Historiography is becoming stuck

September 20, 2024 12:45 AM

It is now difficult to imagine the mass of general readers—assuming they exist—being reached even by a historian of genius. The exigencies of modern academic publishing, declining levels of general culture among historians themselves, and, in some cases, what occasionally looks less like sloppiness or indifference and more like a positive hostility toward good writing among peer reviewers, above all the atrophying of readers’ own attention spans—for all these reasons, it seems to me unlikely that we will ever see a classic on the order of Runciman capture the public imagination. from The Rise of Post-Literate History by Matthew Walther [Compact]
posted by chavenet (26 comments total)

grr. here is the link: The Rise of Post-Literate History
posted by chavenet at 12:46 AM on September 20 [2 favorites]

The insights of most professional historians, however influential within their narrow spheres, remain unknown to the public, buried in the pages of $130 monographs or locked behind the paywalls of scholarly journals.

Barely a nod to this, before going back to faulting the literacy of the general public for the supposed decline.

“Style is like a magic wand”, he quotes, and … it’s hard to know how to what to say. If your field is in decline because it’s preeminent scholarly works are inaccessible in their writing, inaccessible in their delivery and inaccessible in their cost, this is not a problem with the literacy of their audience. Not even a little bit. This is a choice.
posted by mhoye at 1:46 AM on September 20 [23 favorites]

Barely a nod to this

maybe they're unfamiliar with public history [wiki]
posted by HearHere at 2:18 AM on September 20 [5 favorites]

I had some false starts with Computer Science in the 90s, but I eventually completed my undergraduate degree in History about two decades ago. I went to an excellent programme at San Francisco State University, and they were universally strict about the more Riley-Smith format for our writing and research. I was trained in this model of History as a dry, analytic, and defensive practice of argumentation.

I recall our intro course having the only really exciting secondary works, but mainly as historiographic works mocking the more stylistic writings of the mid-20th century. "One could be forgiven for believing that the author had been present for these events." was one of the most memorable cutting remarks. I dutifully completed a capstone paper that dryly outlined the role of different types of transport infrastructure in the shape of San Francisco's own urban development over the entire 20th century. It was full of maps and tables and first-hand accounts as the only real colour in an otherwise dull narrative of the various failed attempts for the automobile industry to completely replace its predecessors.

But my two most engaging and motivating classes were the walking tours class led by the urban studies department (where I received my minor), and the internship I did with the National Park Service (on Alcatraz, as that was the only site that I could get to without a car). I continued volunteering with the NPS after graduation, and took their Historical Interpretation training so I could lead guided tours through the locked areas on the Alcatraz site.

So now, two decades on, I'm enrolled in an MA programme in Public History (on preview, cheers to HearHere for mentioning this first!) over on the UCL's campus on the former Olympic site. I'm still feeling out just how rebellious the field is compared to my prior training at SFSU, and was delighted to see that one of the previous cohort was an NPS Ranger. So I won't be the first student to bring Tilden-style Historical Interpretive Methods to the department, at least.

But all this is sort of background to something I've mentioned elsewhere: Mrs. Hobo has been spending a lot of her free time on Wikipedia lately, often doing history and biographical pages. Wikipedia has a strong "no original research" rule, which means that she's amassed enough secondary works on specific topics (searching for someone citable with the same take on the primary sources we do) that I've timidly suggested writing up a historiography paper to publish in an academic journal. It's the kind of work that exhausted me, back in the day, but also find myself sucked into when a topic is compelling enough for me to get a stake in it.

I think that the constraints on Wikipedia articles make some of its best work into excellent examples of Public History, even if there's a lot of dry and clumsy writing out there.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:40 AM on September 20 [28 favorites]

Also I'm a big fan of stylish typography, and it's common to have a cool drop-capital with a bold or small-caps first line in a magazine article. But uh...switching between sans-serif and serif for that just looks amateurish to me.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:35 AM on September 20 [4 favorites]

Control F + "tenure" turns up nothing - as does when you search for "funding" and "grants."

I have a PhD in history. To do so, I had to read a lot of books (for those that don't know, generally in the third year you take a test that requires you to be at least able to convincingly pretend to have read roughly 300+ books). Historians have always produce books on obscure topics, that are barely read. For what it's worth, chemists, philosophers, astrophysicists, and other academic fields also produce knowledge that the public would struggle with - and yet people don't seem to complain about it. I know we live in a world obsessed with follower counts and "likes," but the value of a piece of scholarship isn't it's popularity, and it's possible to create an impactful book that is significant not because it's widely read but because of who reads it and what it inspires them to do/create/think. This isn't a dig against public history - it can be excellent too - but there is a value of non-public history as well.

Anyway, but the core issue (though I agree, the shortening of attention spans is also a factor) is that writing history is labor intensive and unlikely to be profitable, at least in market terms. You need a lot of time - not just to write, but visit archives (potentially in multiple countries), conduct interviews, etc. Even professors who wrote "hits" would joke that the royalties paid for a really nice dinner. Historical production is possible thanks to job security (tenure), and resources (funding packages when hired, grants - within and outside the university, etc.) All of that is disappearing. Departments are shrinking at when people retired, their tenure line disappears and instead they are replaced by contingent labor. Universities are shifting internal funding away from the humanities to STEM, and national sources of funding are doing the same. Additionally, teaching and service loads are increasing. Those lucky enough to get a tenure-track job are finding that after their first book (based on the dissertation) it's incredibly difficult to write that second (not to mention a third) book.
posted by coffeecat at 5:11 AM on September 20 [22 favorites]

Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat have been crucial to my understanding of our current world situation. I read something written by them every week.
posted by Alcedinidae at 6:52 AM on September 20 [12 favorites]

I love history so much and every time I discover that something that sounds interesting is indeed a $130 monograph, my inside dies a little. My undergrad degree is in literary theory, so the text doesn't even have to be the most exciting or the simplest, but it can be so hard to just lay one's hands on the book. It's a real shame.
posted by dame at 7:12 AM on September 20 [9 favorites]

I have yet to read TFA but I wonder to what extent the writer is pining for a Past That Never Was. Public engagement with real history is not a thing I really recall seeing any time in the last 50 years, which is about how long my memory of such things is relevant.

The public reads biographies and derivative works that are at best based on the work of pro historians. The public used to read Barbara Tuchman, not Runciman. If Runciman was a bestseller 70 years ago... well, yes that's a different time and place. All of those readers died a long time ago.

To the extent that the public is not really engaged with serious history, I'm with people who blame academic publishing, academe's obsession with belt notches in the same, and the Fortune-500-ification of the universities, with its ballooning admin overhead and program for the extermination of tenured faculty, or even teachers paid a living wage. You want pro historians to write stuff that the public will read, there are a lot of obstacles to be removed in those areas before you start shitting on the public.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:17 AM on September 20 [6 favorites]

And OK I went to look at TFA. And I regret to report that I do not have enough hours remaining in my mortal span to waste even a fraction of one on a piece purporting to be about general historical illiteracy that leads off with Tucker Carlson talking to some Nazi. There are lots of problems with the interaction between academe and the real world, and lots of problems the academe can share responsibility for, but Tucker Carlson and the ignorance and credulity of his followers are not among them. Tucker Carlson and his interlocutors are a cultural and political problem, but they are not academic history's fault, no way.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:23 AM on September 20 [9 favorites]

As to the prohibitive barriers to access: we could take down the big 5 academic parasites publishers within 5 years. We all know the score: they don't pay for the work, the peer review, or most editors. Then they sell the product they got for free back to the people who made it, at basically infinite markup. This sort of made a bit of perverse sense maybe 50-100 years ago but it's just insane today.

The shame is, it's so very (conceptually) easy to break their near-monopolies and reduce scholarly publication to a small niche field. All the work is already being done by the universities, and they even have huge robust systems for disseminating the work too. All the Historians (or any field) have to do is organize and say hey you know what. Fuck the Journal of Foo History, and Blackwell or Elsevier or whomever publishes it. Let's just take the editorial leadership and quit, to start the Non-parasitic Open-access Journal of Foo History. We have the exact same expertise and process knowledge, the exact same pool of reviewers, and pretty much the same pool of work submitted. We can host it on the institutional depositories of our member institutions (which are generally underutilized), and distribute it freely. With all the money our institutions save (think things like the Big 10 academic alliance, and other academic library consortia who spend billions per year to get access to the work they did), we have plenty of money to pay a few people to help keep the process running, and to build out more hosting or do more physical printing if necessary.

Anyway, since this depends on getting grey-beard establishment to collectively agree to tear down the system that put them in power, I'd also like a nice pony. But we are *so* close to relieving academia of this giant sucking pile of worms attached to it.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:41 AM on September 20 [11 favorites]

Mrs. A. was told by a professor in graduate school not to write so clearly. "Easy to read" was his phrase. He meant well, but by then she was already halfway out the door.

What can one say? Historian, heal thyself.

Or not. Academic historians are a species apart from popularizers, and at their most valuable, as crucial as medieval scribes in keeping memory alive. Popularizes have a different job altogether, one constrained by the market place. Which is pretty much chicken and egg territory. How does a publisher know what the readers want? Do readers even know what they want?

If we're talking America - let's put it this way. I was at a large library book sale yesterday, two twenty foot long tables filled six deep with titles recent and not so recent. In the fullness of those tables, after the WW2 and Civil War and American political stuff, there were three, count them three, books on the crusades. Same as ancient Greece and Rome. (Oddly, a biography of Alexander the Great written by Norman Cantor, whom I had always associated with medievalism. Who knew?)

What is a writer of unpopular subjects to do? Get thee a platform! The author is as much the product as the work. Respected if relatively obscure classical scholar Duane Roller wrote a biography of Cleopatra for Oxford Press in 2010, quite readable, 3.79 on good reads based on 523 goodreads reviews. That same year Stacy Schiff published her biography, for Little Brown, 3.73 on goodreads based on 118,558 ratings. Not knocking Ms Schiff or her work, if I were a publisher I would have bought her book over Roller's too. The market has spoken.

Same with Manchester's World Lit Only By Fire, which got published because he was Manchester, a proven success writing fluidly about subjects of enduring popular interest (Churchill, WW2, American Politics), a man whose name could go above the title. Easy to read plus a track equals publishers interest. How much interest would the proposal have gotten in 2024 if a first time author sans PhD. had offered it?

As to Cooper- never heard of him before this latest kerfuffle. Pat Buchanan tilled that field in his Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. No idea how much it moved the needle on contemporary thought. (And again - Buchanan was a known entity.)

I think the piece writer is a bit too glass half empty. Unexpected stuff catches public attention without obvious rhyme or reason. Whatever one thinks of Cooper, there's plenty of stuff on the internet that proves an appetite for history in general. Mike Duncan did a service for ancient history. Who knows? Maybe the dearth of ancient history at that library sale had to do with people refusing to donate their home collections.

(As an aside, for a fun quick read, check out Runciman's A Traveller's Alphabet: Partial Memoirs. He was born in 1903. His childhood memories of the Suffragettes alone is worth the price of admission.)

The public reads biographies and derivative works that are at best based on the work of pro historians

Not sure I would agree that writers of biographies and derivative works are not professional historians. How narrowly do we define derivative? What else would we call the practitioners? A discussion for another time.
posted by BWA at 8:17 AM on September 20 [4 favorites]

> Not sure I would agree that writers of biographies and derivative works are not professional historians

Sorry that was infelicitous. Should have said "academic historians," though when I went to read up on TFA's hero Runciman I saw that he also was an "amateur."

But I meant "Historians whose audience is primarily other historians and whose goal is to deepen the understanding of some topic beyond prior human attainments." Maybe another thing that TFA is bemoaning is the fact that in the last couple of generations, specialties have become specialized in a way that is genuinely new.

The problem of academic disciplines making themselves knowable to non-specialists is kind of a general one. There was the pre-WWII story of the English physics prof who insisted that his students did not really understand what they were doing with their experiments, if the latter could not be explained to the barmaids at the local pub. This has not been true in physics for a long time. The way chemists understand chemical reactivity and bonding is going to be totally opaque to anybody who does not put in at least the first few years of effort toward being a chemist. I get the sense that it has become true with molecular biology over the last few decades.

The general lament that the public are hopelessly ignorant is older than any of these. I have seen US newspaper Sunday features from the 1920s, describing the lamentable state of American public knowledge of our own history. Most people have always come out of high school knowing practically nothing about anything.

It plausibly is true that sales of big in-depth nonfiction books by good experts is down, but I would put a big chunk of that on account of how depressing it is to contemplate the real world these days. A big in-depth nonfiction book might seem to be either too trite to be worth worrying about or too horrifying to slog through, with no realistic third possibilities. I know I've had to deal with that, over the last 6-8 years.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:45 AM on September 20 [4 favorites]

I think that my current position (which is about to be far more professionally informed over the next year of graduate school) is that it's probably healthier for a society to have a kind of broken yet accessible book that they argue over, debunk, and assign as indicators of political leanings, than to have all of that discourse reserved for the careful obscurantists.

So yeah, let's have Zinn and Toynbee duke it out in the public sphere. From time to time we'll bring the historians in who've spent a decade in one archive, and have them quietly explain the technical faults to an interviewer on Radio 4. It's a broken system, but if we keep our standards too high then the only ones setting the larger cultural agenda around our past will be the fascist myth-makers.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:46 AM on September 20 [5 favorites]

The purpose of academic history is to nuance the past while the purpose of popular history is to shape the future.

Tucker talking to a Nazi revisionist has nothing to do with a desire to better understand history and everything to do with normalizing his (and his financial backers') fascist vision.
posted by Reyturner at 8:54 AM on September 20 [8 favorites]

(Just a reminder that Compact Magazine is, by design, "a big tent for antiliberal politics" -- that is, an attempt by the illiberal, reactionary Right to build alliances with opponents of liberalism on the Left and elsewhere.)
posted by Gerald Bostock at 10:58 AM on September 20 [4 favorites]

> So yeah, let's have Zinn and Toynbee duke it out

Holy shit, tell me "I've never tried to read Toynbee" without saying so outright.

Those two guys are in completely different universes of discourse, and the latter's popularity was really a product of its time, I'm pretty sure.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:32 AM on September 20 [1 favorite]

Will and Ariel Durant would crush them in a cage match.
posted by clavdivs at 6:47 PM on September 20 [2 favorites]

everything to do with normalizing his (and his financial backers') fascist vision.

what Norm MacDonald said ...
posted by philip-random at 9:52 PM on September 20 [1 favorite]

Aardvark Cheesecloth, I'd argue that nobody reads Toynbee the same way nobody reads Adam Smith. There's just too much of it, and it's not a body of work that makes the simple argument everyone seems to take away from the quotables.

And most folks who sneer at Zinn haven't read him, either.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:10 AM on September 21 [2 favorites]

Sorry that was infelicitous. Should have said "academic historians," though when I went to read up on TFA's hero Runciman I saw that he also was an "amateur."

No biggie. Mind you, Runciman- some amateur. He was the first and last student of J.B.Bury, having persuaded that man to take him on on the basis of his (Runciman's) ability to read Russian (and so Bulgarian). And Gibbon was an amateur, but so much fun to read.

The lamentable state of general historical knowledge, well, in part lamentable high school education but also far too many entertaining distractions in general, and those cheaper than books. For better or worse, podcasts and youtube seem to be the media of choice.

(As a by the way, if you check the faculty listings of, say, Harvard ca 1910, what strikes you is the large number of professors who do not have PhDs. Makes you think.)
posted by BWA at 6:24 AM on September 21 [2 favorites]

Bargain book shoppers... psst...

Anna's Archive
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 12:16 PM on September 21 [2 favorites]

And most folks who sneer at Zinn haven't read him, either.


I've read him -- is it okay to still sneer at him?

My immediate reaction to the article is that historians have always panicked about how badly they're doing public access and probably always will.

My second reaction is that I can name five historians off the top of my head who sell reasonably well to the public, who write stylishly, and who still reconceive our ideas of the past: Tony Judt (RIP), Tim Snyder, Annette Gordon-Reed, Sean Wilentz (though his current political phase has some embarrassing moments), and Heather Cox-Richardson.
posted by Galvanic at 8:33 AM on September 22 [2 favorites]

from Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen:

“You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to do it.”

“That little boys and girls should be tormented,” said Henry, “is what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished historians, I must observe that they might well be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim, and that by their method and style, they are perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life."
posted by Well I never at 8:34 AM on September 22 [3 favorites]

Let's just take the editorial leadership and quit, to start the Non-parasitic Open-access Journal of Foo History.

I have to admit this is something I just don't get about other disciplines. In polisci, this is the overwhelming norm. American Political Science Review is owned and run by the American Political Science Association. AJPS is owned by the Midwest PSA, JOP is owned by the Southern PSA, PRQ by the Western PSA / UUtah.

Organized sections of APSA -- legislative studies, state politics, methodology, mass behavior -- routinely but not universally own and run their own journals.

They almost always contract with Sage / Cambridge / etc to publish, market, and do the infrastructure-level management like providing the editorial web system, but the discipline for the most part owns its own journals and they actually do occasionally switch publishers.

And these are good journals. AJPS, APSR, and JOP are the top journals in the field. Where section journals exist, they're generally the top or among the top outlets for work that's too inside-baseball for general journals; the places where the subfields really talk to themselves.

I dunno. No disrespect intended, like any academic discipline polisci draws heavily from people who are broken in particular ways, but I look around and see what a disorganized clusterfuck the discipline usually is. The idea that we're actually more on the ball about this than other disciplines might be is just chilling.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:11 AM on September 22 [4 favorites]

The historical discipline seems to be doing okay with access as well. If you're an American historian making the median national wage, you can join the American Historical Association for ~100, the Organization of American Historians for the same (Both organizations have substantial discounts for student/early career/lower income folks), and get an individual subscription to JSTOR (the main database for historians, which includes hundreds of specific journals, though not necessarily the most current articles) for $199. That's about $400 for the two premier journals in US history and access to the database that allows you to research in archives of hundreds more. That's not nothing but it's not the kind of mass extraction of legend.
posted by Galvanic at 9:34 AM on September 22 [3 favorites]