Not long ago I identified intellectual “silos” in the fields of climate science and economics. The term refers to scholars within an academic discipline who do not communicate with one another. When one segment of a discipline doesn’t even read the prominent works of another, the discipline suffers.
What about history? In this post I will argue that history does have silos but what is troubling is not silos, but schism, that is, a “split or division between strongly opposed sections or parties, caused by differences in opinion or belief.”
First, silos. If you are studying the impact of the Anglican Church on England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 you may not have much in common with the professor researching the twelfth-century Anasazi in the American Southwest. Your intellectual coterie is likely to be composed of other professionals in your field (e.g., British history in one case, pre-Columbian American history in the other). Continue reading “Silos and Schism in the History Department”
Last fall I discussed a debate over colonialism. Bruce Gilley, a political scientist at Portland State University wrote an article titled “The Case For Colonialism.” The reaction was so negative that the article was retracted and the publisher of Gilley’s forthcoming book decided not to publish it. [1]
The response was painfully unfair. Yet in spite of the retraction (the article was re-published in Academic Questions ) his argument sparked debate. The adversarial positions were made clear.
All too often in academia, however, one intellectual viewpoint simply ignores another.
In 1994, Joseph Stiglitz wrote the book Whither Socialism? [2] At the time, Stiglitz chaired President Clinton‘s Council of Economic Advisors; in 2001 he received the Nobel Prize. In other words, he was (and is) a leading economist. Continue reading “Intellectual Silos in Academia”
Here are two more stories about history I found in recent articles:. One is about the Chinese family, one about the fall of Rome.
The End of the Chinese Extended Family
Nick Eberstadt argues in Foreign Affairs that the past kinship patterns of Chinese will be forced to change. Surprisingly, they haven’t yet.
Reliance on an extended family has been a fixture of Chinese history over 2500 years, he says, and the change will be “absolutely momentous.” In spite of the well-known one-child policy (which ended in 2015), he doubts that the Chinese Communist Party realizes how severe the impact will be on economic growth. Eberstadt is a respected writer about population and demographics who works for the American Enterprise Institute.
It is now accepted that Joseph Stalin perpetrated mass murder in the Ukraine Soviet Republic in 1932 and 1933. A famine occurred throughout the Soviet Union but the most severe impact was in the vital wheat-growing Ukraine because Stalin wanted to wipe out Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets.
“Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food,” writes Anne Applebaum in Britannica. “Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food.” Apparatchiks even entered homes and stole food. (The Soviets could requisition as much food as they wanted from those who produced it.) Millions died.
Many Western observers visited the Soviet Union around that time, but few revealed the true conditions. Most famously, Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for his generally positive stories from the Soviet Union in 1931; the worst horrors were going on a year later, but he did not report them.
Thomas Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. For credit see below.
Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.
As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.
