As an historian of gender and race with strong cultural tendencies I am all too eager to subscribe to what scholars have called the ‘constructionist’ school. Often invoked in debates over gender, constructionists believe that societies construct categories such as woman, man, homosexual, and so forth out of whole cloth. In some ways anyone partial to historicism, which pretty much covers our discipline, has at least a few constructionist bones in their body. Indeed, the notion that the past is very different from the present and requires a specialist to understand it is very edifying for historians. In this vein, Read more