English Versus Every Other Subject

While reading Chapter 4 of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity (which basically said the same thing over and over again in the thirty pages), I noticed that the text kept bringing up the idea that although History and English had separated from each other as disciplines, historians drew “on ‘soft’ sources such as literary tests, autobiographies…as well as ‘hard’ sources such as official government documents, state papers and statistical data” (Moran, 111).  Why does this matter, you might ask? Well, this proves, to me at least, that no matter how rigidly separated any of the disciplines are, they still draw on aspects of each other to essentially “back-up” the claims being made.  So if English texts are so important to make connections to other disciplines, why does it still get the bad reputation?  I guess I will never know, but the question will continue to puzzle me throughout the semester.