Condemning Historians for not Appealing to a Popular Audience
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996
From: Terence Finnegan
Subject: Academic/Popular History Audience
The following appeared on the H-Teach list. I thought those on H-South might find it of interest.
I would raise the question, how does this apply to Southern history? There is a high level of general popular interest in various (ie not just exclusively Civil War) Southern history topics. In recent years how many books on Southern History pop up on the History Book Club, or best sellers lists? and how many of those are by academics? I would hold that we do have an obligation to try to reach the general popular audience interested in history, and we should write so that our work is accessible. --Cheryl Thurber
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Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 07:45:54 -0500
From: Bob Wheeler CSU
Subject: Condemning academic historians for not appealing to a broader audience
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 96 23:16:36 EST
From: David Fahey
The director's column in the March brochure of the History Book Club quotes an article in the Virginia Quarterly Review by William Craig Rice, "Who Killed History? An Academic Autopsy," which condemns academic historians for not writing for a broad audience. He cites the History Book Club where in his sample "less than 20 percent of books offered . . . were grown on the state-subsidized farms of the American academy." Rice praises "nonprofessionals" for writing the books that the academic historians can't or won't write. I mention this for two reasons: (1) in the minds of many people (and in the director's column which is my secondhand source for the remarks of Rice) the supposed indifference of academic historians to the general reading public is seen as related to incompetent teaching and (2) many more people read the History Book Club's monthly advertising booklets than peruse the Virginia QR.
David Fahey (Miami Univ., Ohio) dfahey@miamiu.muohio.edu
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Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 12:57:00 -0800 (PST)
From: "E. Wayne Carp"
I find it puzzling that the History Book Club Director agrees with WIlliam Craig Rice that academics don't write for the public. A simple glance at the offerings of the History Book Club's brochure from the section entitled "Growth of the Americas" reveals that the overwhelming majority are academics: Stephen Innes, Eric Foner, Kermit L. Hall, John Demos, Lawrence Friedman, George M. Fredrickson, David Herbert Donald, David Hackett Fischer, I. Bernard Cohen, Colin G. Collway, Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary. In addition, the two main selections for this month are from Stephen Ambrose (U. New Orleans) and Alan Taylor (UC Davis), both academics, as are the HBC's chief U.S. History reviewers, Sean Wilentz (Princeton) and Helena Wall (Pomona College). Although the HBC selects many books written by non-academic historians, it surely is a vast exaggeration to say that academics are indifferent to the reading public.
E. Wayne Carp
Dept. of History
Pacific Lutheran University
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Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 18:28:03 -0500
From: Bob Wheeler CSU
Subject: Re: Condemning for not appealing to a broader audience
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 16:49:18 -0500 (EST)
From: Eric Rise
I, too, saw the Rice excerpt in the History Book Club mailing, and I think the points that he and David Fahey raise about appealing to general audiences and its relation to assumptions about effective teaching merit further discussion. But a point of methodology. If I recall correctly, Rice based his "20 percent" finding by calculating how many HBC selections were authored by members of the AHA. Is this an accurate way of measuring the contributions of academic historians to general readerships? Is the AHA representative of academic historians, or at least those who publish? Furthermore, is the general public really as biased toward military (particularly Civil War) history as HBC seems to be?
Eric Rise
University of Delaware
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Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 21:38:16 -0500
From: Rolopez@aol.com
From my vantage point many issues involved in the Civil War are still being fought over - witness the so called republican revolution. The war is still being waged by lots of people - too many. Just as importantly many don't realize it (historically challenged) and others are not about to own up (fill in your own observations).
Ron
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996
From: Joan Browning
Subject: Re: Academic/Popular History Audience
Responding to Cheryl Thurber's post about the obligation to try to rech reach the general popular audience interested in history, may I offer a non-academic perspective?
Here in the Greenbrier Valley of West Virginia, I write a weekly newsppaer column, History Lesson. It is a mini-term paper each week, 20 column inches long. I try to bring academic research based on solid scholarship to a lay audience with a passion for especially local history. The subscribers to this list have helped, i.e., with European origins of "American" log construction techniques, etc.
I'm not a historian, but rather a popularizer of history. I try to counter the local historical establishment's embellishments of the gentry's domestic livestyle approach to local history. Somewhere between heritage and history, while still accessible.
My column is wildly popular locally; my publisher, and my audience, thinks it should be widely syndicated. It is clipped and mailed -- so far, to every continent.
I am not a subscriber to History Book Club. War, rumors of war, and especially the Civil War, sickens me. I prefer "academic" histories because they offer more detail and because I can rely on the undergirding research better than, in general, with non-academic histories. However, in terms of the South, books like Connie Curry's SILVER RIGHTS, written by a participant/non-academic with a year's residence at UVA, straddles the academic divide. I wish Bud Bartley's THE NEW SOUTH were slightly more accessible to a popular audience.
For what it's worth ....
Joan Browning
Ronceverte WV
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 1996
From: John Bell
Subject: Comment: Popular history writing
Following Joan Browning's testimony as a "popularizer of history," I offer another voice from outside academia. I edit books for the trade, including titles for the bookstore category of History. (Not exactly the same thing as either the discipline of history or the History Department.)
<<--is the general public really as biased toward military (particularly Civil War) history as HBC seems to be?-->>
Trade publishing is driven by its markets. If the History Book Club saw pleasantly surprising sales of a book on, say, issues of cross-racial theatricality in Alabama Mardi Gras celebrations, you can bet they'd offer more books like that the next time around. The Civil War and other topics of military history are such a big part of HBC's list because those books sell.
Why do Civil War histories sell? They offer the American readers who buy their own books three important qualities:
* FAMILIARITY. Readers know the basics. They see the events' relevance. They even know the team colors. That makes it easier to get right into the...
* NARRATIVE. As in all military history, protagonists and antagonists with clear goals clash, and one side wins. Life rarely follows basic narrative structure so closely. Furthermore, life is rarely so full of...
* EMOTION. In military history the people are fighting for their lives. It feels more exciting and revealing to watch people at crisis moments.
<<--how many of those are by academics?-->>
I bet a statistical analysis will show that while most HBC selections are by academic historians, a much larger fraction of academic histories aren't selected by HBC. It doesn't have to be this way. Academic historians actually have an advantage in reaching a wide audience. Readers (unless they're too fascinated by a topic to care) look for an author's bona fides, which an academic post and honors provide. Historians outside academia have to rely on previous books to establish their credentials (which makes one wonder how they ever get published in the first place).
I suspect what keeps more academic historians' books from popular audiences is that academics learn early to write for the readers who establish them professionally: peers and students. Writing for a wider audience means more than hiding the footnotes. It's better to consider a trade book as a series of public lectures which no one is assigned to attend--how do you get an audience?
John Bell
Editor, General Books Division
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
johnb@aw.com
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996
From: Ginny Jelatis
Subject: Re: Comment: Popular history writing
I am a grad student in Early-American History and have been working in a bookstore while I (try to) write my dissertation. I agree that Civil War literature is the hottest topic in the history section, and this is probably due to the three factors that Mr Bell enumerates. I would like to add a fourth reason. Most of the Civil war literature deals with military aspects -- campaigns, tactics, heros, etc. There is very little social or even political content in these books. I think that these works reinforce mainstream ideas about American history. While academics argues about cross-cultural exchange and "missing voices," the man/woman on the street does not relate to these defining themes. In other words, academics write a kind of history that does not filter down from the ivory tower. While historians have been busy rejecting both progressive and consensus history, and focusing on the "bottom up" approach, rather than "top down" history, most people outside the profession still see American history as "how the west was won." I don't mean to sell the public short, but I am constantly amazed at the reactions I get when I try to talk about current themes in American history OUTSIDE of the classroom. Try to tell people that we learned anything from African or Native Americans. Even educated, sensitive, new-age people have a hard time relating to the (not so) new social history.
I believe Civil War history is popular because this area still accepts a more "traditional" approach. Certainly there are new works that focus on the every day life of a soldier, or on the women who were left behind, but these do not end up in the main stream book store.
I guess I have nothing against the continuation of this paradigm, but I still wonder what good it does to argue among ourselves about interpretations and approaches when only a select group are participating in the debate.
Ginny Jelatis
Dept of History
U of MN
jelat001@maroon.tc.umn.edu
p.s.
The second most popular subject in the history section is military history in general.
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996
From: Bruce Turner
Subject: Re: Comment: Popular history writing
Another comment about HBC and academic historians: I have not seen a HBC listing of books offered for about ten years. However, as I recall it only contained books published by commercial presses. If that is correct then, obviously, anything published by a university press would not be listed.
Bruce Turner
USL
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996
From: Michael Chesson
Subject: Re: Comment: Popular history writing
I've been an HBC member, off and on, over many years, and can state that university press books are frequently offered, not only on the Civil War, but a range of other topics. The kind of subjects that academics tend to write about increasingly cannot find a commercial press that will publish them. Some recent examples of selections from the History Book Club in my field: Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (Cambridge UP, 1995), which is closer to the "new Civil War history" (social, cultural, intellectual) than it is to standard "drum and bugles" military history, long scorned by most academic historians, particularly intellectual historians, who have the luxury of using printed primary sources. Also Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (Oxford UP, 1993), a fine study; and Steven E. Woodworth, Davis & Lee at War (Univ. Press of Kansas, 1995), which was reviewed in the NY Review of Books by none other than James McPherson of Princeton, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, whose titles have also been selected by HBC.
A final thought: the History Book Club is not our enemy, but they are a subsidiary of the giant Book-of-the-Month Club operation since being bought out some years ago, when they were based in Connecticut. They are not in business to lose money. In these days, when the distinction between a so-called vanity press, and a reputable university press, is less and less clear, and when large subvention grants to get a major manuscript published are the order of the day, we really can't complain about the HBC. Their vetting process is very rigorous and thorough. Their panel of readers ultimately select titles that they think will sell, and make money.
Yesterday one of my brightest students, in a survey section, showed me a monograph that she was reading, published by a local university press. It was on housing policy in the late 19th century, social work, related areas. She said it was very poorly written, and poorly organized, so that she really had to work to track the author's argument and figure out what he was trying to say. Her question: whose fault was it? The author's or the editor's? So we had quite a discussion about that problem, but I pointed out that it was the author's name on the dust jacket, not the editor's; and that the author in grad school had been trained to write for other academics, specifically a small group of fellow specialists, and that those outside his field, let alone undergraduates or mere lay persons (the kind who like to read about battles and leaders, presidents, a good story, a good narrative) could not be expected to understand it. Our books aren't meant for the mass audience, whom we will not lower ourselves to address. We have a higher calling. And so we are increasingly marginalized. Even in the field of Civil War history, more and more non-academics are writing wonderful books about Andersonville prison camp, the battle of Chancellorsville, major biographies of figures like Gen. George McClellan. They're not in the academy, most don't hold the Ph.D., but they perform painstaking research, think about it, and then put it into English that their grandmothers could read and enjoy.
Michael Chesson, U/Mass-Boston
omohundro@aol.com
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The commercial success of Studs Terkel work (as well as my own classroom experience) suggests to me that there exists a huge potential market for history from the bottom up. The problem, I think, is that with few exception we have not yet figured out how to take the insights of social history and present them in a way that works as literature. Perhaps that is where we need to direct some energy.
Joel Sipress
University of Wisconsin-Superior
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996
From: David Carlton
Subject: Re: Popular history writing--3 replies
Michael Chesson writes:
<<--Yesterday one of my brightest students, in a survey section, showed me a monograph that she was reading, published by a local university press. It was on housing policy in the late 19th century, social work, related areas. She said it was very poorly written, and poorly organized, so that she really had to work to track the author's argument and figure out what he was trying to say. Her question: whose fault was it? The author's or the editor's? So we had quite a discussion about that problem, but I pointed out that it was the author's name on the dust jacket, not the editor's; and that the author in grad school had been trained to write for other academics, specifically a small group of fellow specialists, and that those outside his field, let alone undergraduates or mere lay persons (the kind who like to read about battles and leaders, presidents, a good story, a good narrative) >could not be expected to understand it. Our books aren't meant for the mass audience, whom we will not lower ourselves to address. We have a higher calling. And so we are increasingly marginalized.-->>
I'm not sure how these two problems fit together. Do we really reward poor writing and poor organization in academe? When I was in grad school the guidelines were explicit; a poorly written dissertation was a poor dissertation. Certainly my advisor, C. Vann Woodward, didn't tolerate a mediocre writing job. As for the "over-specialization" argument, what's more specialized than the 1,733rd treatment of the second day at Gettysburg?
Our problem is, I think, not that we reward poor writing so much as that we tolerate poor writing. Prior to tenure the stakes are so high for an author that those of us who help make the decisions are fearful of introducing anything as "subjective" as stylistic judgment into consideration; after tenure there are no penalties whatever.
But even good writing isn't necessarily popular writing. I suspect that what the lay audience craves is narrative authority; the sense that they're getting "what really happened." Thus even the most sophisticated works of popular history are those that keep messy epistomological issues well hidden. Like the summations of good lawyers, they couch their appeals to their audiences' presumptions about how things work rather than raise knotty questions about them. The problem with the writings of "academics writing for other academics" is less that they're poorly written than that they tend to be concerned with the stage machinery of history. That, I would suggest, isn't necessarily a problem; somebody has to do those things, if for no other reason than to give writers for a lay audience new things to tell them (Do we complain because medical researchers don't write in plain English?). We certainly need more historians with talent for presenting what we do to the public, first because we need to be accountable to those who ultimately pay our bills, and second because we all think that knowledge of the past makes a difference in people's lives. But we also need people who do grubby work like dissecting myths and deconstructing narratives, who look at the glossy narratives with jaundiced eye. Such people will never be "popular," but they can keep the popular historians honest.
David L. Carlton
Associate Professor of History
Vanderbilt University
P.O. Box 1523, Sta. B
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
(615) 322-3326
carltodl@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu
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I too believe that academic historians can and should speak to the broadest possible audience. But I wonder if the lack of rigor which we lament in many popular history books really speaks to a crisis -- either in the legitimacy of our self-appointed role as interpreters of the nation's history, or in the ways we communicate those interpretations.
Americans have always "done history," whether there have been professional historians or not. Our claims that non-professionals do not do it "right," which are implicit in these complaints, often seem pompous and elitist to me. We should not expect the kind of popular deference we seem to, and we should not expect _some kinds_ of serious historical scholarship to appeal to a broad audience.
Civil War battles and military figures are popular subjects owing to the wide, interesting, and complex range of reasons suggested in this thread. It is generally true that the history that sells simply does not _seem_ to require an inordinate investment in time and energy. For a complex of reasons (and not that it is poor or meaningless scholarship), popular history is not _perceived_ as being exceptionally "hard to read," though it may still be sophisticated and complex.
This is to be expected. For pleasure, I would prefer to read _The Killer Angels_ before Foner's _Reconstruction_, though of course the latter is vastly superior by every scholarly measure. This happens throughout the culture. A film like "Persuasion" never had a chance of making as much money as "Broken Arrow." This may be a comment on the lamentable state of our culture, yet it need not compel us to re-evaluate our fundamental mission, which will always force us to straddle the vague territory between the "scholarly" and the "popular."
This does not mean that serious scholarship cannot or should not be done on CW battles and military figures (as the "new" military history amply has demonstrated), merely that it seems silly to try to train the tastes of an audience whose tastes are already manifest. Why do we not simply concede that we may never dominate the popular market for history, but acknowledge that we always will play an important role, both in contributing to it directly and in lending it credibility?
Patrick Rael
Bowdoin College
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The point suggested above, [in the Chesson post] I think, oversimplifies the question of "academics" writing in a means more comprehensible to a "popular" audience. There is no reason why a non-academic could not understand a monograph written in a particular field, provided that reader is interested in the subject and chooses to learn about it. People, after all, are not born with a knowledge of what happened at Gettysburg or when Antietam was.
Rather, they are taught about it or elect to learn about it on their own. To suggest that academics write in a style and about subjects for an audience that is somehow "above" most of the population is also to imply a certain intellectual conceit about our discipline. Granted, there are works that are highly jargonistic and/or deal in concepts perhaps unfamiliar to a reader entirely uninformed. But let's be honest -- history is not quantum mechanics.
Josh Rothman
University of Virginia
jdr9j@virginia.edu
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996
From: Michael Chesson
Subject: Re: Popular history writing
Josh Rothman writes, quite correctly, that we should be honest--"history is not quantum mechanics." Why then are so many dissertations, and so many monographs published by (mostly) university presses, written in unintelligible jargon? Why is "analysis" (and that word can be read, and deconstructed, in a number of ways) far more respected and valued in academe than narrative?
Michael Chesson, U/Mass-Boston
omohundro@aol.com
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Dear colleagues,
I found all three replies quite persuasive about how history is written by academics. Yet another part of the scenario is how books are marketed. Some historians write clear engaging narratives, yet they do not have trade publishers or mass audiences. And in this world where one's space in stores such as Barnes & Noble is dictated by the publisher's willingness to ante up, these historians are not likely to gain wide audiences--being picked up by History Book Club is probably the most to which they can aspire.
Sincerely,
Jane Turner Censer, George Mason University
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996
From: David Carlton
Subject: Re: Popular history writing
<<--Josh Rothman writes, quite correctly, that we should be honest--"history is not quantum mechanics." Why then are so many dissertations, and so many monographs published by (mostly) university presses, written in unintelligible jargon? Why is "analysis" (and that word can be read, and deconstructed, in a number of ways) far more respected and valued in academe than narrative?-->>
A quick response:
First, do the questions reflect reality? Are in fact "so many" works of history currently being published written in "unintelligible jargon"? Given that cliometric and other forms of quantitative history have been marginalized, and the sorts of "theory" that infest the humanities have been marginalized, and the sorts of "theory" that infest the humanities have thus far chiefly slipped in through to our field through the back door, I'd say not. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that the bulk of bad historical writing is, as it has always been, bad *narrative* historical writing, of the "line up the note cards and let 'em speak for themselves" school.
Secondly, I hardly see narrative downgraded that much; indeed, postmodernism has led to new appreciation of narrative among many historians. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to be suspicious of narrative. For one thing, it's a form that only imperfectly captures the nature of causation. Anyone who's dealt with, say, economic history knows that much of it involves circular causation, the sort of chicken-and-egg issues that louse up the nice neat progression of note cards. Moreover, it's a form that readily lends itself to the purposes of the intellectual confidence man. We all (certainly we of Michael's and my generation) know the power of the classic Reconstruction narrative, a most tyrannical construction. But what brought it down? In large part the burrowings of grubby "analysts" who put its components under the microscope. Were carpetbaggers really the people the Dunningites, Claude Bowers, etc. said they were? Did their actual use of evidence validate their claims to "objectivity"? Of course that narrative needed more than dissection; it needed replacement. Lacking a firm replacement (Foner's work notwithstanding), it wouldn't surprise me to hear it leap full-blown out of a Pat Buchanan speech (perhaps coupled with an assault on us sandals-and-beads academic "elitists" for daring to question it). But such grubby "analytical" work, however denigrated by the "populists" among us, is essential.
Finally, no, history ain't quantum mechanics; it's its own way of knowing. But if the problems my science and engineering students have with it is any indication, it's no piece of cake either. Understanding the past is messy business; distilling it into a plot is an imaginative triumph. But for just that reason we need "analysts" to keep the imaginers from taking us for a ride.
David L. Carlton
Associate Professor of History
Vanderbilt University
P.O. Box 1523, Sta. B
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
(615) 322-3326
carltodl@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996
From: Debra Reid
Subject: Re: academic prose
List members who are interested in the discussion of the density of some academic prose will enjoy a selection by Patricia Limerick. See "Dancing With Professors: The Trouble With Academic Prose," The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 31, 1993, 3; 23-4.
Then we can all chat about why some buzzards get their feet wired to the branch and others do not.
Debra Reid
Lecturer, Dept. of Museum Studies
Curator, Strecker Museum
Baylor University
P. O. Box 97154
Waco, TX 76798-7154
Debra_Reid@Baylor.edu
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