There was a nice article by Cass Sunstein recently reviewing a book about counterfactual historical arguments. (I am impressed by the fact that whomever wrote the headline and Facebook summary seems to have not read the article or understood Sunstein's conclusion.) As someone who occasionally dips a toe into counterfactual arguments on my blog, I enjoyed the piece, because it both acknowledged how silly some of these kinds of arguments can be, while also pointing out that they can have utility, and in fact counterfactual reasoning is core to any cause/effect argument that historians want to make. Anyway I thought I would post it here (and not the reading day) because it is about the nature of historical narratives, and I know this sort of thing is of interest to many people on here.

I'm sure in some universe it made sense for all of the grant AND job applications to be due around the same time, but I'm pretty sure we left that universe behind quite a long time ago.

Has there been a mass shift away from teleology? The sonderweg thesis, the secularization thesis, even Marxism have all either been discredited or are not taken seriously.

Which are the prominent journals that engage with the theory and practice of archives? I am interested in reading up on archival practices, particularly within the domain of digital humanities and archiving.

Any experts on Chicago Style here?

What do I do when I want to quote several pages from one book in a single footnote? Should I use Ibid. and a semicolon or just list the pages? It looks awkward as CS does not use "p./pp."

An example of a shortened citation, in which I would refer to pages 7 and 16:

Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 7, 16.