My friends Henry, Kevin, and Bland have all made valuable and
interesting contributions to this discussion, which in turn suggested to
me that there are several, sometimes mutually incompatible, discussions
here.

Professional historians tend to write for one another, which encourages
narrow specialization, jargon, contingency, complexity, and a severe
avoidance of hero worship and mythology. Which is why real people don't
like us or read our stuff.

Nevertheless, the insights and corrections to old versions of history
very much need to get into the reading public's book bags or onto their
electronic gizzmoes. Professional historians ought to write more and
write more often with an intelligent lay audience in mind, which may
make a few (perhaps minor and preliminary) inroads into bringing what we
think is new and important to people who wouldn't otherwise read about
it or understand it.

And then there's the question of writing textbooks for children, a
radically different audience that if it receives good rather than bad
history early may not find some of the old rubbish as readily digestible
as a great many people do today. One of the fine insights in Carol
Sheriff's article in the new issue of Civil War History, which brought
on this Va-Hist discussion, is that professional historians ought not
try to write for elementary or secondary school students if they haven't
the skills to do so (we nearly all of us don't), but leaving the content
of texbooks to people who do not know or cannot understand what we study
and write about is very likely to produce yet another shelf full of bad
books full of bad history and therefore future audiences of readers we
will never have a chance to reach.

Those of us who have been on the edges of the recent textbook
controversy in Virginia can see where the pitfalls are and how difficult
and time-consuming it can be to avoid them; but if we don't do that, who
else will?

Now, I'm off to the seventh annual Virginia Forum at James Madison
University in Harrisonburg, where from Thursday evening through Saturday
afternoon gradaute and undergraduate students, professors, librarians,
archivists, archaeologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, journalists,
butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and ordinary human beings will
luxuriate for two and a half days talking intelligently and originally
with one another about Virginia history. Alas, though, not one single,
solitary person in the textbook business or educational community made
an attempt to get on the program, even through I tried to get some to do
so.

$0.02 from

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at
http://www.lva.virginia.gov

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