I Have Kept the Faith

It has been my great privilege and a real pleasure to serve as editor-in-chief of the USIH blog for the past three years.  In keeping with the transition plan put in place by the executive committee a few years ago, I will step down in August and the blog will have a new editor-in-chief.

Here at the conclusion of my term, I would like to share some lessons learned.

In no particular order:

1. Ben Alpers is a mensch. He served as editor-in-chief of this blog for about a decade.  There was no official co-editor structure in place at that time, and when he asked for help (very infrequently), that was handled on an ad hoc basis.  Along with Tim Lacy, the blog’s founder, and the original blogging crew, Ben Alpers built and sustained this community.  This was an incredible commitment of time and resources on his part, and I can’t say enough good things about Ben or about the online publishing outlet / community that he left in our care.

2. Never publicly announce your publishing plans before you have the manuscripts in hand.Early in my editorial tenure, I made the mistake of projecting out for our readers some roundtables and some upcoming themes we would be covering.  But then an unexpected and very sad event took place—the passing of the late, great Leo Ribuffo—and we (rightly) scrapped what we had planned and rearranged our schedule to include a roundtable of posts about his work as a scholar and a teacher.  Getting “back on schedule” was easier said than done.  And this is always going to be the case, especially when what we’ve promised is a roundtable, because those depend on the almost-impossible condition of every planned contributor actually having the time / space they hoped to have when they signed on to participate.  Many is the roundtable we have run at this blog over the years that was published months after we had initially intended, because people needed the time to get the pieces in.  But readers would only know a roundtable is late if we announced it before we had the contributions in.  Live and learn.

3. The quiescence of the comment section is not anyone’s fault or responsibility to fix. This has been a very tough lesson to internalize for someone who feels that anything going wrong anywhere in my vicinity must somehow be My Fault Entirely.  Many is the time that I have thought, “Ugh, what have I done? I’ve killed the comments section.”  But I won’t allow myself to bear that charge.  There is a much broader cultural shift happening in online communities and in the academic blogosphere more generally over the past five years or so.  Commenters at the blog are becoming scarcer, while commenters on the blog continue to say interesting and helpful things, though those conversations happen about the blog in other places, principally on Twitter and Facebook.  People who might once have come to the comments section to post a list of shared resources will now put together a quick Twitter thread.  I always encourage folks to leave comments at the blog, but—believe it or not—our very simple comment interface, which requires an email address, is a perceived barrier to interaction.  It takes more effort than many other mediums do.

 

4. Relatedly: the comment policy we have implemented here has been helpful.  One can wax nostalgic about the good old days of USIH comments, when there was some kind of brawl going on in response to some polemic, with Jesse Lemisch swinging from his heels and throwing ad hominem haymakers right and left.  (I do miss Jesse Lemisch, bless him.)  But those were also the days when readers would find their way to the blog, see that brawl in the comments, and decide, “No thanks; this community is not for me.”  Our comment section is more measured these days. Often we have no comments on a story at all.  But those who happen upon our posts are able to read and share them without feeling like they are endorsing or perpetuating an aggressive or bullying style of argumentation that can create a very unequal ground for participants.

 

5. That said, our regular commenters are a treasure. None of the writers here are compensated for our work or our time, and we put in yeoman’s work trying to bring something fresh and new to our community of readers.  Sometimes those posts on which we have worked hardest pass without comment here, while posts that we put together quickly without much planning can generate sustained conversations. Either way, we do have some regular commenters here (aside from blog contributors) who will leave a few words just to let us know that they’ve read our work and thought about it.  We all appreciate that.

 

6. We haven’t done developmental editing at this blog, but that might be a direction to take the site in the future. Editing or writing for this site has never entailed editing the work of our fellow bloggers or contributors.  Every post you see on this site has been drafted, revised, and copy-edited by the person who wrote it.  Some of our bloggers clearly spend time honing their posts to perfection—I am thinking particularly of the lapidary writing of Anthony Chaney, Sara Georgini, and Andrew Seal, whose posts could all pass muster in one of America’s major glossies.  Others of us are a bit more spontaneous.  I am a one-and-done blogger.  Every post you read from me is both the first and final draft.  That makes for very uneven quality, but it’s how I’ve been able to manage writing an essay every Saturday, more often than not, for the past nine years.  However, I can envision a scenario in which there is some sort of peer review for posts here, at least when it comes to guest posts or solicited contributions, so that a team of editors and regular bloggers could work with an author through a few rounds of editing. However, such an arrangement would mean a significant increase in workload for the editors.  Far be it from me to champion a change that I would not myself be willing to implement.

 

7. I almost quit, but I’m glad I didn’t. This has been a rough year for me.  A historian of culture wars, I have found myself embroiled in a culture war that is coming for all of us in (or now out) of academe:  an all-out assault on professors who dare to express certain political opinions outside the classroom or who dare to teach certain practically incontestable truths inside the classroom.  When the entire apparatus of the rightwing outrage machine swung into action to flay me over a snarky tweet, I informed my colleagues here that I would be lying low for a while, for the simple reason that I did not want to draw their fire to this space.  But while lying low, I didn’t know just how low I would get.  This past year was brutal.  It was dangerous.  I had to take measures for my own physical safety and for the safety of my family.  My health suffered.  And my heart suffered, my spirit suffered.  I found myself apologizing to people who had championed me as a scholar and teacher, as if I had somehow let them down because my employer had no regard for civil rights.  To a person, they told me I had nothing for which to apologize.  And I know they are right, but in the middle of the awfulness it was hard to believe them.  I am grateful to every reader here and every co-author and every colleague in our field who reached out to make sure I was okay.  I was not. But things are getting better.

 

8. Thank you. Thank you, reader, for sticking with us here.  Thank you for reading our posts and for sharing them.  Thank you to everyone who has enjoyed a blog post here and decided to include it on your syllabus. Thank you to everyone who has encouraged your grad students or your undergrads to read the blog.  In December of 2010, when I was weighing whether or not I could handle intellectual history—it sounded awful highfalutin’ and esoteric—Dan Wickberg did everything to reassure me that I could. One of the things he did was recommend that I begin reading this blog, so that I would have some idea of the breadth of topics and range of approaches that “intellectual history” can cover in practice, and so that I would have some sense of what the community of U.S. intellectual historians was like.  This blog was the vestibule through which I passed into that Jamesian house of learning that is actually a hostel for intellectual travelers.  This blog is the common hallway that leads to a different inquiry taking place in every room, not behind closed doors, but with the doors flung wide open so that anyone might join the fun.  And join I did, to the point where I became the very thing I could not imagine being: an intellectual historian.  So thanks to Dan Wickberg for sending me here, and thanks to every mentor or professor who does the same for their own grad students.

 

This blog and the conference and the society that were born from it constitute a vestibule to our discipline, a well-appointed entryway to a whole intellectual world.  But there will and should always be shortcuts, hidden doors, jimmied windows, gaps in the walls, open patios through which others can find their way to this community and this discipline.  The USIH blog and society hardly have an exclusive monopoly on the field.  We’re not the only way to be and to do and to become.  If things get too highfalutin’ and gatekeep-y around here, you will find me outside the walls, fighting like hell to tear them down.

In the meantime, thank you all, again, for allowing me to serve as the editor in chief of this very important publication that helps to sustain the beloved community to which I am so grateful to belong.