Dear Mr. Corneliussen,
   I have read your essay at TJscience.org, and it deserves publication.
Finding the right journal is always a challenge.  In the preface to a
collection of his essays, J. H. Hexter commented that one of the
chapters that I very much admire had been rejected by several journals as
not being "top-drawer Hexter" - and he was certainly a first-rate historian.
  And in regard to my statistical methods for word/page counts I acknowledge
that your posts did comprise the smaller portion of the number I cited. My
apologize if I gave offense - certainly none was intended.

  That said, as I wrote you off-list in May 2008 when VA-HIST was embroiled
in an earlier round of this recurring tempest:
". . . In regard to your interest in the use of science and statistics, . .
. if you have Fraser Nieman's monte carlo computations in mind, I think
you'll find that most historians skimmed that part of his WMQ piece  . . .
but what historians did find pertinent was the 'raw data' - birth dates and
computed conception dates he presented."
With all due respect, I still believe that is the case.

All best wishes,
-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com


On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Steven T. Corneliussen <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Mr. Kukla is being entirely unfair to both Mr. Locke and to me in lumping
> me with Mr. Locke -- for whom, by coincidence, I was about to press "send"
> on a modest proposal of my own.
>
> The adding of my word count to Mr. Locke's has no more meaning than would
> the averaging of our phone numbers. That's a potshot that I did not earn,
> Mr. Kukla.
>
> Nor have I earned either the tone or the content of the rest of what you
> say about my work unless you have read my 7000-word essay at TJscience.org
> -- and even then there's more to say. I originally prepared that essay
> according to the standards of The American Scholar, which rejected it. Then
> I tried The New Atlantis, which liked it but rewrote it in a way that harmed
> it, so I withdrew it. By now it was over a year old, and in another sense
> nearly a decade old. Then Jurretta Hecksher challenged me in this forum --
> just as you are doing now, but without your tone.  At that point I decided
> to stop fiddling with journal editors and to post it online myself. It seems
> to be doing its job there.
>
> If you read the essay, Mr. Kukla, I hope you'll criticize it.
>
> Please stand by for my own proposal to Mr. Locke.
>
> Steve Corneliussen
>
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