In researching last week’s post, I ran across a reference to a poll of historians taken in 1952 that quizzed respondents on what were, in their views, the “best” works of history published “recently.” The poll was organized by and reported in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, the forerunner of the Journal of American History. Re-reporting it now may seem a bit antiquarian but there are (as far as I know) relatively few comprehensive exercises such as this in the history of our profession, so it does have some rough merit for the snapshot it provides. At any rate, we Read more