Thread by @notabattlechick

Dr. Lee asks a serious question, so I'll attempt a serious answer -- or at least some thoughts, as someone who's worked in an interdisciplinary environment for a long time. But these are mostly disjointed observations; I'd have to think more about making a coherent argument.

https://twitter.com/CarrieALee1/status/1396107376634351620

1. I think there are two types of berating - some of it good-natured ribbing by historians who understand and appreciate the work that political scientists do, and some of it is really vitriolic. I find the second sort to be really distasteful.

2a. Historians occupy a strange space in university structures that often separate the "humanities" from "social science." History, as a discipline, fits neatly in neither category. Are "we" more like literature and the arts or more like political science and sociology? Yes.

2b. "Historians" are a pretty diverse bunch, so some historians will be more comfortable hanging with one crowd or the other. And historical methods vary widely among fields and sub-fields.

2c. Some of the disciplinary berating is, I think, a result of significant methodological differences -- and what historians see as an increasing impulse toward quantitative work in political science. That's a hard literature to break into, even just to understand central claims.

3a. I don't know that I've heard political scientists "berating" or "bashing" history...but I've heard an awful lot of them be pretty dismissive. Or to assume that their doing archival work is the same as historians' work.

3b. I've heard political scientists say that historians only write narratives about the past and tell "what happened" (as if that's not real "research") and that historical work lacks "argument." That history is just a catalogue of the past.

3c. I've heard someone say that political science is "applied" history -- where "application" is assumed to be a higher form of analysis than "mere" explanation/description/argument.

3d. I've heard political scientists suggest that historians "lay the groundwork" for their work, or "we couldn't do our work without historians," and I think these are meant as compliments...but they don't come across that way. They come across as oddly paternalistic.

3e. These arguments are really problematic -- and demonstrate a facile understanding of the discipline -- and come pretty close to being offensive, if I'm being honest.

4a. Historians -- and especially in this crowd where the comment originated -- have struggled mightily in the academic job market (as has everyone), but they also find fewer obvious outlets in think tanks, government, and policy positions.

4b. Not because they wouldn't be *great* -- but because 1) the training in graduate schools hasn't caught up, 2) assumptions about "application" and "presentism" that still pervade the discipline, and 3) a tendency to answer "it depends" and "its complicated" to everything.

4c. On the last, we are -- of course -- right. But that's not a super helpful position for people who need to make decisions.

5a. Then there's the matter of historians being absolutely driven bananas by some of the trends we observe in political science. Data sets that leave out Native American wars, African wars, Latin American wars...

5b. Definitions and categories that collapse nuance. Arguments that are made with paper thin historical context or that get the historical facts demonstrably wrong. Arguments that show a narrow understanding of historiography and cherry pick secondary arguments.

5c. A sense that the things Political Science can purport to "prove" are not worth saying and those things that are worth saying are probably not "provable" with political science methods.

6a. Different disciplinary expectations WRT "productivity." Historians (most of us, at least) are SLOW scholars. The discipline is still grounded in books, and books take a long time. We also don't have a tradition of co-authoring in the same way.

6b. This has ramifications in, say, interdisciplinary PME searches, where it's really hard to compare CVs. And at junior levels, it often looks as if the poli sci crowd is more "productive" -- and the historians get a little defensive about the work junior scholars are doing.

7 (fin). Historians ought not bash other disciplines. Historians should understand political science (as a discipline) better than we do. Historians can and should call out problematic arguments made by other academics.

3f. I’ve heard political scientists claim that history classes lack rigor or are just a series of anecdotes. (Please note, in PME land, almost NO ONE is teaching “history” courses, as we might at a civilian institution. That is, PME is not a great proxy for “the discipline.”)

3g/6c. As a result of being in PME for over a decade...my CV no longer looks like that of a historian. I’m hard pressed to imagine a history department hiring me. I would have to rethink my research agenda and pedagogy pretty substantially.