idea of “what’s new here?” Research is oriented toward getting re-
sults. Theory is useful, but not paramount. Those disciplines that
tend to have less agreement are based more on rhetoric, on
personalism, that is, “I worked with da, da, da, or this is my the-
ory,” and they have no tangible way to judge excellence. I don’t
think that many of the so-called humanities have that, whereas
the social sciences tend to have much more of a stronger sense of
what’s good and what’s not.^34In his bookHistoriography in the Twentieth Century,Georg Iggers
argues that if over the past decades history has “not only survived,
but thrived,” it is in part because it “demands adherence to a logic of
scholarly inquiry shared by scholars generally by which the results of
historical inquiry can be tested for their validity very much as they
are in other disciplines.” For Iggers, this empirical focus has pre-
vented the threat posed by post-modernism from “com[ing] to fru-
ition” in history. In place of a legitimation crisis, there has been an
“expanded pluralism,” accompanied by an expansion in the scope of
historical studies.^35 Like English, history has benefited from a consid-
erable broadening of its object over the past thirty years, fed by the
turn toward microhistoria, women’s and gender history, the history
of other subaltern groups more generally, “history from below,” and
expanded coverage of geographic areas.^36 History also has had solid
undergraduate enrollments for several decades, and unlike English,
has suffered comparatively little from an internal split between its
teaching and research functions—that is, between teaching history
and producing historical studies. It has also had a fairly healthy
job market for PhDs. While the number of PhD recipients ex-
ceeded the number of job openings throughout most of the 1970s,
there was an excess of jobs in 2004–2005 (and earlier, in the 1990s,
as well).^37 The hiring situation varies greatly across areas, however,
with Europeanists facing a more difficult time than scholars working
On Disciplinary Cultures / 81