I have no idea why this ended up being true, since I liked many of the other books far more but never got around to doing more than jumping around within the text.

Nobody ever gave you specific points off for unexcused absences, though, as they would in high school. But that’s what the warning in your syllabus sounded as if you do.

Fascinating class topic, by the way, and it would have tempted me (as a history major) even though I have little taste for or interest in those giant big-picture stylist historians.

Sam: That’s a huge topic! But yes, Hayden White had a huge impact on the practice of most professional historians, and Metahistory was a key driver of what is often called “the linguistic turn” in history. I’ll see if I can’t work up an entry on this at some point in relation to a course I’m teaching next spring.

I’m curious how a professional historian evaluates the work of Hayden White and the like. As a literary critic, I find his Metahistory profoundly provocative and intriguing (and still packing some punch three decades after its publication), but I’m pretty removed from the world of “actual” historians. (Possibly, and ungenerously to myself, because being a prrofessional historian requires “actual” knowledge.) So: does White’s book, and others like it, have any impact on the way professional historians think about their narrative practice?

Is this a common policy today? In my day as a major-university history major, 30 years ago, attendance was never required. The only penalty for missing too many classes was getting a poor grade on the class-participation element. Instructors were very strict about assignment deadlines, however.

Students were pretty conscientious about attendance as far as I observed. But they might skip an occasional lecture class without saying anything to anybody. In some large lectures, discussion sections were where assignments were dealt with, and attendance was very good; in others they were strictly voluntary and couldn’t have held everybody if they’d all showed up. In seminars, one told (not asked) the prof beforehand of a pre-scheduled absence, and explained a sickness absence on one’s return, but politeness, not department rules, enforced this.

I suspect the subsequent advent of e-mail has done a lot towards creating stricter standards of communication in this regard.

But the more important point here is that you would have to agree, I suppose, that comparing Johnson to Hobsbawm as historian is mildly obscene. Making that kind of intellectual trade-off for diversity’s sake is a far greater sin than any of the ACTA-chimeras, as far as I can tell.