Does history have a replication crisis?

Those who do not study history are doomed to replicate it.

Those who do study history are doomed to not replicate it.

> And it’s simply not viable to follow that hundred-chain length sourcing tree for everything used in an analysis.

Maybe not for the passing reader, but I would imagine it's totally viable for those especially interested. So why not make it available anyways?

> This lack of effective institutions or incentives was really brought home to me recently by the publication of a paper in the prestigious journal History & Technology by Jenny Bulstrode of UCL, in which she claimed that the inventor Henry Cort had stolen his famous 1783 iron-rolling process from Reeder’s iron mill in Jamaica, where it had been developed by 76 black metallurgists by passing iron through grooved sugar rollers. It was a widely-publicised paper, receiving 22,756 views — eleven times as many views as the journal’s next most most read paper, and frankly unheard of for most academic papers — along with a huge amount of press coverage.

It is pretty obvious that this became so widely spread because it agrees with a certain political viewpoint.

In order to become a history teacher, I had to get a master’s degree in education. I was required to take a minimum of five graduate-level history classes in the history department as part of it. I was transitioning from being a lawyer. Professors would talk about checking citations (although not systematically) but it was more for the purpose of finding useful material you want to use, not to check how they are being used by authors. Ok, whatever. I was used to reading cited sources for the purpose of evaluating the argument they were purportedly supporting. But every single time I raised in a seminar that some citation did not bear the weight placed on it, or even simply failed to logically support what it purported to support, it was explained to me that I was missing the point.

After the second seminar of this happening, the chairperson of the history department called me into his office. He said he understood that I used to be a lawyer and thus was likely to be more drawn to or interested in arguing about things. He understood I was going to become a teacher, not a professional historian. But my approach to sources and citations was being complained about by history graduate students and the professors agreed. I was told that when reading secondary sources in seminars I should spend more time thinking about what is valuable about them and how they might be used in further research than scrutinizing the evidence and logic underpinning them. Anyway, it was a little insulting for me to think that I could legitimately critique such things in a useful way when I had not spent the years of work in the archives that the authors of those works did. He had called this meeting with me in order to be frank with me about the problems that the history department was having with me and to give me a “second chance” before talking to the education department where my degree would come from.

Suffice to say, I got the message: I obediently complied and shut my mouth in the remaining seminars. I got my degree and was certified and am now a history teacher at an urban public high school. I’m happy with my life. And I’ll never think about professional history/historians with the same fundamental deference to expertise as I did before I got a glimpse of it up close.

The election is something that distance makes clearer, although 50 years might not be enough time. Think of the history of the roman senate. Truth is barely talked about, the narrative revolves around factions, power, and outcomes.

Call it post-truth, call it machiavellian, but being on top is a social game, not a practical one.