Category: Academia
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Gates No Friend of the Humanities
Inside Higher Ed: During a sprawling talk in which he emphasized the importance of using data-based metrics to figure out how to increase educational attainment while bringing down costs in both K-12 and higher ed, Gates said that when the governors are deciding how to allocate precious tax dollars, they might consider the disparity between…
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My View on Historical Reenactments
I’ll just admit it up front: I’m not a big fan of historical reenactments. I always tend to look at them the way this Monty Python sketch portrays them. That being said, reenactments are not innately bad, just very hard to do well. In a pure sense, reenactments are another attempt at understanding the world…
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Civil War Reenactments
Here’s a good piece on Civil War Reenactments in Texas. It’s well timed too, since my Monday post will be on historical reenactments. The Texas Observer: Here in Texas, it’s becoming popular to celebrate the war as the opening salvo in the conservative campaign for states’ rights. Neo-Confederate organizations and pro-secessionists are among the leading…
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Humanities Blogs
Interesting list of the “50 Best” humanities blogs. The list includes many good non-academic blogs (from NPR, New York Times, The New Yorker, etc.), but does not recognize many historical blogs (though there are plenty of good ones).
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Yale Inc.
Through a friend from undergrad I learned people at Yale are working on organizing and getting recognized a graduate student union. First, I think this is great and wish them luck. Second, on a more broad point, I do not think the corporatization of the university is a good trend. Even though there is a…
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What are the Humanities and NEH
Jim Noles at the Huffington Post: For what it is worth, I will share my own definition with you. The humanities are those fields of study that explain and celebrate what it means to be human and, in doing so, enrich and enhance our lives. Think of the fields of literature, history, the classics, jurisprudence,…
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Support the NEH
Don’t let the National Endowment for the Humanities become a casualty of political posturing. Tell your elected officials you support the NEH. http://www.congressweb.com/cweb2/index.cfm/siteid/NHA/action/TakeAction.Main
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What Grad Students Need
I applied to continue onto the Ph.D. program at UNL this semester and it got me thinking about what I would have know about grad school before beginning. I had lots of good advice, but most of it was from personal conversations. All that I could find online was either non-department specific or not that…
Brian Sarnacki 