When Will Academic Historians Stop Flogging Themselves Over This Issue?

I suspect that there are multiple factors at work that explain why the number of undergraduate history majors has dropped in recent years as well as the decline in course enrollments and funding for the discipline. Whatever the answer is (and I don’t claim to have an answer) the reason has little to do with a failure on the part of academic historians to write for and engage with the general public.

The latest version of this tired meme comes from historian James Cobb, who offers a taste of his new biography of C. Vann Woodward. It turns out that the Yale historian expressed some of the same concerns about his profession decades ago and anticipated the very position that the profession finds itself in. [I am currently reading and thoroughly enjoying Cobb’s biography.]

C. Vann Woodward (Source: American Historical Association)

According to Cobb:

Through books like “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” and his historically informed essays on current affairs, Woodward won acclaim from his colleagues in the academy and, no less importantly, from general audiences, as well. But despite his own notable success, by the end of the 1960s, he was fretting about “the future of the past,” citing slumping enrollments in history courses, a decline in history majors and a Harris survey of 100 high schools in which students named history as the “most irrelevant” subject in their curriculum. In his 1969 presidential address to the American Historical Association, Woodward shared a recent admonition from French historian Marc Bloch that civilization might “one day turn away from history, and historians would do well to reflect on this possibility.”

Several years later, in his brief reflections on the “History of American History,” Woodward seemed to foresee his fellow historians contributing to their profession’s demise by losing sight of the need to write effectively for a broader nonacademic audience to maintain public awareness of the importance of their contributions. Doing so, he thought, ran the risk of their discipline being perceived from the outside as insular and irrelevant.

I must be living in a completely different universe from the one described by Cobb and others.

Walk into any bookstore today and you will find titles from a wide range of professional historians that have or should have broad public appeal. The best book I read last year was Matthew Delmont’s, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. Delmont teaches at Dartmouth. Last week I finished reading John Wood Sweet’s book, The Sewing Girl’s Tale—a beautifully written book about a rape trial in New York City in the 1790s. Sweet teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Most of the recent Pulitzer Prize winners in history are academic historians. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sweet wins a Pulitzer this year.

My shelves are filled with such books. In fact, most of the books I now read are authored by academic historians and published by trade presses. These books are most certainly not bogged down by academic jargon and are easily accessible.

This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

Beyond the production of books academic historians have never been more engaged with the broader public. Cobb’s own op-ed takes its place among a steady stream of commentary by trained historians on practically every issue under the sun. Just spend time perusing the Post’s “Made By History” page.

Historians are now on a wide range of social media platforms and finding new ways to share their research with engaged audiences.

The image of the disinterested or disengaged academic historian, who only rights for his fellow academics, is deeply embedded in our culture. We can’t seem to shake it, apparently even among academics.

I do think that historians need to find ways to highlight for the general public what it is that they do or how historical studies are produced and their value. We are living in a time—though certainly not unprecedented—in which history has become overly politicized. I suspect that for many people, the work that historians produce is little more than an expression of their political beliefs or explicitly presentist. Unfortunately, I think there are examples of the latter for critics to embrace.

Today academic historians are one among many groups that write history for a public that is eager to learn about the past. It’s important for people to understand that the rigorous process of producing a work of scholarship, regardless of its wider appeal, is different from what say Nikole Hannah-Jones or Ken Burns is doing.

Again, perhaps I am missing something, but I don’t think there is much of anything to lament surrounding this question of public engagement. I consider myself, first and foremost, to be a student of history. I read a lot of history. In fact, considering my writing deadlines and the book projects that I hope to complete, I probably read too much.

We are experiencing something close to a golden age of very creative and entertaining history writing that fully embraces the importance of research, analysis, and interpretation. I can’t think of another time in which the offerings were so incredibly rich.

Happy reading.