Reworking the History Distribution

[Restitutor27]

This is a post about some thoughts I've had on history distributions, specifically temporal balance.

Disclaimers
This post is focused on non-US history, since all the US history will by necessity be modern, and as such I don’t think it’s reasonable to compare its temporal spread to the history of other geographical regions.
- The temporal splits of pre-600, 600-1000, 1000-1300, 1300-1500, 1500-1700, 1700-1800, 1800-1900, and post-1900 are arbitrary to some extent, and sensible divisions which work everywhere in the world don’t really exist. However this is meant to very roughly correspond to “ancient and late antiquity”, early/high/late medieval, early modern, and then finer divisions by century for the last few periods. Sets absolutely can and should be flexible with the exact temporal boundaries.
- I’ve used only tossups and not bonuses for the data below, partly to reduce the time I spent scrolling through qbreader, partly because you get more cross-period bonuses that are harder to categorise, and partly because TUs are what primarily determines the outcomes of matches.
- The world history distribution in my suggested geographical distro below might look insane by most sets’ standards, but please do read the explanation.

Issues with Many Sets
While playing quizbowl over the past few years, I’ve noticed that history distributions in a lot of sets have felt a bit inconsistent, so I went through the questions in a number of tournaments to investigate this. I’ve gone through the non-US (so European, World and Other) History tossups from 2020-2023 ACF Regionals and roughly periodised them. Where a question crosses boundaries I’ve tried to average it out, and for 7 very heavily cross-period TUs I’ve just excluded them from the data. Although I have not seen the prescriptive temporal subdistros for these sets, the spread found here is suggestive of what I would consider a strange way of doing the subdistribution, and I think this could definitely use a reworking.



The bar chart below shows the spread for the non-US history in four broad temporal categories that roughly correspond to the divisions used for COOT (a British set that has very little US history and hence is able to do a primarily temporal distro).



As we can see, there is a lot of 20th century, especially in world history, and this isn’t unique to ACF; for example, recent sets such as 2022 Winter Closed have had 9/14 world history TUs be 20th century, and I’m aware this is often by design (from a brief discussion with one of the 2022 ACF Winter editors, I know the world history for that set was intentionally ~1/2 20thC, ~1/4 19thC and ~1/4 pre-19thC).

Obviously 20th century history is very important and I think it’s perfectly fine for it to be asked more than any other single century. However I would say there is a good argument that this is too much and should be reduced. From the table above we can see that sets are extremely light on the entire 600-1300 period, and since you only play ~10/16 packets at an ACF tournament it’s entirely possible to play 2023 ACF Regionals (which I actually thought had a better spread than lots of comparable tournaments) and not hear a single TU from that period. This is not to mention how there is almost twice as much 20thC as 1500-1900 (a period which you can’t really make the “there are fewer sources for” argument about) - the large amount of 20thC is what is taking up the space in the distro and it really could stand to be curbed a bit. This is especially the case since US and Commonwealth history is already all modern, contributing a lot of modern history to the set even before you start piling it on in the rest of the distro as well. (I was somewhat amused by Franco being TUed three years in a row in ACF Regionals from 2020-22, with a TU on the Spanish Republicans in 2019, while there are so many gaps elsewhere…). I think there’s more to be discussed here than just proposing “take a bunch of the 20thC and reassign it to medieval”, as will be explained below.

(Additionally, I’m aware packet-submission tournaments may be restricted in what content can be used based on what is submitted, but a simple way to fine-tune this more would just be to tell teams to write on certain periods to get the questions needed.)

Proposed Fixes
Firstly, for non-US sets (that don’t need to have 1/1 US History), one fix for this is to use a primarily temporal distribution with a geographical subdistro. This is what COOT (a British set with an average of roughly 1/1 British history) uses, with a formal distro of 1/1 of each of pre-1100, 1100-1600, 1600-1900 and post-1900 for the 2021 and 2023 iterations. One major advantage of a temporal distro is that it avoids having to do weird continental divisions that don’t make sense in the context of the period, such as trying to split the eastern Mediterranean between Europe, Asia, and Africa. The distribution below is the precise subdivision used for COOT 2021.



However I realise temporal distros probably don’t work for US sets (i.e. the vast majority of sets that are written these days) since it’s pretty set in stone that such sets will have 1/1 US history. I’ve come up with a distro suggestion that attempts to (non-rigidly) transfer the general sense of the temporal balance of the non-US history in sets like COOT to a 16/16 format (roughly the same size as an ACF Regionals set) that is compatible with the standard geographical distribution with 1/1 of each of US, Europe, World and “Other”. ("American" in the distro below means US)





The first thing that will be noted about this is probably the very radical change of the world history distro to be significantly less modern. However it’s worth noting that over half of it is either modern or “early modern” in character, which is not unthinkably anomalous in comparison to e.g. 2023 ACF Regionals which had 6 20thC world history TUs. I realise that currently medieval world history doesn’t come up very much at all, and that initially it might seem like it will be hard to find enough askable content to fill out such a distro, but for instance having one TU and bonus on each of Africa, Asia, and the Americas in 1300-1500 should absolutely be doable for a set of this difficulty, and for the more noncanonical periods I have nothing against having lots of common-links or questions on broad geographical regions if this is what is needed to fill out the distro.
It might be hard at first but I think it is genuinely important to try to include a good range of pre-modern world content rather than just TUing the coup of Pinochet over and over. I’m also entirely on board with easier sets being a bit more modern than this, but it’s worth remembering that so much of the rest of the distro (US and commonwealth) is modern that trimming from ~7 20thC TUs to 4 or 5 in each category is hardly that unthinkable of a change.

“Other History” is usually a random grab-bag of ancient history, commonwealth, sometimes modern and premodern Britain, historiography from any region,and miscellaneous common-links. I still find this fundamentally a very incoherent combination, largely because going “is the other history question this round going to be 1st century AD Rome or 1980s economic history of New Zealand” just feels very weird, but considering that it’s fair not to expect this content to be in every packet, I’ve kept the “other” section like this for consistency with the “standard” quizbowl distro. More specifically, a lot of sets tend to go very heavy on classical-era Greco-Roman history (sometimes overdoing the 5th century BC for Greek history while later Hellenistic doesn’t come up much) and the 1st centuries BC and AD for Roman history, not infrequently having more than one question from the same century per set, while often barely touching late antiquity or less canonical ancient periods at all. The distribution above has this blocked out to ensure the content exists in the set (even as 2/2 rather than 0/0, although there’s not a huge amount of room). If you add up the questions in this distro corresponding to the four main periods mentioned earlier, you have a 14/11/13/10 split and I think it is fine to have slightly more antiquity for the purposes of including more archaeology in quizbowl than there was before (which I have noticed a good number of sets shifting towards lately rather than overdoing the 20thC commonwealth politics).

Since quizbowl tends to go into more depth on European history than world history I think the change made here needs less defence, but the main idea is that considering how foundationally important early medieval Europe is and how much changes from ~600 to ~1000, blocking out roughly 2/2 seems not too unreasonable, if only to ensure the content definitely exists in the set in the first place rather than risking glossing over it entirely (additionally there tends to be an over-focus on certain areas of medieval Europe with a lot of random gaps left out, especially in lower difficulty sets). The same argument applies with the reduction in the amount of modern content as with world, considering how much modern there already is elsewhere in the set.

I’d very much like to discuss this further if people have any thoughts - both the reasoning behind assigning “importance” to certain historical areas/periods and the implementation of it in a quizbowl setting.

[Cheynem]

I appreciate all the work that was put in making these statistics, and I think your overall point is logical. I do agree that quizbowl history does tend to skew more "modern" (using modern in a very loose way here). One reason I see for that happening at a lot of tournaments is that I think "modern" history is more accessible for players and writers--I mostly write high school and easier college, which I realize I don't think was what you were focusing on, but beyond the very canonical ancient and pre-modern things (ancient Greece, some ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Julio-Claudian Rome), it gets a little scattershot both in terms of expecting player knowledge bases and in finding good, buzzable clues (as opposed to noting what Cassius Dio had to say about this dude). This is even more difficult in asking about early modern world history--aside from several empires or dynasties that have a number of good clues and sources, we are again kind of scattershot in terms of knowledge bases and clues (i.e., I think you really see this problem in early modern Latin American and African history, particularly when colonizers deliberately destroyed or obfuscated information on the people they conquered).

Now, all of that is more of an explanation than an excuse, and again, it makes more sense on lower levels. For higher levels (Regionals and beyond), I would agree that greater attempts at trying to do more temporal representation would be good. I also think that writers and editors may need some guidance in finding good resources on these time periods.

I would be curious to note if this temporal issue in the history distribution is different for ACF Nationals and for NAQT college tournaments (I would guess it is even *more* out of wack in NAQT sets, which I think do an admirable job representing different regions/locations in history but less so temporally).

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I think you're running into two issues:

(1) More recent history simply means more to people who are alive today because rightly or wrongly they think it's more relevant to their current day existence. They are more passionate about it, they are more likely to know it, they are more likely to read and write books about it. There are many places where you can get punched in the face for expressing the "wrong" opinion about 21st, 20th, or 19th century places: the number of places where you can get punched for a hot take about Basil the Bulgar Slayer is much smaller. Like, they exist, I've been to them, but it's a much more niche thing. One thing that struck me when I went to Oxford Open was how little actual British people I met there seemed to care about the medieval English kings who, at the time, dominated the British section of the European History distribution: to them, their history seemed to begin in the 1920's with the rise of the Labour Party, because that's the start of the things they have brawls about in pubs today.

(2) More recent history has more and better sources. It's easier to write about them and you can write more and varied things about them. Francisco Franco may be old hat but there is a wealth of information available about him, there are even still people who met him, touched him even. In the ancient world you may have only 1-2 sources for a given person or event and we can't even be sure that the people mentioned in those accounts really existed or the events in them really happened.

These issues will frustrate any attempts to write and answer more questions about more distant history.

[mdu]

Frankly, I'm not so sure about the strict equalization of as proposed, or the geographical distribution mentioned earlier. I have several thoughts about the history distribution, which I will lay out.

History, in the sense of recorded documents of the past, is not egalitarian. It is strongly biased towards those groups of people who have established a writing system, and especially towards those who are organized in a state, usaully equipped with a bureaucracy interested in recording the functioning of such state. Since strong and/or centralized states are a recent innovation for much of the world, this introduces a strong temporal bias as well. For almost all geographical areas that aren't China or Rome, I would hazard that there is far more source material to write a history tossup for in the past century than in the entirety of the 1st millenia CE. For that reason, I don't see the expanded modern history distribution as a problem. I would much rather have a detailed, academic tossup about the Biafran conflict, than another Mansa Musa tossup with a new subset of the same ten clues.

As Mike Cheyne just mentioned, another distortion of the information space is the destruction of cultural heritage by colonizing authorities. For that matter, it could be argued that we have so much information about Egypt simply because the Sahara is dry and papyrus keeps well in those conditions. Hence, we write about Egyptian history in terms of numbered dynasties and named pharaohs, while pre-contact Mesoamerican history is clued with archaeological sites.

So in terms of this problem, the quizbowl community's dilemma is between writing about well-documented subjects, or trying to correct information inequality in time and space by giving space to topics with less historical detail and discourse. Should we try to write as much African history as Chinese history in the pre-1000 era? Should we write about 8th century France with the same density as we do for 18th century France? Even within a given geographical distribution, we certainly know more about states than nomadic peoples or simple agriculturalists. We can write a tossup about the Konbaungs; not so much for the Karen people of the nearby hills, but we don't make an attempt to address this. It is perhaps a matter of equity that we write about certain areas even if the only available clues are archaeological, but I think it's reasonable to conclude that the quality of questions in terms of gameplay is not the same. On the other hand, I see a far weaker argument for that in terms of temporal representation, especially as granularly as it is suggested in the original post.

History, in terms of notability and impact on our modern world, is not equal either. We seem to not care too much about how much tax the Tang empire raised in 620. The early days of Islam, while likely documented in less specific detail than a random year in Tang China, are undoubtedly quite a bit more important to how the world looks today. I would say that the history of the Middle East in the time of Muhammad can and should be asked about more than contemporaneous China. Hence, a strictly and fine-grained temporal distribution may serve to distort the material being tossed up in terms of historical significance. In a similar vein, more recent events are easily traced to the present, which I believe is the other reason for the temporal bias of quizbowl (as Bruce just touched on). We can very easily imagine a different world where WW1 went differently, and speculate on whether WW2 would have happened, whether we would have an entirely different set of borders in Eastern Europe. We can't really imagine what the major difference of the English losing Agincourt would be. On the same topic, I would like to comment that quizbowl has a preference for great-man, big-event history compared to history about, say, specific classes of people and social trends, and I think that shifting into the past will not help here either. Universal literacy amongst the middle and working classes only began a few centuries ago in England, and is even more recent nearly everywhere else. Writing about the past more is much more likely to end up being of the great-man (gender emphasis intended) variety. The original post remarks that the 15-19th centuries have just as many sources as the 20-21st; this may be true with regard to major events, but I would hazard that the past century is rich with economic data and private writings which the four centuries before it are not.

Finally, as an aside, quizbowl is ultimately a result of the western intellectual tradition, and this is more than obvious throughout the entirety of the 20/20 distribution. Looking at our 4/4, the entirety of AmHist and EuroHist are in that vein, and usually the OtherHist contains a lot of Greco-Roman and Commonwealth, which is again western. This is not exactly the writers' fault; we are limited to academic sources in English, and to what an average (X)-dot player is expected to know. I find Chinese history incredibly underrepresented in quizbowl, but I understand that most people couldn't tell you much about the Taiping rebellion despite its incredible death toll, including myself. I don't have much to say except that canon expansion in such areas is a slow process.

Ultimately, I don't believe that the type of distribution suggested in the original post is necessarily beneficial to quizbowl. On the other hand, perhaps I am just speaking from the biases of the type of history I like to read about.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

With regards to the history distribution, I think we're mostly in a good spot but could do with a few tweaks that would hopefully nudge writers towards closing a lot of existing blind spots. I'd advocate:

• Putting British/Irish history inside Euro - not sure how consistently this is done across tournaments today.
• Combine Canadian history with US history as 1/1 - a few tournaments have done this before, such as CO 2021. Keep questions heavy on US foreign policy in the American history distribution as well.
• Use the resulting space in the "other" category to explore a lot of interregional topics, which naturally tend heavily towards the 19th and 20th centuries, though can also hit on other areas. A lot of these questions cover things that traditionally go under "World."
• Use more room of the World History distribution for non-20th century content, with confidence that plenty of 20th century non-Western history topics are getting covered.

Ultimately, this really adds up to 4/4 or 5/5 so of extra space in "Other" across a tournament, but you can do a lot with that.

I definitely agree that quizbowl has a pretty big gap in what gets covered from 500-1000 AD; at some point I'll get around to writing Age of Empires II to help address this In the meantime, though - looking outside of Europe, the early centuries of Islam, the Tang golden age, and the Classical Maya are all topics well worth exploring more at collegiate levels; Late Yamato/Nara/Heian-era Japan have also fallen out of favor recently, possibly as a reaction to the huge number of questions on them in old quizbowl. At higher levels, there's a ton of material yet to be tapped.

Finally, I'll reiterate my belief that Chinese history should get an absolute minimum of 5 questions in a typical-length tournament, and probably more. Chinese history has a wealth of source material from the Iron Age on - unlike India, for example, where the records are far spottier. Between that, the obvious fact that China is Really Big and Important, and China getting covered a decent amount in typical advanced high school world history curricula, we could stand to be asking Chinese history at a fairly high frequency.

[Cheynem]

Oh yeah, pre-modern China and Japan offer a wide amount of clues and answerlines.

I'm unsure if I like Canadian history placed in the 1/1 U.S. history. I agree that Canada shouldn't take up room in world history, but there also doesn't seem to be a great place for Canadian history to be honest. However, in most tournaments, there are such small amounts of Canadian history (and a lot of it *does* overlap well with U.S. history) that it probably doesn't matter.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

25% of history being post-1900 is really not that hard to pull off difficulty-wise. In LONE STAR, a high school regular difficulty tournament I head edited, I had the European history distribution work out to roughly 3/3 Medieval, 3/3 Early Modern, 3/3 Enlightenment, 3/3 19th century, 3/3 20th century, and 1/2 recent/cross-temporal/miscellaneous. We fulfilled this with very minor bending and had 5/5 questions with post-1900 clues in them. The world history was not split up as evenly, but by my count, we had 6/6 ancient and 5/5 20th century out of 20/19 total. This makes for 10/10 out of 36/36 non-US questions being about the 20th century, which is only 1/1 more than 25%. Again, this was a high school regular difficulty set. There were no comments from players about the temporal distribution feeling strange, nor did we have any trouble filling out the distribution or hitting difficulty. It's not like we were incredibly experienced writers either; it was the first true writing experience for much of my team.

The real questions are not whether we can hit any college difficulty with the reduced amount of 20th century history in Abigail's above distributions, but (1) how much 20th century we want there to be and (2) what to have instead.

For question 1, I cosign the above posts about 20th century history being important. In fact, I agree that it should be the most well-represented century in the distribution, as evidenced by the distributions I've used myself! But if in 2 of the past 4 regionals, over 60% of non-ancient world history tossups were post-1900 (so about 50% of all world history tossups), quiz bowl has clearly gone too far. The most recent century does not deserve as much space than all the rest of history put together. Overrepresentation of 20th century history isn't just a problem in quiz bowl; it's a problem in actual history departments as well. All history majors at Yale, regardless of specialization, must take two classes (out of ten total required) that focus on preindustrial time periods. Presumably, this requirement exists is because in its absence, the vast majority of students would not satisfy it.

For question 2, I think the above distributions give too much space to late medieval history. Ancient history/archaeology and modern history are both also very important and prominent in the popular imagination, each individually more so than medieval history. This would be the part of the distribution that would be tough to hit and that might feel excessive to play, not the lack of 20th century history, and I say this as someone who just chose and loved a class on Europe from 1000-1500. 1300-1500 having the same amount of space as 1500-1800 seems especially strange. 1100-1600 having the same amount of space as 1600-1900 also seems a bit much. I'd personally do something like 25% each of pre-600, 600-1700, 1700-1900, and 1900-today, lumping early modern and all of medieval history, rather than just late medieval history, into a single 1/1. This would still be a good deal more history from that period than is asked in most tournaments.

[theMoMA]

There is obviously a need to have some temporal balance in every subdistributional area. Some will skew very heavily to contemporary or near-contemporary times, such as science, which views itself (at least in quizbowl) as more the developed body of contemporary knowledge than the historical process and progression toward that knowledge, for better or worse. History is obviously the most historical category and will likely call for the most careful balancing of time periods.

Obviously, however, temporal considerations are just one axis that one could attempt to control. Within history, there is also a geographical axis and a type-of-history axis (political, military, social, etc.). More esoterically, one could attempt to balance history by political orientation, dedicating certain percentages of the distribution to the perspectives and events and figures favored by conservatives, liberals, the left, etc.; or by dedicating only such and such percentage to imperial powers vs. colonized peoples, etc. There are certainly dozens of axes that no one really thinks about but that would create a bizarre tournament if disregarded flagrantly. Plainly it would be possible to write an entire and otherwise well-balanced history distribution from an avowedly British imperialist or Straussian conservative perspective, but those decisions would quickly make themselves manifest, presumably to the distaste of most players who just want a reasonably normal slate of history questions.

It seems to me that only commonsense "close enough" distributing really makes sense, because ideas of truly optimal balance do not cohere and are not really achievable. It would be entirely arbitrary to make the value judgment that 20th-century history is precisely 30% of history, no more and no less. Taking these numbers as a mathematical ideal rather than a rough guidepost, when coupled with the multiplicity of possible axes of control, could lead one to such conclusions as that a 17th-century bonus on southeast Asian political economy from a noncolonial standpoint is the only question that could stand in perfect equipoise to those already inhabiting a set.

Consider the manifest folly of controlling so carefully along every conceivable axis of subject matter, only for each of your ~120 history slots to require the elevation of a single historical topic, which is so vanishingly small when compared to the entirety of human existence, to be blown up into a question and stand for 1/120 of all history. Quizbowl is based on arbitrariness from top to bottom: from saying that history roughly composes 8 out of 40 things worth asking about, to saying that European history roughly composes 3.5 out of 8 history things, to saying that 11th-century history roughly composes 0.03 out of 3.5 European history things, to saying that Canute the Great is the one 11th-century European history thing to roughly represent all of them in this 120-question span. I think you cannot replace each instance of "roughly" with "precisely" in the preceding sentence and make any sense.

I think subdistributions should serve as a rough guidepost for a broader and more commonsense purpose: to make sure things aren't way out of whack to such an extent that the tournament feels weird or skews in unfair directions. (Given how arguable it is to set the amount of 20th-century history at any percentage, I don't see how subdistributions could claim any grander purpose than being "close enough" or "fair enough," even if set and followed with avidity.) But I think creating such rigorous subdistributions ends up flipping things on their head; instead of the subdistributions serving a purpose, serving the subdistributions becomes a purpose unto itself. People end up writing questions not because they had a good idea, but because they felt compelled by illusory mathematical certainties to look only within a certain place and time.

The result is often dry questions on haphazardly chosen historical dynasties (a cadet branch, a key battle or two, a founder and a story of downfall, etc.) or other stale fodder, which are meant to stand in for an entire "world" region's multi-century history. These questions are boring. They make these regions seem as though they lived in complete isolation from the rest of the world, which is often not the case. And they mainly reward players who have played past questions written by previous writers and editors who also felt they were duty bound to produce a 14th-century Indonesian history question but did not want to look too carefully into what made that time and place significant or interesting.

I don't mean to disparage anyone's questions or any attempts at creating subdistributions for a particular tournament, to be clear, and I'm sure you can find numerous examples of the kinds of dry dynasty questions I've outlined above in just about every set every created. I'm sure it's helpful for some people to have specificity from subdistributions, so if that works for you and you're able to write interesting questions, keep up the good work.

[1.82]

There's an aphorism that I've seen before (but can't actually find in the original) that says something to the effect that a hundred miles is a long way in Britain while a hundred years is a long time in America. Quizbowl is an ancestrally American game produced and played mostly by Americans, and it reflects our national culture, where a hundred years really is a long time. If quizbowl were British in origin, the standard history distribution probably would reflect the longer-term British conception of history, and it's entirely reasonable for a British set to have such a goal, but I think that that would be odd in an American context.

Quizbowl is not really a reflection of what people learn in class, but it should try to be reflective of what people know. When I was thinking about this post, I realized (somewhat to my surprise) the history distribution is surprisingly reflective of what people who care about history do study. I was a history major as an undergraduate, and I list here the titles of the theses of the ten members of my program who chose to write one:

• Actors in the Great Depression: Child Labor Law and its Beneficiaries
• Mother of the GI Bill: Edith Nourse Rogers and her Quest for Veterans’ Rights
• LBJ’s ‘War’: A Geographic Case Study of President Johnson’s War on Poverty Programs and their Impact on Civil Disobedience and Racial Violence in the Civil Rights Era
• The Need for Change: University Student Protests during the Vietnam Era
• American Women’s Impact on the Occupation of Japan
• ‘A Beautiful Face on an Athletic Machine’: American Perspectives on Women's Sports and Eastern Europe, 1976–1989
• From Prayer Book to Globe: Changing Icons of Elizabeth I
• Democratized Dissent: Responses in Maryland to the 1765 Stamp Act
• Weapons, Tactics & Generalship during the Civil War
• Waging Cold War in Central America: U.S. Intervention, Immigration Politics, and Human Rights from Carter to Reagan

Seven out of ten have unambiguously twentieth-century subjects, which I think is a representative sample at least of what interested undergraduates in my department. College students who care about history care about twentieth-century history, which to me is a very strong argument for the twentieth century occupying half of the history distribution.

[RexSueciae]

A decade ago, when I was a high school student working on GSAC, as I recall the history subdistribution went something like this: 1/1 American, 1/1 European, 1/1 World, 1/1 Ancient/Modern. The latter being split half and half, so 0.5 of each. I don't remember the exact year limits (I think that "modern" was post-1990, so effectively within the past two decades, and I think that ancient was probably pre-476 CE). Point is, we had a specific ancient history subdistribution back then, if my memory does not betray me.

Looking over the distributions posted for sets currently being mirrored at the high school level (because their threads are so conveniently grouped in a single "seeking mirrors" subforum, rather than scattered throughout an announcements subforum) we have examples like:

• CARD (14/14 American, 16/16 European, 16/16 World, 6/6 Ancient)
• MOQBA Novice (1 U.S. History, 1 European History, 1 World History, 1 Miscellaneous History)
• KICKOFF (1/1 American, 1/1 World, 1/1 European, 0.6/0.6 Ancient, 0.4/0.4 Other)
• SHOW-ME More (1 American, 1 European, 1 World, 1 Mixed/Other)
• CREEK (1/1 American History, 1.25/1.25 European/Commonwealth History, 1.25/1.25 World History, 0.5/0.5 Other History)
• SCURVY (12/12 American History, 12/12 European History, 12/12 World History, 12/12 Miscellaneous History)
• PLANETFALL (1/1 each American, European, World, and Ancient/Other)
• Maryland Spring Classic/Hoosier Invitational (1/1 American, 2/2 European, 1/1 World)
• IQT Undergraduate Championship (1/1 American, European, World, Any)
• Harvard "Fall" (1/1 American, 1/1 World, 2/2 European/British/Ancient/Other)
• DMA (1/1 American, 1.5/1.5 European, 1.5/1.5 World (including ancient and cross-regional)

Only looking at those housewrites with publicly posted history subdistros and ignoring all the ones that just say 4/4 history. If I made any error in the above, I decline to correct them. I may have missed a few (there are unarchived threads from the last competition year mixed in) but that should be a representative sample.

Some writing teams specify a certain amount of ancient history. Some "include" it in another category, often "Other." Some ignore it altogether, and while we assume that some number of Greeks and Romans will find their way into European History, that's not necessarily guaranteed. There doesn't seem to be as much consensus on what makes for a standard history subdistro -- Science is practically always divided into 1/1 Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Other -- Literature usually has 1/1 of American, British, and European, with some disagreement over how much World Lit goes into the final 1/1 -- but as you can see, History is still in flux.

Ever since I started following Bret Devereaux's blog, I've really gotten into ancient / classical stuff. I don't really have a point behind this post, but I hope the above is helpful.

Quizbowl is not really a reflection of what people learn in class, but it should try to be reflective of what people know.

I agree with this.

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

I obviously have no stake in the broader dispute in this thread over history distributions, but I do feel a need as a history graduate student in the United States to bring up some structural factors within university history education in the United States that are relevant to points made here. First, a sample of BA thesis subjects is likely to be rather unrepresentative of the intellectual interests of "committed undergraduates." BA theses are produced on a shorter timeline and usually with less travel funding than MA or PhD theses, resulting in a reliance on sources accessible digitally or in the United States close to the writer's home institution. Digitization efforts, for obvious reasons, have proceeded faster in the United States and other wealthy countries than in other parts of the world, and faster for more recent documents than older ones. Coupled with the "100 years in America is a long time" effect that Naveed notes on American archives, this means that BA thesis writers with more diverse intellectual interests are steered by their source base, and often their advisors, toward the 20th century and toward the United States. The single classicist in my own undergraduate history thesis writer cohort, for instance, had to abandon her project for a year because it would have required a trip to Turkey that she wasn't able to carry out. Structural trends toward departmental austerity at public universities and the incentives of a nearly nonexistent job market push even graduate students into writing conditions similar to the BA thesis writers I describe above. Recent academic trends toward neglect of earlier eras of history in further-afield places should therefore not be regarded as representative of a broader student public's interests, let alone of historical importance.

[Mike Bentley]

I obviously have no stake in the broader dispute in this thread over history distributions, but I do feel a need as a history graduate student in the United States to bring up some structural factors within university history education in the United States that are relevant to points made here. First, a sample of BA thesis subjects is likely to be rather unrepresentative of the intellectual interests of "committed undergraduates." BA theses are produced on a shorter timeline and usually with less travel funding than MA or PhD theses, resulting in a reliance on sources accessible digitally or in the United States close to the writer's home institution. Digitization efforts, for obvious reasons, have proceeded faster in the United States and other wealthy countries than in other parts of the world, and faster for more recent documents than older ones. Coupled with the "100 years in America is a long time" effect that Naveed notes on American archives, this means that BA thesis writers with more diverse intellectual interests are steered by their source base, and often their advisors, toward the 20th century and toward the United States. The single classicist in my own undergraduate history thesis writer cohort, for instance, had to abandon her project for a year because it would have required a trip to Turkey that she wasn't able to carry out. Structural trends toward departmental austerity at public universities and the incentives of a nearly nonexistent job market push even graduate students into writing conditions similar to the BA thesis writers I describe above. Recent academic trends toward neglect of earlier eras of history in further-afield places should therefore not be regarded as representative of a broader student public's interests, let alone of historical importance.

While true, I'm skeptical that there's some magical other groundswell of, say, interest in medieval history when you consider other dimensions such as popular history books, university press releases, magazine articles, historical novels/films/TV shows, etc. This is not to say there's 0 of this--just like how quizbowl history as it's currently distributed offers at least some space to these areas.

As I mentioned on Discord, I do think editors should pay a little more attention to the timeframe of what's being asked about. But apart from that, I don't think quizbowl would really benefit from a substantial shift into earlier periods for many of the reasons other people have mentioned above. That's not to say that tournaments should be forbidden from doing this. I'm happy to experimentation with distributions, especially at housewrites and open tournaments.

[Shorts are comfy and easy to wear]

I absolutely agree that the 20th century is over-represented, but I won't go so far as to say that that is something that needs remedying. Yes, we have more sources for more recent history; yes, quizbowl is a game and needs to consider playability; yes, quizbowl is a small enough community that we need to consider maintaining people's interest by asking about what is commonly known; yes, people tend to care about things that are more relevant to themselves; yes, distributions are arbitrary; yes, we can only know and care about so much. These are valid points and I can't fault the community for prioritizing them. However, I have a few responses to the discussion thus far, written from the perspective of someone who almost entirely writes for open events:

• Outside of the initial post, the discourse thus far primarily rates a topic's worthiness to be asked about by it's relation to us, i.e., "How does it impact the modern day?" and "How does it affect me personally?" What about how it relates to others? Things that happened in 7th century China probably impact people in China today, and they definitely impacted people in 7th century China! Isn't that enough to make it worthy of knowing? They may even impact us now in ways we can't fathom, and millions of people were affected in ways we can. "Historical significance" is not entirely objective and we can afford to take a broader perspective.

• Even when writing about the document-rich 20th century, political and military history still dominate. We can take greater advantage of the sources we do have.

• Boring writing is boring regardless of its topic. There are limitless clues and ideas for questions; you don't have to choose the dull ones.

• Archaeology exists. Oral history exists. Genetics exists. Linguistics exists. Documents are not the only way to know what happened in the past.

• How much do people like novelty in quizbowl? I love when a question can teach me new things, particularly when it can teach about a theme rather than just present a series of facts. I'd rather bagel a bonus with an awesome theme than 30 one that adds nothing new to the canon. I get that this style of writing isn't always possible, but why not try to be all of functional, fun, and educational when we can, an easier task outside the well-trodden 20th century?

• The canon is shaped by our education and the culture, but we have a say too. If the community wants to make something canon, it becomes canon, regardless of whether anyone around us cares about it.

• I like to think of history as an exercise in empathy. It's learning about the actions and beliefs of people geographically, culturally, and temporally distant from ourselves. If this is the case, why would we not want to get as thorough an empathetic workout as we can?

[ErikC]

I think it's cool that British tournaments have a pretty different history distro (and I'd also generally a different style too) than the average American tournament. I also think it's cool when other editors decide to have different distros and focuses. I don't think you're ever going to find the perfect distro, and I also think there's so many reasons to argue for having more old history or having the same amount of modern history. I do like the points made that its easier to write a wider variety (social, economic, etc) history with modern sources compared to old stuff, but at higher difficulties of tournaments I don't think what people did in Euro AP matters that much anymore.

I say let editors do their thing, and if something is a bit extreme we point it out politely after playing - 2021 having only one tossup on a stretch of 700 years sounds extreme!I'm fairly certain most history editors would do fine covering time periods and not doing something boring. I don't really see any good reason for everyone to adopt a strict time distro if they don't want to. Every tournament being the same wouldn't be as fun, and editors putting their own spin on things is part of the fun for both parties.

I will say, being as specific with those time periods sounds like a pain as many cool topics would span more of them, especially tossups on things that aren't event or people. I'd also say that truly ancient history and classical history like Greece and Rome should be considered separately.

• Putting British/Irish history inside Euro - not sure how consistently this is done across tournaments today.
• Combine Canadian history with US history as 1/1 - a few tournaments have done this before, such as CO 2021. Keep questions heavy on US foreign policy in the American history distribution as well.

I think its still very weird that tournaments sometimes don't do the first point. The second point I fully agree with, as Canadian history is so connected to American history that many topics that aren't another tossup on Louis Riel or someother damn thing from the Prairies/1800s can be connected to the U.S.