Does history have a replication crisis?
In order to become a history teacher, I had to get a master’s degree in education. I was required to take a minimum of five graduate-level history classes in the history department as part of it. I was transitioning from being a lawyer. Professors would talk about checking citations (although not systematically) but it was more for the purpose of finding useful material you want to use, not to check how they are being used by authors. Ok, whatever. I was used to reading cited sources for the purpose of evaluating the argument they were purportedly supporting. But every single time I raised in a seminar that some citation did not bear the weight placed on it, or even simply failed to logically support what it purported to support, it was explained to me that I was missing the point.<p>After the second seminar of this happening, the chairperson of the history department called me into his office. He said he understood that I used to be a lawyer and thus was likely to be more drawn to or interested in arguing about things. He understood I was going to become a teacher, not a professional historian. But my approach to sources and citations was being complained about by history graduate students and the professors agreed. I was told that when reading secondary sources in seminars I should spend more time thinking about what is valuable about them and how they might be used in further research than scrutinizing the evidence and logic underpinning them. Anyway, it was a little insulting for me to think that I could legitimately critique such things in a useful way when I had not spent the years of work in the archives that the authors of those works did. He had called this meeting with me in order to be frank with me about the problems that the history department was having with me and to give me a “second chance” before talking to the education department where my degree would come from.<p>Suffice to say, I got the message: I obediently complied  and shut my mouth in the remaining seminars. I got my degree and was certified and am now a history teacher at an urban public high school. I’m happy with my life. And I’ll never think about professional history&#x2F;historians with the same fundamental deference to expertise as I did before I got a glimpse of it up close.