At the annual meeting of the American Historical Association early this year, several well-attended sessions raised an issue much on historians’ minds: Do we still have a public audience?
Economics has an audience in corporate and government circles; sociology and psychology have important roles in the social services. But historians generally have not had a similar targeted audience, except in schools. They have aspired to reach a general public, to explain the past and its relationship to the present and, perhaps, the future.
While once we were successful in doing that, for a long time we have been digging ourselves into a hole. We’ve been victims of our own success.
In the early 20th century, the Progressive historians, like Frederick Jackson Turner and, especially, Charles A. Beard, brought to a wide public the significance of economic factors and regional politics in the narrative of American history. They were concerned about rampant capitalism, unprecedented inequalities, business-dominated politics, and widespread corruption. The master work of Progressive history, The Rise of American Civilization (two volumes, 1927), by Charles and Mary Beard, offered a comprehensive story of America in compelling prose that stood as the foundation for school textbooks and the public understanding of American history for at least a quarter-century.
Many years later, the historian Herbert G. Gutman longed to expand the narrative of American history to include American laborers, black and white, native and immigrant. But the rich scholarship in social history that he had helped inspire, was, he feared, fragmenting American history: In his introduction to Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (1976), he lamented that “overspecialization” had fractured both individual experience and a national historical narrative. With some hyperbole, he noted that a biography of an “Irish born Catholic female Fall River Massachusetts textile worker and union organizer involved in the disorderly 1875 strike” would require “nine different specialized substudies.” Writing in The Nation in 1981, he worried that for a generation, American history “has been without coherent focus and has lacked compelling central themes.”
The idea that history has a public role was central to the discipline’s institutionalization and professionalization. The history association established curricular guidelines for history courses in high schools that lasted for most of the 20th century. It organized the American Nation series, 26 volumes designed to provide general readers with the findings of scholars.
In aspiring to explain the past to the general public, academic historians have become victims of their own success.
Of course, the public sphere was narrower in the early 20th century, constituted by the educated elite to which historians belonged. It would expand vastly in the 20th century with the emergence of mass communication and mass culture, which from the 1940s to the 1960s gave a megaphone to academic historians who had access to it, mostly those in the megalopolis that stretched from Boston to Washington, with New York City at its core. The concentration and interconnections of the television networks, magazines, newspapers, and high-quality-paperback publishing made New York more like Paris than at any other time.
As college enrollments soared and gradually became more diverse, a new and large body of potential readers emerged. Many, in college on the GI Bill, brought life experience and were prepared to engage with the new paperbacks, which included Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson (1945) and Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948), Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted (1951) and C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Whatever their particular interpretations and critiques, such works shared the belief of the Progressive historians that history mattered beyond academe.
But by the late 1960s, historical writing and the nation were changing. The proliferation of studies of the working classes and of gender, ethnic, and racial groups seemed to undercut a single American narrative. When there were calls in the 1980s for developing a framework to bring those histories into a larger story, strong opposition ensued. Many scholars feared that such a “master narrative” would obscure the groups and issues made visible by the social history that had come to dominate the field. Historians offered many parts but no whole — and, seemingly, no satisfying way to construct one.
As historians eschewed biography, narrative style, and large topics, our writing also became analytic: an explanation of the nature of the sources, methodology (often quantitative), and particular findings. We began to imagine not a general reader but fellow specialists at our elbow. We wrote defensively, not fluidly. Valuable as such studies are, they rarely reach a large public. Some years ago, I gave a copy of one of my books to a highly educated friend. She found the topic interesting but later told me she had set the book aside. It was work, and she had to sit at a table to read it. It is work for us, too, but that’s our chosen career. The broader public tends to read in a comfortable easy chair or in bed, not at a desk.
What’s more, we now have competitors who provide what those readers want: journalists, who are embracing the large topics and narrative history that we have turned away from. They have a general, well-educated reader in mind. In a series of important books and in articles in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Nicholas Lemann has written histories that put key issues, often associated with race, before the public. Robert A. Caro’s work on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson and Taylor Branch’s on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement are deeply rooted in primary sources and existing scholarship, but they do not have a running conversation with “the literature of the field.”
In fact, historians’ relationship with journalists is more fraught than a bit of writerly competition. They control access to the media. Increasingly, book-review editors have turned to fellow journalists for historical articles and reviews. That shift was highlighted during the recently ended, nine-year-long editorship of Sam Tanenhaus at The New York Times Book Review. During those years, it was rare to see an academic historian reviewing a serious work of history. Journalists did the job. But it was not only there. A simple count of contributors in the far more culturally significant New York Review shows a substantial shift. From 1988 to 2008, the number of essays by historians dropped slightly, while the number by journalists tripled. I can presume only that the editors believed that the latter were not only qualified but best able to communicate with highly educated readers.
They may be right — sometimes. The training and the practice of academic historians have changed since World War II in ways that makes them less likely to be crossover writers. The number of historians to staff the vast expansion of American higher education rose (from the 1950s to the 1970s, the annual production of Ph.D.’s in history tripled), while average teaching loads were reduced by half. Research production rose significantly.
Our success has created appealing subidentities. The annual meeting of the American Historical Association is largely an anonymous experience compared with the gatherings of many of the discipline’s subfields. As opposed to thousands, the few hundred attracted by the smaller associations are numerous enough for diversity and debate, but few enough for everyone to know a good number of the participants and their scholarship — and an ideal audience for ever more sophisticated scholarship. Shop talk is much more focused and intense — and, of course, narrower.
So, too, is our teaching. In large history departments, usually with American historians the majority of the faculty, a necessary division of labor has encouraged the focus of teaching to become more specialized, with more limited time periods, to the point that many historians no longer feel able to teach the whole of American history. For some years, we have differentiated between the “first half” or the “second half” of the introductory U.S. survey course; now there are some attempts to make three sections: colonial, 19th century, and 20th. More and more courses also tend to focus on a sequence of topics, often framed by social history and seriously diminishing the role of the state and economy.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, “signature” survey lecture courses showcased synthetic thinking, often delivered with rhetorical power. Enjoyable and informative as those lectures were, however, students learned little about the historical scholarship behind them. In retrospect, memorization seems to have been more important than what we today would call critical analysis.
The dissolution of those courses paved the way for new pedagogical goals and more analysis of historical issues. The move to seminars, colloquia, and workshops that emphasize methods and critical inquiry is a great step forward in giving students an understanding of the discipline of history. Yet, like the monograph, the analytical work of the seminar does not travel far into the public culture.
The late Edmund Morgan, a distinguished teacher and scholar trained in the 1940s, once remarked that creating synthetic lectures for undergraduates was an excellent foundation for reaching a larger public. We saw that in his contributions to The New York Review and other publications. It is evident today in the staying power of The Puritan Dilemma (1958), which is still assigned and still informs undergraduates. But note that his pathbreaking book American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) was written in a different key; it would be tough for a freshman. Historians can and should be ambidextrous.
So let us return to Herbert Gutman’s complaint about the overspecialization of social history. We can and should renovate the kind of narrative built by the Beards, particularly since the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) made clear that the concerns of the Progressive Era are pertinent today. Of course, we also need to incorporate the findings of social history into that narrative, to give recognition to those who were missing in The Rise of American Civilization.
What we should not do is assume that because our public culture has fractured and we seem to be losing our longstanding alliance with journalism, we no longer have obligations to the public that date from the founding of our profession. The scholarship of the past couple of generations is too valuable to keep to ourselves. Indeed, by providing a synthetic narrative of who we Americans are as a people and how we got to be so, we can even contribute to the construction of a more democratic and inclusive public culture.
