david henige - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by david henige
Materials in this bibliography are arranged roughly by subject and within these chronologically. ... more Materials in this bibliography are arranged roughly by subject and within these chronologically. The subject divisions, which have been developed over many years, are probably somewhat arbitrary and perhaps also too broadly defined. To make this bibliography manageable, entries are limited to studies published since 1975, with a few exceptions.
History in Africa, 1990
The Association for the Publication of African Historical Sources (presently headquartered at the... more The Association for the Publication of African Historical Sources (presently headquartered at the Department of History, Michigan State University) is now administering one umbrella National Endowment for the Humanities grant for editing, translating, and publishing significant African texts, and hopes to administer more in the future. In aid of this, the following guidelines, which should for the moment be considered to be in a draft stage, are offered in an effort both to bring uniformity to these editions and to stimulate thinking towards making the guidelines more thorough and enduring. Readers are urged to send suggestions for the latter to: David Henige, Memorial Library, 728 State St., Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A. If all goes well, it might be possible to publish an improved set of guidelines in next…
Terrae Incognitae, 1991
... 29Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo (Alcala: Michael d'Egnia, 1530), ... more ... 29Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo (Alcala: Michael d'Egnia, 1530), Aiii. ... all, but as Columbus himself "recounted it," apparently during his royal audience at Barcelona some two months after his return.31 If nothing else, this reinforces the view that Bernaldez also derived ...
The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 1981
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1987
... Coverage is from the Ancient Near East to the present (but with skimpy coverage of the former... more ... Coverage is from the Ancient Near East to the present (but with skimpy coverage of the former) and embra-ces present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish areas. There is an author/translator index and a list of more than 75 journals con-sulted. ...
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1974
... Ki0ge in 1783, after which it is reported that he made peace with the Krobo on advantageous t... more ... Ki0ge in 1783, after which it is reported that he made peace with the Krobo on advantageous terms, probably by levying a fine.18 This Wenchi Saki is the same as the Wetsey Sackey who headed ... For example, the genealogy submitted by Enoch Azu in 1939, NAG, ADM 1/1/519. ...
History in Africa, 2001
Annotation is possibly the aspect of any edition in which the editor is most vulnerable.This is g... more Annotation is possibly the aspect of any edition in which the editor is most vulnerable.This is going to be a discourse without footnotes. I have always had a suppressed desire to risk such an indiscretion, and people have asked why I cannot write anything without timidly quoting chapter and verse from some German professor… Where we quote it will be from memory, wens [sic] and all, speaking with conviction but with no authority whatever.If footnotes were a rational form of communication, Darwinian selection would have resulted in the eyes being set vertically rather than on an inefficient horizontal plane.At a conference recently, a member of the audience criticized a historian (not present and not me) for adopting an “ad hominem” strategy in some published criticism. Later I asked her what she meant. Her reply was that the historian had not been content to disagree with certain approaches in another field, but went farther by specifying examples to sustain his case. In other words...
History in Africa, 1986
The historian can of course be his own textual critic; but the editing of text has to precede its... more The historian can of course be his own textual critic; but the editing of text has to precede its use as a historical document.The view of the primacy of the properly edited source represents a notion long taken for granted by classical and medieval historians (among others) and philologists, as is evidenced by the very large number of edited texts that undergird their interpretative work, and which continue to appear regularly, including improved editions of previously-published texts. It cannot be said that Africanists (to mention only one group) have enthusiastically adopted a similar view with respect to their own sources.In fact, if there was a hallmark of the nascent historiography of precolonial Africa, it was its commitment to rehabilitating oral sources as a legitimate tool for recovering the deeper past. The reasons for this development are obvious, perhaps even ineluctable: it provided a unifying esprit de corps which served to actuate its practitioners; it permitted the ...
History in Africa, 1979
Readers may be interested to know that there are several little-known depositories of African-rel... more Readers may be interested to know that there are several little-known depositories of African-related Catholic missionary journals in the United States and Canada. Since these materials were not usually disseminated very widely when published, they are almost never to be found in academic and research libraries, nor, therefore, in the standard locating tools like Union List of Serials and its supplements. Because of this an effort is now being made to find at least one location in North America for each of the more than four hundred relevant journals. Likely possibilities include provincial and mother houses, teaching seminaries, monasteries, and provincial archives, as well as the libraries of institutions of higher learning affiliated with particular missionary orders. Although this project is very far from complete (and almost certainly will never attain the rather quixotic goal mentioned above) some early returns are in and several important collections have been identified. Thi...
The Hispanic American Historical Review, 1978
... (Ciudad Trujillo, 1949-1956), III, 179-207, and Troy S. Floyd, The Columbus ... regime of Bar... more ... (Ciudad Trujillo, 1949-1956), III, 179-207, and Troy S. Floyd, The Columbus ... regime of Bartolome.54 However, the chroniclers' record of Spanish activities does not lead one to accept effective Spanish control much beyond the immediate area of their main settlement at Isabela. ...
History in Africa, 1987
By common consent the constitution of an author's text is the highest aim a scholar can set b... more By common consent the constitution of an author's text is the highest aim a scholar can set before himself.It is not easy to imagine any historian advancing such a claim these days--or at least meaning it. In fact many historians might not even be sure what Burnet meant by it. Yet, if themétierof textual criticism in history has fallen on hard times, it might not be quite true that there is no place for it at all, even in African historiography. At first glance, to be sure, it might seem quite beside the point to discuss “constituting” any text, written or oral, that Africanists might use as a source, since it must most often seem as if these texts are quite straightforward existing in the state we chance upon them and in that state only.As is so frequently the case in the study of African history, for example, the only genuine sources for the life and activities of St. Patrick are two brief Latin texts he composed (or so it is widely believed), but which have survived only in v...
Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 2011
Like it or not, errors occur throughout scholarly publishing. Some creep in, while others leap in... more Like it or not, errors occur throughout scholarly publishing. Some creep in, while others leap in. Some are utterly inconsequential, whereas others are foundational. Some result from the Rush to Pronounce, while others betray insufficient searches for, or misuse of, evidence. It falls to the academy to correct as many of these as possible, but there is a palpable reluctance to be bothered, as though correcting error were a second-rate activity. As a result, errors either go uncorrected or are corrected in conditions of lower visibility. In this article, the author discusses a few such examples and brings to bear some quantitative data to support the conclusion that, once insinuated into the public domain, errors continue to live on far more frequently than is desirable.
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 1984
African Research Documentation, Apr 1, 2007
The authors of the set of essays on various aspects of reviewing recently published in ARD (no. 1... more The authors of the set of essays on various aspects of reviewing recently published in ARD (no. 102 [2007]:13-35) argue en ensemble that reviews continue to fill a function in scholarly communications-an unofficial system of checks and balances that can and often does set limits on how cases are presented to the public. I am less convinced of this than the authors, at least as to their value in the library acquisitions process. At any rate, the greater their value, the greater the need to optimize the production and reception by launching a number of reforms that would have the effect of providing this argument with grounds that could make it even stronger. Book reviews have long been touted as a means to influence institutional purchasing, not only of scholarly books but of all books. Focusing on the former, it strikes me that this could never have been much the case. In the days of print monopoly, substantive reviews appeared long after the books being reviewed did-anything less than a year could be considered almost miraculous. Sure, there were a few prominent organs (Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, etc.) designed to do nothing other than publish reviews, sometimes even before the books appeared in the marketplace. These still exist and still serve the same purpose, but then and even more so now, only a tiny fraction of published works could be attended to, and there was and is no reason to assume that this tiny fraction contained a disproportionate number of especially significant books, although being reviewed in these organs might have made them significant after the fact. Nowadays, of course, rather than holding a monopoly, print seems barely to be hanging on, derided by many as inadequate in the face of competing electronic formats. These have the capacity to offer book reviews more quickly than before and at whatever length a reviewer expounds but, like the TLS and others, the electronic review tools seem satisfied to publish only a few reviews, and very few works get multiple reviews across the band of electronic resources. So, while it is probably incorrect to argue that no research libraries depend on reviews to decide what to buy and what not to, it is surely the case that most such libraries, even those with qualified subject specialists, have accepted the obvious-and the expedient-and handed the task of supplying materials, especially university press publications, over to megaproviders such as Blackwell and YBP, under the hardly unreasonable assumption that these titles have already been vetted extensively enough to accept a priori that they belong in research library collections. By the time reviews of these imprints do appear, they have long since been acquired by libraries working under the assumption that they were fair grist for their mills. As to trade publications, expectations are lower, but materials are often ordered on the basis of prepublication announcements and the like, in which the only 'reviews' are the blurbs by friends of the authors that can often be found on die book jacket flap or back cover.1 In the circumstances it strikes me as highly inadvisable for libraries to wait on several reviews of a work before deciding whether to buy it, as apparently is the case at Rhodes House Library. Even with high-speed review organs such as Choice, it should be many months, and could be many years, before this occurs. Indeed, it is known to be the case that many, maybe most, academic tomes never receive as many as three reviews.2 This fact of life has little relationship to their quality, their price, or their promotion, but rather to the vagaries of the review process, not the least of which is available space and interest.3 Thus waiting for multiple reviews of any book could also be a case of waiting for Godot. And then what to do if the balance of the reviews is neither positive nor negative? On the other hand, that reviews provide "a significant amount of intellectual capital" that can prime librarians to meet the after-purchase needs of their users is less exceptionable, although it is worth distinguishing in this between reviews in library journals (usually terse and intended for librarians) and journals within the relevant disciplines. …
The problems with university responses to students' mental health needs-secrecy, penalties and di... more The problems with university responses to students' mental health needs-secrecy, penalties and disincentives to seeking help.
College & Research Libraries, 2007
It would be almost impossible to imagine any book title whose fulfi llment could possibly be more... more It would be almost impossible to imagine any book title whose fulfi llment could possibly be more different than just twenty years ago. The production, array, and consumption of information right now are enormously more complicated and confusing than they were then, and no one knows exactly in which directions these will go in the near and more distant future. Twenty years ago, "information" was more exiguous and certainly harder to come by, and often more effort was put into finding information than in digesting it. In contrast, today the problems begin with determining in which of numerous formats one wishes to have information brought to his or her attention. Even so, digesting is still an issue, and the question is: does this encourage more or less careful interpretation of it? As befits a member of the School of Library and Information Science and the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Dan Schiller operates at a rarefied level and does not really address the kinds of contexts with which librarians must grapple on a daily basis ("libraries" barely makes the index). Rather, he is concerned with, as he puts it, "information as a commodity." Indeed, Schiller expresses his focus almost at once: "[h]ow, when and why does information become economically valuable?" In these circumstances, it is surprising that he fails to discuss one information-as-commodity issue of supreme consequence to libraries-the increasingly high costs of information (would that it were also always knowledge!) to both libraries and individuals. Instead, the present work is aimed at technocrats, macroeconomists, and others who are interested in developing abstracted notions of information. Working librarians, faced with an overwhelming tidal wave of both information and ways to gain access to it, will probably not fi nd it
Choice Reviews Online, 2012
College & Research Libraries, 2004
The Journal of American Folklore, 1984
Materials in this bibliography are arranged roughly by subject and within these chronologically. ... more Materials in this bibliography are arranged roughly by subject and within these chronologically. The subject divisions, which have been developed over many years, are probably somewhat arbitrary and perhaps also too broadly defined. To make this bibliography manageable, entries are limited to studies published since 1975, with a few exceptions.
History in Africa, 1990
The Association for the Publication of African Historical Sources (presently headquartered at the... more The Association for the Publication of African Historical Sources (presently headquartered at the Department of History, Michigan State University) is now administering one umbrella National Endowment for the Humanities grant for editing, translating, and publishing significant African texts, and hopes to administer more in the future. In aid of this, the following guidelines, which should for the moment be considered to be in a draft stage, are offered in an effort both to bring uniformity to these editions and to stimulate thinking towards making the guidelines more thorough and enduring. Readers are urged to send suggestions for the latter to: David Henige, Memorial Library, 728 State St., Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A. If all goes well, it might be possible to publish an improved set of guidelines in next…
Terrae Incognitae, 1991
... 29Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo (Alcala: Michael d'Egnia, 1530), ... more ... 29Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo (Alcala: Michael d'Egnia, 1530), Aiii. ... all, but as Columbus himself "recounted it," apparently during his royal audience at Barcelona some two months after his return.31 If nothing else, this reinforces the view that Bernaldez also derived ...
The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 1981
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1987
... Coverage is from the Ancient Near East to the present (but with skimpy coverage of the former... more ... Coverage is from the Ancient Near East to the present (but with skimpy coverage of the former) and embra-ces present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish areas. There is an author/translator index and a list of more than 75 journals con-sulted. ...
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1974
... Ki0ge in 1783, after which it is reported that he made peace with the Krobo on advantageous t... more ... Ki0ge in 1783, after which it is reported that he made peace with the Krobo on advantageous terms, probably by levying a fine.18 This Wenchi Saki is the same as the Wetsey Sackey who headed ... For example, the genealogy submitted by Enoch Azu in 1939, NAG, ADM 1/1/519. ...
History in Africa, 2001
Annotation is possibly the aspect of any edition in which the editor is most vulnerable.This is g... more Annotation is possibly the aspect of any edition in which the editor is most vulnerable.This is going to be a discourse without footnotes. I have always had a suppressed desire to risk such an indiscretion, and people have asked why I cannot write anything without timidly quoting chapter and verse from some German professor… Where we quote it will be from memory, wens [sic] and all, speaking with conviction but with no authority whatever.If footnotes were a rational form of communication, Darwinian selection would have resulted in the eyes being set vertically rather than on an inefficient horizontal plane.At a conference recently, a member of the audience criticized a historian (not present and not me) for adopting an “ad hominem” strategy in some published criticism. Later I asked her what she meant. Her reply was that the historian had not been content to disagree with certain approaches in another field, but went farther by specifying examples to sustain his case. In other words...
History in Africa, 1986
The historian can of course be his own textual critic; but the editing of text has to precede its... more The historian can of course be his own textual critic; but the editing of text has to precede its use as a historical document.The view of the primacy of the properly edited source represents a notion long taken for granted by classical and medieval historians (among others) and philologists, as is evidenced by the very large number of edited texts that undergird their interpretative work, and which continue to appear regularly, including improved editions of previously-published texts. It cannot be said that Africanists (to mention only one group) have enthusiastically adopted a similar view with respect to their own sources.In fact, if there was a hallmark of the nascent historiography of precolonial Africa, it was its commitment to rehabilitating oral sources as a legitimate tool for recovering the deeper past. The reasons for this development are obvious, perhaps even ineluctable: it provided a unifying esprit de corps which served to actuate its practitioners; it permitted the ...
History in Africa, 1979
Readers may be interested to know that there are several little-known depositories of African-rel... more Readers may be interested to know that there are several little-known depositories of African-related Catholic missionary journals in the United States and Canada. Since these materials were not usually disseminated very widely when published, they are almost never to be found in academic and research libraries, nor, therefore, in the standard locating tools like Union List of Serials and its supplements. Because of this an effort is now being made to find at least one location in North America for each of the more than four hundred relevant journals. Likely possibilities include provincial and mother houses, teaching seminaries, monasteries, and provincial archives, as well as the libraries of institutions of higher learning affiliated with particular missionary orders. Although this project is very far from complete (and almost certainly will never attain the rather quixotic goal mentioned above) some early returns are in and several important collections have been identified. Thi...
The Hispanic American Historical Review, 1978
... (Ciudad Trujillo, 1949-1956), III, 179-207, and Troy S. Floyd, The Columbus ... regime of Bar... more ... (Ciudad Trujillo, 1949-1956), III, 179-207, and Troy S. Floyd, The Columbus ... regime of Bartolome.54 However, the chroniclers' record of Spanish activities does not lead one to accept effective Spanish control much beyond the immediate area of their main settlement at Isabela. ...
History in Africa, 1987
By common consent the constitution of an author's text is the highest aim a scholar can set b... more By common consent the constitution of an author's text is the highest aim a scholar can set before himself.It is not easy to imagine any historian advancing such a claim these days--or at least meaning it. In fact many historians might not even be sure what Burnet meant by it. Yet, if themétierof textual criticism in history has fallen on hard times, it might not be quite true that there is no place for it at all, even in African historiography. At first glance, to be sure, it might seem quite beside the point to discuss “constituting” any text, written or oral, that Africanists might use as a source, since it must most often seem as if these texts are quite straightforward existing in the state we chance upon them and in that state only.As is so frequently the case in the study of African history, for example, the only genuine sources for the life and activities of St. Patrick are two brief Latin texts he composed (or so it is widely believed), but which have survived only in v...
Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 2011
Like it or not, errors occur throughout scholarly publishing. Some creep in, while others leap in... more Like it or not, errors occur throughout scholarly publishing. Some creep in, while others leap in. Some are utterly inconsequential, whereas others are foundational. Some result from the Rush to Pronounce, while others betray insufficient searches for, or misuse of, evidence. It falls to the academy to correct as many of these as possible, but there is a palpable reluctance to be bothered, as though correcting error were a second-rate activity. As a result, errors either go uncorrected or are corrected in conditions of lower visibility. In this article, the author discusses a few such examples and brings to bear some quantitative data to support the conclusion that, once insinuated into the public domain, errors continue to live on far more frequently than is desirable.
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 1984
African Research Documentation, Apr 1, 2007
The authors of the set of essays on various aspects of reviewing recently published in ARD (no. 1... more The authors of the set of essays on various aspects of reviewing recently published in ARD (no. 102 [2007]:13-35) argue en ensemble that reviews continue to fill a function in scholarly communications-an unofficial system of checks and balances that can and often does set limits on how cases are presented to the public. I am less convinced of this than the authors, at least as to their value in the library acquisitions process. At any rate, the greater their value, the greater the need to optimize the production and reception by launching a number of reforms that would have the effect of providing this argument with grounds that could make it even stronger. Book reviews have long been touted as a means to influence institutional purchasing, not only of scholarly books but of all books. Focusing on the former, it strikes me that this could never have been much the case. In the days of print monopoly, substantive reviews appeared long after the books being reviewed did-anything less than a year could be considered almost miraculous. Sure, there were a few prominent organs (Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, etc.) designed to do nothing other than publish reviews, sometimes even before the books appeared in the marketplace. These still exist and still serve the same purpose, but then and even more so now, only a tiny fraction of published works could be attended to, and there was and is no reason to assume that this tiny fraction contained a disproportionate number of especially significant books, although being reviewed in these organs might have made them significant after the fact. Nowadays, of course, rather than holding a monopoly, print seems barely to be hanging on, derided by many as inadequate in the face of competing electronic formats. These have the capacity to offer book reviews more quickly than before and at whatever length a reviewer expounds but, like the TLS and others, the electronic review tools seem satisfied to publish only a few reviews, and very few works get multiple reviews across the band of electronic resources. So, while it is probably incorrect to argue that no research libraries depend on reviews to decide what to buy and what not to, it is surely the case that most such libraries, even those with qualified subject specialists, have accepted the obvious-and the expedient-and handed the task of supplying materials, especially university press publications, over to megaproviders such as Blackwell and YBP, under the hardly unreasonable assumption that these titles have already been vetted extensively enough to accept a priori that they belong in research library collections. By the time reviews of these imprints do appear, they have long since been acquired by libraries working under the assumption that they were fair grist for their mills. As to trade publications, expectations are lower, but materials are often ordered on the basis of prepublication announcements and the like, in which the only 'reviews' are the blurbs by friends of the authors that can often be found on die book jacket flap or back cover.1 In the circumstances it strikes me as highly inadvisable for libraries to wait on several reviews of a work before deciding whether to buy it, as apparently is the case at Rhodes House Library. Even with high-speed review organs such as Choice, it should be many months, and could be many years, before this occurs. Indeed, it is known to be the case that many, maybe most, academic tomes never receive as many as three reviews.2 This fact of life has little relationship to their quality, their price, or their promotion, but rather to the vagaries of the review process, not the least of which is available space and interest.3 Thus waiting for multiple reviews of any book could also be a case of waiting for Godot. And then what to do if the balance of the reviews is neither positive nor negative? On the other hand, that reviews provide "a significant amount of intellectual capital" that can prime librarians to meet the after-purchase needs of their users is less exceptionable, although it is worth distinguishing in this between reviews in library journals (usually terse and intended for librarians) and journals within the relevant disciplines. …
The problems with university responses to students' mental health needs-secrecy, penalties and di... more The problems with university responses to students' mental health needs-secrecy, penalties and disincentives to seeking help.
College & Research Libraries, 2007
It would be almost impossible to imagine any book title whose fulfi llment could possibly be more... more It would be almost impossible to imagine any book title whose fulfi llment could possibly be more different than just twenty years ago. The production, array, and consumption of information right now are enormously more complicated and confusing than they were then, and no one knows exactly in which directions these will go in the near and more distant future. Twenty years ago, "information" was more exiguous and certainly harder to come by, and often more effort was put into finding information than in digesting it. In contrast, today the problems begin with determining in which of numerous formats one wishes to have information brought to his or her attention. Even so, digesting is still an issue, and the question is: does this encourage more or less careful interpretation of it? As befits a member of the School of Library and Information Science and the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Dan Schiller operates at a rarefied level and does not really address the kinds of contexts with which librarians must grapple on a daily basis ("libraries" barely makes the index). Rather, he is concerned with, as he puts it, "information as a commodity." Indeed, Schiller expresses his focus almost at once: "[h]ow, when and why does information become economically valuable?" In these circumstances, it is surprising that he fails to discuss one information-as-commodity issue of supreme consequence to libraries-the increasingly high costs of information (would that it were also always knowledge!) to both libraries and individuals. Instead, the present work is aimed at technocrats, macroeconomists, and others who are interested in developing abstracted notions of information. Working librarians, faced with an overwhelming tidal wave of both information and ways to gain access to it, will probably not fi nd it
Choice Reviews Online, 2012
College & Research Libraries, 2004
The Journal of American Folklore, 1984