U.S. Intellectual History Blog

A New Comment Policy, Some Blog Departures, and Other Changes

We’re going through a period of transition on the blog.

Two of our longest-serving bloggers – Ray Haberski and Andrew Hartman – are leaving our roster of regular writers.  They’ve been incredibly valuable contributors to the blog. Both have been with us since before there was a Society for U.S. Intellectual History.  They were both instrumental in creating not only this blog, but also the conference and eventually the Society that grew out of it.  Andrew was the first President of S-USIH; Ray our first Secretary. Needless to say they will be greatly missed. Both will continue to do other things for the Society. And we’re hoping they’ll occasionally show up again on the blog if the spirit moves them. In the meantime, both can be found online on their podcast, Trotsky and the Wild Orchids. Please join me in thanking them both for the incredible work that they’ve shared with us over the years.

A number of our other bloggers are changing the days on which they’re posting.  Robert Greene is moving to Thursday. Tim Lacy is moving to Sunday. And Anthony Chaney is now posting every other Wednesday rather than every other Sunday. There may be other changes like this in the near future, as well.

Finally, we’ve adopted a new comment policy. As our comment threads have become livelier, they’ve also grown more contentious. We welcome the liveliness and the debate, but we consider this academic space and want to avoid the kind of personal attacks that often mar internet comment threads…and that unfortunately had begun to appear more frequently in ours.  We looked around for models among comment policies on other academic blogs and decided to adapt the comment policy at The Junto, the terrific Early Americanist blog.  Sara Georgini, who blogs both here and there, helped create the Junto’s comment policy, so she deserves special credit for our new policy.

Here’s our new policy, which now appears next to our comment threads:

We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.

All of us at the USIH Blog are committed to implementing this policy, but we especially hope that our commentariat embraces it.  In many ways, our best posts are the ones in which you are all most actively involved.  We’re deeply grateful for your participation. And we hope that this new policy might make some readers who’ve been wary of participating in our threads feel more comfortable about taking part in the future.

Please consider the comments on this post an open thread for the discussion of any issues related to the blog that you might want to discuss, including but not limited to those addressed in this post.

5 Thoughts on this Post

S-USIH Comment Policy

We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.

  1. Let me be among the first to thank Andrew and Ray (along with all the original bloggers and founders of SUSIH) for the wonderful work they have done here in building a scholarly field and stimulating discussion about such a wide variety of topics that fall under the umbrella of intellectual history. I imagine blogging over a long period of time is taxing, and so it is with great appreciation and admiration for their efforts that I want to let them know that those efforts have been appreciated.

    I comment here less than I once did, but I continue to appreciate this as a forum for discussion. I think the new comment policy is excellent; as someone who has occasionally found myself in a spirited debate here devolving into a melee that generates more heat than light, I think a balance that sustains a space for reasoned disagreement but demands a level of civility is a good one. I know there are people who believe that the call for civility is just a way to control dissent. This is a less tenable position in the age of Trump. All over the internet, as well as in the highest office in the land, there are models of what not to do. Thanks to the blog for joining a move to preserve and sustain thoughtful discussion.

  2. Kudos to Andrew and Ray for years of thoughtful, informative, provocative, and generally stimulating posts. Don’t know how you have done it in addition to everything else you do so well! Best wishes for Trotsky and the Wild Orchids. Continue on in your project to enlighten (and radicalize?) the nation!

  3. A personal thank you to Andrew and Ray for welcoming me and accepting me as a contributor to this blog when I was just beginning as a PhD student, for engaging with my ideas (such as they were) and commenting on my posts, for thinking well enough of me as a thinker to argue with me, and for thinking well enough of me as a friend to offer your backchannel advice and put up with mine. Andrew has written letters for me and vouched for my work as a scholar and my character as a colleague, and Ray has offered sensitive and sensible counsel on many an occasion. The 2017 conference would have ended up being fourteen people fighting over half a carafe of coffee were it not for Ray’s sage advice and many reassurances that we were Doing Okay and It Would Be Fine. (And it was, once I got the coffee situation straightened out.)

    This blog is many things — a public forum, a virtual community of colleagues, a real community of friends collaborating on a shared intellectual project, an entry point and anchor for a professional society that remains flexible, resilient, and open to new people and new ideas.

    Yes, to Dan Wickberg’s comment above, blogging over a long period of time is taxing, and both Andrew and Ray put in that time and paid that price for the sake of strengthening our discipline and our discourse and our commitment to community. And while some kinds of writing “count” for those of you who have to count such things for tenure and promotion, writing for an academic blog probably doesn’t count nearly as much as it should.

    But it has counted for everything for me to be included in this work, and especially to be accepted as a colleague by Andrew and Ray and my other fellow bloggers.

    We worked hard, for a long time, behind the scenes, on the question of whether and how to develop a formal comment policy, and what we’ve ended up with here is going to help us preserve and strengthen what has been best about this blog, about the work of Andrew and Ray and Tim and Paul Murphy and all the other “old timers” who were here from the beginning.

  4. While this is the blog of a professional society, it also exemplifies some of the best aspects of the blogosphere in other respects, especially in the welcoming attitude toward anyone who is interested in participating in discussions and/or guest posting. Everyone connected with the blog deserves thanks for that, and also of course I join the thanks to Andrew and Ray for their work here.

  5. A change surely did come to Sam Cooke when he was killed 11 days before the release of the 45 bearing “A Change is Gonna Come.” Cooke died at the age of 33 when he was shot to death at the Hacienda Motel at 9137 South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, California, on December 22, 1964.

    Answering separate reports of a shooting and a kidnapping at the motel, police found Cooke’s body, clad only in a sports jacket and shoes but no shirt, pants or underwear. He had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, which was later determined to have pierced his heart. The motel’s manager, Bertha Franklin, said she had shot Cooke in self-defense after he broke into her office residence and attacked her. Her account was immediately disputed by Cooke’s acquaintances.

    It was the “B” side of “Shake.”

    Nothing is to be read into this. just thought it interesting.

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