I too lament the respect economic historians get, or more importantly, the study of economic history gets re. to econometrics.

Another very notable exception is Douglass North (winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with another economic historian, Robert Fogel). Robert Heilbroner and John Galbraith are two other economic historians most folk have at least heard of, before the cult of mathematical economics became the flavor of the era.

"Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis"

-- Kenneth Boulding

Of course, the death of economic history can be tied
to a larger trend in the University toward research
that can secure funding from private entities. See
for example this article by Princeton's Anthony
Grafton:
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/437005501/britain-the-
disgrace-of-the-universities

Hopefully INET is a different type of beast that
sees the value in original research that is not
immediately tied to bringing new products to market.

Not many folks covering this. Especially our MSM (hello Rachel, Keith) enough stories about Sarah Palin
Has Aafia Siddiqui’s Daughter Surfaced?
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/
Last weekend a girl approximately 12 years old, who spoke only English and Persian and claimed her name was “Fatima,” was dropped off in front of the home of Siddiqui’s sister. Some stories indicate an American named “John” may have been with her. Dawn reported a senior policeman described that the girl was:

… wearing a collar “bearing the address of the house in case she wandered off”.

We miss John Kenneth Galbraith, too. He would talk about the structure of the economy and problems inherent in it, not just the horse race that most economists love to follow.

The country urgently needs to address the widespread rise of shared monopolies, not just banks that are too big to fail, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite.

"We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." - Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

May be talking in an abandoned closet. But...

Mark Thoma: "How Mathematics Might Have Caused the Financial Crisis"

"As we looked around to find courses to cut to make room for the new technical tools that were coming into economics, our mistake was thinking that US economic history and the history of economic thought were the least valuable courses that we offered. In fact, they may be among the most important. There’s no way to know if more attention to and knowledge of the past would have made a difference, but I think it could have, and we need to rethink the elimination of these courses from graduate studies."

http://moneywatch.bnet.com/economic-news/blog/maximum-utility/how-mathematics-might-have-caused-the-financial-crisis/577/

While I regularly try to read Mark Thoma's column at http://economistsview.typepad.com/, I would not have caught the above without the heads-up of Daniel Mandel and Steve Clemons,the latter who pushes the former's daily selection of economics postings.

So.... thanks to both