I wish politely to challenge an earlier statement that “When one gets into
the realm of historians who publish for the general public the problem is
magnified several fold.”

   Suggesting that this is the underlying “problem” of inaccurate published
history depends on how one defines “historians who publish for the general
public.”  Sure, there seem to be a legion of careless writers publishing
popular history. (I recently had to deal with the limitations of a recent
book by one of the more successful practitioners of this popular history in
a review for the September Journal of American History.)

   As an academically trained scholar attempting to present reliably
accurate history to a general audience via commercial publishers, however, I
agree with Gordon S. Wood that the “problem” may be that there aren’t enough
of us “who publish for the general public” (as well as in the
academic/professional venues of journals and monographs).

   Wood said it pretty well in a Washington Post op-ed last year - the
beginning and closing of which I paste below for  convenience. . . .



Jon Kukla
________________

www.JonKukla.com <http://www.jonkukla.com/>



Defending the Academicians

by Gordon S. Wood          Washington Post : Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The writing of academic history seems to be in crisis. Historical monographs
-- scholarly works on highly specific subjects -- pour from the university
presses (at least 1,200 or so a year) and yet have very few readers.
Sometimes, sales of academic history books number only in the hundreds; if
it weren’t for library purchases, their sales might be measured in the
dozens. Most people, it seems, are not interested in reading history, at
least not the history written by academic historians. Although some blame
this situation on the poor teaching of history in the schools, most critics
seem to think that the problem lies with the academic historians themselves.
They don’t know how to write history, at least the kind of history that
people want to read. After all, David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Jon
Meacham and other popular historians sell hundreds of thousands of books. If
they can do it, why can’t the academic historians write better, more
readable, more accessible history?

Historians who sell lots of books have always thought that it was their
ability to write well that made them popular. Samuel Eliot Morison, a
historian who was that rare bird, an academic who was a bestseller during
the middle decades of the 20th century, certainly believed that. Academic
historians, he said, “have forgotten that there is an art of writing
history.” Instead of scintillating stories that move, they write “dull,
solid, valuable monographs that nobody reads outside the profession.”
Barbara Tuchman, who was America’s most popular historian in the 1960s and
1970s, likewise believed that academic historians did not know how to write.
The reason professors of history have so few readers, she said, is that they
have had too many captive audiences -- first with the dissertation
supervisors, then with their students in lecture halls. They really do not
know how “to capture and hold the interests of an audience.” McCullough
agrees, though he is too polite to put it so bluntly. History is in trouble,
he suggests, because most academic historians have forgotten how to tell a
story. “That’s what history is,” he says, “a story.”

Alas, if it were only that simple. Academic historians have not forgotten
how to tell a story. Instead, most of them have purposefully chosen not to
tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history.
Narrative history is a particular kind of history-writing whose popularity
comes from the fact that it resembles a story. It lays out the events of the
past in chronological order, with a beginning, middle and end. Such works
usually concentrate on individual personalities and on unique public
happenings, the kinds of events that might have made headlines in the past:
a biography of George Washington, for example, or the story of the election
of 1800. Since politics tends to dominate the headlines, politics has
traditionally formed the backbone of narrative history.

Instead of writing this kind of narrative history, most academic historians,
especially at the beginning of their careers, write what might be described
as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs
usually based on their PhD dissertations. Recent examples include an account
of artisan workers in Petersburg, Va., between 1820 and 1865, a study of the
Republican Party and the African American vote between 1928 and 1952, and an
analysis of the aristocracy in the county of Champagne in France between
1100 and 1300. Such particular studies seek to solve problems in the past
that the works of previous historians have exposed; or to resolve
discrepancies between different historical accounts; or to fill in gaps that
the existing historical literature has missed or ignored. In other words,
beginning academic historians usually select their topics by surveying what
previous academic historians have said. They then find errors, openings or
niches in the historiography that they can correct, fill in or build upon.
Their studies, however narrow they may seem, are not insignificant. It is
through their specialized studies that they contribute to the collective
effort of the profession to expand our knowledge of the past.

. . . .

So advising academic historians that they have to write more stimulating
prose if they want to enlarge their readership misses the point. It is not
heavy and difficult prose that limits their readers; it is rather the
subjects they choose to write about and their conception of their readership
as fellow historians engaged in an accumulative science.

The problem at the present is that the monographs have become so numerous
and so refined and so specialized that most academic historians have tended
to throw up their hands at the possibility of synthesizing all these
studies, of bringing them together in comprehensive narratives. Thus, the
academics have generally left narrative history writing to the non-academic
historians, who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much
knowledge of the extensive scholarship that exists. If academic historians
want popular narrative history that is solidly based on the monographic
literature, then they will have to write it themselves.



Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History
Emeritus at Brown University. His most recent book is Empire of Liberty: A
History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.

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