entitlement

I've decided that being a graduate student at a well respected university entitles me to come out with my list of academic things that I hate, that I think are totally dry and boring and overrated. Before, this might have rendered me low-brow...but I think I've earned it (note: this list comes after a long day of dry reading).

1. Marx: you suck. you were never an historian--you should stay the hell out of my history books!

2. Marxist historians: see above.

3. Military historians--who stood where when really doesn't tell me much.

4. Economic historians--for the same reasons I find Marx boring. And, they're never good writers. If you pick a boring topic, you should write well.

5. Treaties, political history from above: Yawn.

6. It hurts me to say this a little, but Lenin: proletariat this, proletariat that...come on, already. The crafters of the french revolution at least strayed from the party line often enough to say something interesting.

7. Hitler: for someone so creepy, "Mein Kampf" was a real snooze. It took me forever to get offended.

8. Historians of sex: that one's surprising, but I have a good reason. They pick the most tawdry subject, potentially the best read ever, and then muck it all up by spattering the words "normative" and "heteronormative" all over their damn work, with completely scant descriptions of any getting it on. The field is based on the idea that the academy is too prudish for its own good--live up to your complaining!

9. Theorists: when you're supposed to study what people did and thought in their own context, theory, I think, just mucks it up. See: Marx

10. Feminist historians: see Theorists

11. Religious historians: a prerequisite is having reliable reserves of skepticism for sources.

12. Early American history: turns out, puritans were mostly a dull lot. and the people that tend to write about them...man.

Here's my recent list of people who are awesome, off the top of my head:
Eric Hobsbawm (though technically a marxist historian, he certainly doesn't write like one), Francois Furet, Mark Mazower, Robert Darnton, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ian Kershaw, Inga Clandennin, Karen Armstrong, Orlando Figes, Tzvetan Todorov.