ashthomas//blog: Noble Dreaming: History Writing in the 21st Century

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Thursday, May 26, 2005

Noble Dreaming: History Writing in the 21st Century

Last week David Greenberg had a very good article in Slate about the differences between the sort of books that academic historians produce, and the popular history books that sell. In "That Barnes & Noble Dream - What's wrong with the David McCulloughs of history", Greenberg argues that there is nothing that should prevent academics from selling well, and there is no reason that popular historians can't produce good scholarship:

Instead of grumbling over the public's middlebrow book buying tastes, the best thing academic historians can do is to try to offer them something better. A number of our own practices lead us away from engaging the public as we should. I've seen students entering graduate school aspiring to write like Arthur Schlesinger, only to be shunted into producing pinched, monographic studies. I've seen conferences full of brilliant minds unable to find an interesting presentation to attend that isn't literally read off the page in a soporific drone. We write too much for each other, —and, as we do, a public hungry for good history walks into Barnes & Noble and gets handed vapid mythmaking that uninformed critics ratify as 'magisterial' or 'definitive.'

I couldn't tell you how many times I have ploughed my way through text that is as dense and thorny as a thicket that is supposed to be communicating some important theory or another and wondered to myself, "Isn't there a better way of saying this?" Historians, and other academics in the humanities, should realise early in their careers that they are not only professional scholars of the past, but also professional writers: an insight that isn't effectively communicated is worthless.

Greenberg notes that there is a crossover between popular and academic writing: some serious scholarship ends up selling well, and some books written by non-professionals become useful to the academy. The tradition of this sort of cross-pollination seems to be a bit stronger in Europe, where respected historians often operate outside of the university. In my field, I thinking of writers like Joachim Fest or Götz Aly. And even in English, some books written by journalists have acquired a high degree of respectability and are cited frequently--granted, the writers that I am thinking of (William Shirer, Cornelius Ryan, David Halberstam) are generally usefully for their skills at "telling the story", rather than insightful analysis, but there is certainly a need for the story to be told. Many of my students tell me they find a succinct summary of the events, a description of the events and the main characters, essential before they can begin to understand the deeper analytical and critical material. You need to know the story before you can start to analyse the story, in my opinion.

The thrust of Greenberg's piece is that both camps of historians, the popular and the academic, need to learn from each and meet towards the middle and away the extremes of dense analysis and novelistic storytelling:

The major failing of much popular history is that it betrays no interest in making intellectual contributions to our understanding of an issue. The Barnes & Noble historian seems to treat history as a pageant of larger-than-life events and people to be marveled at, rather than a set of social, political, and cultural problems to engage. Unless you wrestle with the ways in which the problems of the past have been defined, interpreted, ignored, or mischaracterized by other historians—the historiography——your writing will seem unsophisticated. You won't know which of your ideas are novel or trite, simple or complex, suspiciously trendy or embarrassingly out of date, or what avenues of research have already been pursued. Historians have to try to build upon what's been written, while keeping in mind that the goal is broader than just revising or applying other scholars' findings.

Greenberg's suggestions are useful, and academics certainly are the ones that will benefit the most from changing. Popular historians will always be bestsellers, because the public has an appetite for digestible stories and myth. If they want their books to have relevance into the future, however, they will need to be at least aware of the historiography of their topic and engage with it, however subtly. Academics, as well, need to learn how to make their work both interesting to and understandable by the general reader. Both types of historian need to take a leaf out of each other's books.

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