GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY & THE FUTURE OF HISTORY
Posted on January 27th, 2009
The Home Page of the History News Network
If you are wondering what direction the study of history may be going, the History Department at George Mason University is a great place to start looking. Located in Fairfax, Virginia, the George Mason University is the home of the Center for History and the New Media. New media is largely the internet, and while some historians still turn up their noses at the internet, at George Mason University historians are using the internet to advance the study of history in new and exciting directions.
Ph.D. candidates in history at George Mason are actually required to take a two semester course that focuses on history and the internet. These are History 696: Clio Wired: An Introduction to New Media and History 697: Creating History in New Media. In addition, all students are required to demonstrate basic computer competence. Being able to use the internet to communicate is an essential element to the study of history at George Mason.
George Mason University also started the History News Network (HNN), which was launched in June 2001. HNN is the only website on the Internet wholly devoted to the task of putting events in the news into historical perspective every day. The site is updated daily in response to breaking news. HNN is funded by George Mason University. This site, which has its own Facebook page, and features Youtube videos of featuring roundtables with historians on such topics as “Election 2008: How Historic Was It?” Podcast interviews with historians and blogs explore issues that relate history to current events. The publisher and Editor-in-Chief of HNN is Rick Shenkman, who has been interviewed by Jon Stewart about his book How Stupid Are We: The Truth About the American Voter. The HNN is one of the most visited History sites on the web with 1.3 million page views per month and nearly 300,000 unique visitors per month.
Not surprisingly, the HNN is sometimes criticized for its approach. To its critics, HNN offers the following explanation:
” . . . the pressure to publish something in a timely manner necessitates foregoing the slow and steady approach common in peer-reviewed journals. By the peer review standard, none of the articles we publish pass muster as none of them are peer-reviewed in advance; the peer reviewing comes after they have already reached the public. But if that standard is the only standard, then historians must retreat from the journalistic fields and leave the harvesting of interesting views and opinions to others.
This does not sound like a reasonable approach to us. In the fast-paced world in which we now live, public attention is focused on issues for ever briefer periods of time. If scholars want their analyses to be taken into consideration–and why shouldn’t they?–they have to jump into the debate early and with forcefulness.”
Basically, the world has changed and if historians want to matter they need to change as well.