniel Rodgers's book, Age of Fracture, and the forum on John Lukacs's The Future of History. He also zeroes in on the lead essay by Jane Kamensky on lessons learned from fiction writing and the interview with Kamensky's co-author, Jill Lepore.

According to Wilson, Historically Speaking is "not at all written only for people in the profession. It's written for anyone who is genuinely interested in the whole range of history." We could not have put it better.

He gives the publication high marks for the degree of diversity in its pages. "It's very rare in a publication of that kind," says Wilson,"to get this kind of [political] diversity, despite the constant lip service paid to the notion diversity as a matter of fact in an awful lot of intellectual discussion you get a boring monotony of a certain range of narrow views."

The Historical Society Announces a Competitive RFP-Based Research Program

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Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs: Exploring the Role of Religion in the Origins of Novelty and the Diffusion of Innovation in the Progress of Civilizations

With generous funding from the John Templeton Foundation, the Historical Society is launching a major interdisciplinary grants program in September 2011. It will provide $2.0 million in research support for empirical, conceptual, and interpretive work exploring the role religion may play as a driving force of innovation in human affairs.

The competitive RFP-based research program will award approximately 15 two-year grants of $100,000 each and a few larger grants of $250,000 to support archaeological fieldwork and traditional social science and historical investigation, as well as conceptually-oriented analysis.

Donald A. Yerxa will serve as the Program Leader for Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs. And a distinguished board of advisers will be announced this summer.

A request for proposals will be forthcoming later this summer. For more information, visit the RIHA website (under construction) at www.bu.edu/historic/riha

The John Templeton Foundation (www.templeton.org) serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. The Foundation supports research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. It encourages civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights. The Foundation’s vision is derived from the late Sir John Templeton's optimism about the possibility of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. Its motto, "How little we know, how eager to learn," exemplifies its support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.