Author: Jane Shaw Stroup

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Learning to Write, Again

Although I have been a professional writer for more than fifty years, I still have some things to learn about academic writing. Here are five lessons I’ve picked up so far:

  1. Don’t use bullets or make lists (like this one). A professor told me that explicitly, and once I began to read more journal articles, I saw the rule at work. Bullets are a useful tool in, say, policy papers, although they are undoubtedly overused in the Internet era (with automatic bulleting). Why aren’t they right for academia? Maybe they make things look too simple. Ideas and facts need to be interwoven in history; trying to separate them into single phrases may oversimplify. Or it may just be a matter of style.
  2. Don’t use short paragraphs. I discovered this on my own. My journalistic three- or four-sentence paragraphs just don’t fly. Again, I don’t exactly know the reason. But combining paragraphs in my papers has given them (and me) a more serious image; very good for a future academic. And topic sentences help.
  3. The first paragraph, especially, should be long. Forget about the Wall Street Journal’s “anecdotal lede” (yes, that’s the way editors spell it), which was invented to attract the reader’s attention. Don’t use Business Week’s “back when, but now” lede, which creates in a few sentences the story’s context for a busy reader.  By the way, quotations to enliven the piece are also on the edge of propriety. Be serious. Continue reading “Learning to Write, Again”
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Historians Have Facts, Economists Have Theories?

Years ago, as a young economics professor, my husband served on a history student’s advisory committee. At the student’s dissertation defense, the historians asked detailed questions about the paper. My husband asked, “What is the theory behind your findings?” The student stammered an answer and my husband concluded that historians don’t think much of theories.

I won’t address whether historians have theories right now, but, rather, discuss economists’ theories about how people make decisions. Some are simple: Incentives matter, so when something becomes more costly (in money, effort, or pain), people usually want less of it. Another is opportunity cost: something may have value, such as sitting on the lawn on a nice day, but its opportunity cost is high if it means missing an interview for a good job.

Economists apply their theories to all kinds of human behavior. In my historical research on primogeniture in the Middle Ages, I came across a bold and bracing paper, “An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation.“[1] The economist authors tried to figure out why some regions in Europe became Protestant and why others stayed Catholic. They hypothesized that some European countries were more open to Protestantism than others: “societies characterized by the decline of feudalism and relatively unstable distribution of wealth” would welcome Protestantism, while “more homogeneous, rent-seeking societies that were mostly dissipating rather than creating wealth” would reject it. Continue reading “Historians Have Facts, Economists Have Theories?”

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Is There Such a Thing as Collective Memory?

My class in historiography introduced me to a relatively new historiographical concept, “memory.” A group of people, usually a country, shapes a memory of its past that reorders the facts of history into a narrative.  Historians explore such memories and how they came about. It’s fascinating, but it makes me uneasy.

David W. Blight is a leading historian of memory. His brilliant book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory epitomizes the best use of the concept. [1] In brief, he explains that after the most devastating war in American history the reunified nation had to come to grips with what had happened. Americans created a memory of the war—its goals and its results.

That memory creation could have taken one of two directions, he says. Continue reading “Is There Such a Thing as Collective Memory?”

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Frédéric Bastiat on Communism

I was fortunate to spend a semester studying the work of Frédéric Bastiat, the great nineteenth-century French economic pamphleteer. Beloved by libertarians, he is unequalled in his ability to defend freedom and personal responsibility.

Even Frédéric Bastiat, an insightful libertarian thinker,  could not imagine communism of the twentieth-century kind.

Much can be said about Bastiat, but here I’d like to mention his discussion of communism, for two reasons. First, it illustrates the fluidity of the terms socialism and communism in the mid-nineteenth century—something historians should not forget. For another, it illustrates how brilliant people can be both unusually perceptive about what is around them, but still blind about the future.

Warning: Like most writers about Bastiat, I find it hard not to quote him at length. He says things much better than most of us can.

Continue reading “Frédéric Bastiat on Communism”

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About Time

I was 33 years old when I realized I was living in a different era from my past. My 1950s world of big skirts with felt poodles, petticoats, and even hoops; of sweltering at school in May and June because there was no air conditioning; of 45 rpm records; of going to the drugstore soda fountain and choosing vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream—all had been part of a different epoch.

Yes, I had been a young adult during the turbulent ‘60s (and was part of the turbulence), but I hadn’t experienced them as anything other than one year following the previous one, like day follows day, even if those days were tumultuous. It took twenty years for me to see my past as part of a distinct period, one that was gone.

Historians, however, routinely chop up time—they have to.

Continue reading “About Time”