There's a great letter from #CarlBecker as he leaves University of Kansas in 1916 - after nearly 15 years! - and begins a migration that will ultimately land him at Cornell. He is explaining why he left, even though he loved the people at Kansas, felt he'd been treated fairly, etc.

His reasons are a list of problems of academia that would look very familiar to anyone in it today:
* An emphasis on growth of the university in numbers rather than quality of work

* Attaining that growth by adding new departments/schools at the expense of existing ones

* In the meantime, underfunding things that do need growth, like libraries (he specifically calls out neglect of the library and its resources)

* Administrative bodies that have little familiarity with academic work (both teaching and research) are making decisions they are not equipped to make

"Not enough attention has been given to the religious aspects of the 18th century. In America, as in France, the old religious conceptions were in a sense being transformed into a kind of civil religion, and in this change is to be found much that explain the revolution--so I think at present."

-- Carl Becker to William Dodd, 1914

#CarlBecker was *way* more interested in religious history, and related subjects, than I would have guessed based on my prior reading of him.

The above quote about the 'growth and decline of opinion' was about changing opinions re: witchcraft in the 18th c.

This bit came shortly after when, in writing a textbook volume on early American history, he was especially interested in emphasizing religious aspects of "the back country" in the 18th c., as well as the Great Awakening.

Pinning this bc apparently I *am* going to read more and write more about Becker, lol.

That letter to Frederick Jackson Turner led me to Becker's famous "Detachment and the Writing of History," published the same year. I've read this before but probably early grad school? It's been a long time.

Holy crap, what a fascinating essay, both for its time and in our *present* time, like literally, right now.

I was able to download a pdf here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1910/10/detachment-and-the-writing-of-history/644705/

#PhilosophyOfHistory #HistoricalThinking #WhyHistory #ReadingNotes #CarlBecker

(Have started thumbing through a collection of #CarlBecker letters ("What is the Good of History"). Why? Because I don't have enough books started, lol.

If I find anything else interesting, will probably put it here.)