Mike Wehrman wrote: "I think maybe the reason there are not as many questions about historians is because in writing questions to fulfill a tournament's history requirement, unlike in other social sciences like anthropology and economics, you can write questions on what (may have) actually happened." The way I see it, distribution requirements for "History" are there to ensure questions about the stuff of history -- people and events of the past -- not about history, the academic discipline, which is another sort of thing altogether -- and which has a place in the game to be sure, but not, in my opinion, within a "History" quota at all. For distribution purposes I count questions about specific historians or historiography either as social science or as literature, within a "non-fiction" sub-category. (It should be understood that I also do not narrowly equate the quizbowl category of "literature" with the academic study of literature.) In general, I think many people place far too great an emphasis on categorizing questions within niches, and, specifically, on trying to align those niches with academic divisions as typically found in college and university departments. In my favorite sort of quizbowl, practically anything could come up, and almost surely will, sooner or later; I like questions that cross subject area boundaries, or mix them, rewarding cultural and academic literacy, if you will, of both great depth and breadth. Packets and tournaments need "balance" to be sure, and questions that distribute widely as to subject matter, but I dislike micromanagement here. I also am out of sympathy with comments criticizing college-level quizbowl for not tending to include enough questions relating to one's own somewhat specialized field of study. In my view, the content of quizbowl is not necessarily supposed to bear any particular relation to what people may happen to be learning in their coursework or their major. It will *happen* to relate to a greater extent if your studies fall within the core liberal arts tradition -- subjects which are at once the backbone of quizbowl and which it is the mark of any well-educated person to have learned something of -- but the more specialized your studies, the less you can and should expect that the knowledge you build up via coursework will be reflected with much frequency in the sort of general knowledge or general academic knowledge around which quizbowl as we know it has been built. Eric Hillemann Carleton coach
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