Here’s the story of an extraordinarily petty response to a review of a book. The reviewer, Caleb McDaniel, is an old friend of mine from grad school, and I don’t believe him remotely guilty of the attitudes imputed to him.
Some days I miss the academy. Today I don’t.
It’s things like that that make me glad I dropped out of grad school in history.Report
What a jerk. It’s funny- a grad student friend recounted a very similar anecdote to me today. At a conference, he asked a historian who argues, similarly, about widespread homosexual behavior in the colonial era if men sharing living quarters is really evidence of homosexuality, and the guy’s response was, “Why? Is homosexuality threatening to you?” We both laughed about that.
Is this sort of thing really so common though? I mean, most people I know in history have at least one story about someone responding really poorly to a comment at a conference or a review or whatnot, but for most of us it’s an amusing anecdote along the lines of, “boy what a jerk!” Otherwise, most of my experiences with historians have been very convivial- or at least, no less so than colleagues in any of my other jobs.Report