Today’s post accompanies “Creating the Fourth Amendment,” episode 261 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of Doing History 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment. by Lauren Duval The image of a victorious and weary George Washington retiring to Mount Vernon after eight long years of battle… Read More
Today’s post accompanies “Creating the First Ten Amendments,” episode 260 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of Doing History 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment. Last week as I was listening to Ben Franklin’s World, I was struck by the way in which Liz Covart and… Read More
Today’s post accompanies “American Legal History and the Bill of Rights,” episode 259 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of Doing History 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment. By Gautham Rao In 1965 a lawyer named Malcolm S. Mason wrote an article for the Journal of Legal Education with a simple problem: legal history was boring. Read More
Bibliography for Doing History 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment Want to learn more about the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment? We’ve compiled a list of suggested books, articles, popular blog posts, and online resources that you might find helpful. We either used these works ourselves for production research or they were suggested by our guests. Happy researching!… Read More
“Doing History 4 Legal Lexicon; or A Useful List of Terms You Might Not Know” We are pleased to announce the release of “Doing History, Season 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment.” Law is all around us. This 4-part Doing History series explains the early American origins and importance of the fourth amendment. Although it doesn’t always make headlines as… Read More
Today’s post accompanies the Doing History 3 series on Ben Franklin's World. You can find supplementary materials for the series on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. Biographies serve as a gateway to history. They serve this role because, as all of our guest scholars in the Doing History: Biography series related, biographies humanize the past. At their core biographies are about people, and as people, we are naturally curious about how others lived, worked, and experienced life. Read More
Today’s post accompanies “Researching Biography,” episode 212 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Catherine O’Donnell Always be arguing. It’s the historian’s version of David Mamet’s line for salesmen, “Always be closing.” I know that rule, and I know another one, too: don’t oversimplify. Because historians are not, to put it mildly, Occam’s Razor kind of people. We don’t think that the simplest answer is best; the simplest answer is the one we give three points out of ten on the midterm. The more causes the better, in our book. There are historians who readily combine these two directives to create bold arguments and to make those arguments reflect the complexities of human society. I am not one of them. Working my way through an archive, I become entranced by nuances and exceptions to the rule. “What is your argument?” I sternly ask myself. “My goodness, will you look at this,” I answer, helplessly. Read More
Today’s post accompanies “Considering John Marshall Part 2,” episode 211 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. In prior weeks, Michael McGandy has written about biography from the perspective of a publisher and interviewed numerous historians of early America about why they chose to write biographies. Today, he conducts an in-depth conversation about the process of writing biography with historian and biographer Cynthia Kierner. Read More
Today’s post accompanies “Considering John Marshall Part 1,” episode 210 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Michael J. McGandy When asked to consider the prospects for biography, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf reflected on their experience researching and writing as a team: But positioning Jefferson in his time and, more importantly for us, in his place, enabled us to see and know his world and the world of his contemporaries a little better. The pay-off for us is in the nuances, in glimpses of the dynamics of family life, in the performance of mastery, in the ways he fashioned himself as a patriarch. Biography can show us the way to good history; a good historical understanding is the prerequisite and justification for a worthwhile biography. The reciprocal relationship that Annette and Peter highlight here is, I think, an important insight. Not only are biography and history connected by processes of research and writing, they are associated with respect to the goals of a “worthwhile biography.” In sum: big-picture history without a fine sense of individual experience is as deficient as is detailed biography that lacks a strong sense of context, place, and pattern. Read More
Today’s post accompanies “Considering Biography,” episode 209 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Michael J. McGandy I am an editor, I admit, who is wary of biography. When a junior scholar working on her first book raises the prospect of writing a biography or a book with a strong biographical line, I sound a note of caution. Are there other ways, I ask, of telling this story? I wonder if the author knows how biography is evaluated in the scholarly community. Frankly, I question, are the virtues of this form worth the manifest danger of putting her career at risk? Read More
Doing History Season 3: Biography If biographies tell us about the past, why do bookstores and libraries always shelve them separately from history books? When historians write biographies, do they approach things differently? And if so how? These questions got us thinking and so we decided to dedicate season three of Doing History to them. The… Read More
The following post originally appeared at Teaching United States History. by Erin Bartram We often emphasize to our students that our lectures, and even our entire courses, have arguments and use evidence to make those arguments. We also talk about historiography, even if we don’t use the term, and show students how historians produce new historical knowledge. This semester, my US I class is using Liz Covart’s podcast Ben Franklin’s World to consider both of these issues. Read More