Like many other flairs, I'm in graduate school, but unlike most of them, I'm studying animal behavior, not history or anthropology (I've been scarce the past month or so because I'm in the field banding and watching birds).

What I do academically falls comfortably under the umbrella label of "science". However, I've been thinking about the relationship between science and history. The essence of science, as most people would define it, is a system of gaining knowledge where hypotheses about the universe are used to make predictions that are then tested empirically. The "tests" don't have to be literal experiments; you can think, "well, if this hypothesis were true, this other thing would be the case; is this other thing indeed the case?"

The thing is, this looks like the kind of historical research a lot of you do. It made me wonder: for those of you who are historians in academia, do you consider history as you practice it to be "science"?

I also understand that, not being an academic historian, this may be a stale question or fundamentally flawed somehow, and if you think so I won't be offended to hear it.

(I'm assuming that the archaeologists here would consider their research to be science, since everyone else does (I'm sure that's a naive statement on my part), but if you have something you want to add here feel free)

My theoretical contribution for this week: Deleuze and Guattari. Wow. What the...?

So, hey, I'm in the middle of a very interesting process of gaining archival clearance to one of the most difficult countries in the world to obtain it from. I'm down to the last approval, from someone in the middle of the process, and it's quite amazing to see the roadblocks in action--and very amusing to my friends running interference with their institutions in-country to get me through it. Do you have any stories of research barriers, and how you got past them? I'm excited to go, because these records have been virtually unconsulted since the 1960s and never in the way I intend to, but it's got me thinking just how much archival access procedures define what gets written about and by whom.

Are there databases out there geared towards historians which are relatively easy to use and which can later be easily converted to allow for hosting on websites?

I'm doing some research on militia who mustered on April 19th, 1775 and I'm going to be collecting a fair bit of information on them. Spreadsheets are far too clunky (already tried that), and I'd like more advanced features of a regular database.

Suggestions?

Speaking of historiography, I've been arguing for awhile now that the American Revolution saw a Thermidorean-like counter-revolution take place after the war that rolled back much of the truly radical ideas being presented.

I've recently started reading Bailyn's "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution". In the introduction he throws down the gauntlet at me:

"The powerful set of ideas, ideals, and political sensibilities that shaped the origins and early development of the Revolution did not drop dead with the Constitution. That document, in my view, does not mark a Thermidorean reaction to the idealism of the early period engineered by either a capitalist junta or the proponents of rule by a leisured patriciate; nor did the tenth Federalist paper mark the death knell of earlier political beliefs or introduce at a crack a new political science."

I guess that means he and I are now bitter historiographical rivals . . .

I'm finishing up Katsuya Hirano's The Politics of Dialogic Imagination and I'm really enjoying his problematization of dialectical approaches to historical "progress" and explanation of Bakhtin's dialogism of parody and interaction as a historical mover. Has anyone else read this and what do they think?