A History of Reviewing History Books: Post-publication “Peer Review”, Historiography and its Publics, c.1700–c.2000
摘要
Rethinking book reviewing as a form of peer review refreshes our understanding of both activities, as well as the conceptual and historical interactions between the two. Moving beyond the usual reference points of the professionalisation and scientification of the discipline of history, this article takes a novel and dynamic approach to crafting an English/Anglophone history of reviewing history books. Working with a source base drawn from the Historical Journal, the English Historical Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, published reviews of academic history books can be seen to fulfil complex and important functions that readily transcend any suggestion that they merely service the needs of a small group of students and researchers in “ivory towers”. For the last three centuries, the value of reviewing select history books has been intertwined with wider and deeper political designs about how to understand the past in local, national, and international contexts. Here, book reviewing as peer reviewing advances the cause of public scholarship. The vitality of reviewing history books is to be found in a set of processes that have required diverse experts to engage in public conversations about the very nature and purpose of history. That this profound legacy is being undermined by twenty-first-century crises in university culture should give all stakeholders of academic history pause for thought.