Scholarly Snippets Season 2 Official Announcement

This is the official announcement for the release of Scholarly Snippets Season 2. The episodes will premiere on the Ctruth YouTube channel once a week starting next Saturday (September 25th).

Scholarly Snippets features people with college degrees in history (or related fields) responding to questions about their specific fields of interest. The aim of the show is to allow these degree-holders to shed light on their fields and to share their experiences so that other people can learn more about those fields and the people in them.

Season 1 premiered in 2020 and can be watched in its entirety on the Ctruth YouTube channel. Season 2 begins a week from today and will run until December 18th at the latest. Season 3 is in the works and the goal is to have it released sometime in the summer of 2022.

At the end of Season 2, Ctruth patrons will have access to a few polls related to the episodes. The first one will allow you to vote for your favorite guest from the season. The second one will have you vote on your favorite question that was asked in each episode. The last one is a vote for a new guest for next season. All of the results will be announced in a public video to conclude Season 2.

Support Future Seasons

I want to produce a season of Scholarly Snippets every year. You can help me do this by pledging to the Ctruth Patreon channel. Patreon allows people to support content creators through a monthly subscription. By pledging to Ctruth, you gain access to exclusive Ctruth activities, benefits, and content. I am eternally thankful to the people who offer support in this way.

Alternatively, donations can be made through:

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or

Cash App – https://cash.app/$Ctruthtoday

The Quote

The beginning of each episode from this season includes a quote by the renowned scholar Arnaldo Momigliano:

“In our time there is a great danger that those who talk most readily about historians and scholars may not know too much about history and scholarship.”
New Paths of Classicism in the Nineteenth Century (1982)

Context

Arnaldo lived from 1908-1987 and gained a reputation as a brilliant scholar of historiography. His quote above comes from the introduction to part 4 of History & Theory’s 21st volume, which was published in December 1982, about 41 years ago. The central topic of this work is classical scholarship (scholarship dedicated to ancient history) in the 1800s and early 1900s. Arnaldo argues that understanding the achievements of these scholars helps deter superficial or partisan dismissal of said achievements. He makes this argument by exploring the history and historiography of some prominent historians, such as Niebuhr, Mommsen, and Weber, as well as others.

History & Theory is an international peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the theory and philosophy of history. It was founded in 1960 (about 61 years ago) and currently publishes one four part volume each year. Among other topics, they publish articles, review essays, and book summaries about history, historiography, historical methodology, and more. The journal has a website @ https://historyandtheory.org/ and it’s hosted on Jstor @ https://www.jstor.org/journal/historytheory.

Comments

Aside from the ambiguity of what constitutes a “great danger”, this quote still stands true today, some forty odd years later. There are many people today, some quite popular, who speak about history and historians, or scholars and scholarship, without an adequate understanding of them. The question arises, “what danger comes from this? What harm results from novices readily commenting on history, historians, or scholarship?”.

On my own, I’ve thought up a list of 5 results:

1 – Misrepresentation

2 – Pseudo-history/pseudo-scholarship

3 – Unwarranted ridicule

4 – Harassment

5 – Violence

Whatever dangers accompany a result, Scholarly Snippets helps combat them by providing windows into the world of historical scholarship.

When I set out to create Season 2, I had not thought of putting this quote at the start of every episode. It was only after the first few recordings that I decided to include the quote, and it was only after the 5th recording that I decided to ask the guests what they thought about it. This means that I didn’t ask about the quote in the first five episodes. I attempted to remedy the absence in those episodes by reaching out to those guests to get their take so that I could include it before premiere.