=================== HES POSTING =================== 
 
In Roy Weintraub's most recent post, he says that perhaps 
I join him in a call for a change in emphasis in the histories 
written by members of HES. I do not "perhaps" agree with this 
statement, I wholeheartedly agree with it. 
 
The calls in other recent posts for "making room" for Whig 
histories and tolerating them as a legitimate form of history 
seem to miss the point. They are almost all we have, 
and the real need is to make room for the kind of history that 
Roy and Ross are calling for. 
 
I take Ross's statement of the inevitability of "geistesgeschichte" 
as a fair and reasonable acknowledgement of the possible value of 
this kind of work. If people write it, and it's good, that's great. 
But how many of the Whig histories that we see are really good examples 
of this genre? How many articles published in HOPE, JHET, 
or EJHET have moved the rest of the discipline to rethink 
their research agenda? How many of them deserve to be read 
by the rest of the profession? 
 
What we might best contribute to the rest of the profession, what 
we might do that deserves to be read, is work that is better researched 
and is informed by a fuller sense of what good historical work is. 
 
Brad Bateman 
Grinnell College 
 
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