Alastair Harper: A popular history of history
[Alastair Harper is a freelance journalist.]
Over the last couple of months there have been a spate of arguments about the state of today's history books. Popular history has, we are told, been dumbed down, rendered into porridgey pabulum for the lowest common denominator. Funnily enough, it's the popular historians that are complaining. Andrew Roberts has called for a regulatory authority (Ofhist, apparently) to cordon off the works of opinionated amateurs from genuine pieces of scholarship. He is the author of such cosily triumphalist books as Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West. For Roberts to criticise the publishing market he was integral in creating is for the kettle to denigrate the dusky hue of the pot.
Meanwhile biographical writing is in "sclerosis", according to Kathryn Hughes. This is because more people are interested in Katie Price's crippling indecision – a boob reduction or an augmentation? – than learning about Emma Hamilton's plans to bonk her way to respectability. To be fair, Hughes recognises that the same trash is served up, differently presented, for different classes of reader, and that Hamilton is only Jordan's 18th century equivalent. Hamilton, being a figure of antiquity, makes more respectable reading for the person sitting in first class on the First Great Western train to Kingham.
Every year there is another 700-page hardback telling us that the British empire was a jolly good idea after all, or a Tory shadow minister's account of a politician with whom he shares a forename, who was, he judiciously decides, a clever old sort. We hear about chubby, white-whiskered men and their lovers. Singular events where chubby white-whiskered men slaughtered dirty Johnny Foreigner with brilliant plans that should make us proud to have been born in the west.
What is striking is how few popular historians are academics. Rather, they are minor celebrities – news presenters, novelists or politicians. Queen Mary's Peter Hennessy and Columbia's Simon Schama spring to mind as exceptions, but both have written the kind of books rare in academia: weighty histories of long periods of time. Academic history is perceived to have become myopically focused on minutiae, drowning in clunky jargon, dissertations and careers being based on the most unappealingly desiccated and obscure fragments of the world's past. The academic grove no longer warmly welcomes the rest of the world – so it has became the role of the amateur, the red-blooded lover of history as it happened – to fill it. But this isn't the whole story.
A generation or two ago things were different. Eric Hobsbawm, AJP Taylor, Richard Hofstadter or Arthur Schlesinger were all academic writers who crossed over into the mainstream, working for presidents, hosting television shows; their books were read as often in train carriages as they were in lecture theatres. They wrote engagingly, but they dealt with challenging ideas. They attempted to reconcile traditional liberal concepts of society's progress with uneasy questions – was that "progress" simply a checklist of greed and hubris? They were successful historical writers who fed their willing readership strong meat.
Today's reading public likes its history less spicy, demanding jolly tales of what fun we had in the 1960s or how nice that Mr Churchill was. It's a return to the type of history written in the bestselling biographer's favourite century, the 18th – bulging, shelf-buckling tomes, depicting the great singular events that mark out history. They may win newspaper prizes, be given several series on the BBC, but an undergraduate wouldn't make it through his first term essays based on them. The assumptions they make, based on individual characters and motives, would never stand up in court, while their prose is often laborious, Whiggishly deferential to the subject and patronising to the reader. And yet these readers can't get enough of them.
There are plenty of recent academic books that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the masters of the 1950s and 60s who successfully walked the line between serious and readable. Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations rejects the idea of a single exceptional state, telling America's story as that of a people in a geographical setting reliant on the world to the east and west. Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumer's Republic looks at how we have all become consumers alongside citizens since 1945, our protests becoming more commercial than ideological. The Wages of Whiteness explores the implications of race as a socially engineered phenomenon.
The kind of historical writing that sells at present is comfortable, unchallenging nostalgia-fodder. As David Lowenthal argues in The Heritage Crusade, we have a desire to domesticate the past, to see it as a safe place for us to stroll through from a holiday beach. Lowenthal's point is all but proved by the low sales figures for his well-written and provocative book.
Why do the public want this? Perhaps we should look at the style of the big books the current popular historians have tried to emulate. It's in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that we find a contemptuous account of the popularity of "verbose and fabulous" biographers in fourth century Rome: "The libraries, which they have inherited from their fathers," says Gibbon, quoting Ammianus Marcellinus, "are secluded, like dreary sepulchres, from the light of day." Gibbon believed that the rejection of serious history and serious literature led to the cultural flatlining of Rome. Perhaps we should be worried.
Read entire article at Guardian
Over the last couple of months there have been a spate of arguments about the state of today's history books. Popular history has, we are told, been dumbed down, rendered into porridgey pabulum for the lowest common denominator. Funnily enough, it's the popular historians that are complaining. Andrew Roberts has called for a regulatory authority (Ofhist, apparently) to cordon off the works of opinionated amateurs from genuine pieces of scholarship. He is the author of such cosily triumphalist books as Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West. For Roberts to criticise the publishing market he was integral in creating is for the kettle to denigrate the dusky hue of the pot.
Meanwhile biographical writing is in "sclerosis", according to Kathryn Hughes. This is because more people are interested in Katie Price's crippling indecision – a boob reduction or an augmentation? – than learning about Emma Hamilton's plans to bonk her way to respectability. To be fair, Hughes recognises that the same trash is served up, differently presented, for different classes of reader, and that Hamilton is only Jordan's 18th century equivalent. Hamilton, being a figure of antiquity, makes more respectable reading for the person sitting in first class on the First Great Western train to Kingham.
Every year there is another 700-page hardback telling us that the British empire was a jolly good idea after all, or a Tory shadow minister's account of a politician with whom he shares a forename, who was, he judiciously decides, a clever old sort. We hear about chubby, white-whiskered men and their lovers. Singular events where chubby white-whiskered men slaughtered dirty Johnny Foreigner with brilliant plans that should make us proud to have been born in the west.
What is striking is how few popular historians are academics. Rather, they are minor celebrities – news presenters, novelists or politicians. Queen Mary's Peter Hennessy and Columbia's Simon Schama spring to mind as exceptions, but both have written the kind of books rare in academia: weighty histories of long periods of time. Academic history is perceived to have become myopically focused on minutiae, drowning in clunky jargon, dissertations and careers being based on the most unappealingly desiccated and obscure fragments of the world's past. The academic grove no longer warmly welcomes the rest of the world – so it has became the role of the amateur, the red-blooded lover of history as it happened – to fill it. But this isn't the whole story.
A generation or two ago things were different. Eric Hobsbawm, AJP Taylor, Richard Hofstadter or Arthur Schlesinger were all academic writers who crossed over into the mainstream, working for presidents, hosting television shows; their books were read as often in train carriages as they were in lecture theatres. They wrote engagingly, but they dealt with challenging ideas. They attempted to reconcile traditional liberal concepts of society's progress with uneasy questions – was that "progress" simply a checklist of greed and hubris? They were successful historical writers who fed their willing readership strong meat.
Today's reading public likes its history less spicy, demanding jolly tales of what fun we had in the 1960s or how nice that Mr Churchill was. It's a return to the type of history written in the bestselling biographer's favourite century, the 18th – bulging, shelf-buckling tomes, depicting the great singular events that mark out history. They may win newspaper prizes, be given several series on the BBC, but an undergraduate wouldn't make it through his first term essays based on them. The assumptions they make, based on individual characters and motives, would never stand up in court, while their prose is often laborious, Whiggishly deferential to the subject and patronising to the reader. And yet these readers can't get enough of them.
There are plenty of recent academic books that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the masters of the 1950s and 60s who successfully walked the line between serious and readable. Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations rejects the idea of a single exceptional state, telling America's story as that of a people in a geographical setting reliant on the world to the east and west. Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumer's Republic looks at how we have all become consumers alongside citizens since 1945, our protests becoming more commercial than ideological. The Wages of Whiteness explores the implications of race as a socially engineered phenomenon.
The kind of historical writing that sells at present is comfortable, unchallenging nostalgia-fodder. As David Lowenthal argues in The Heritage Crusade, we have a desire to domesticate the past, to see it as a safe place for us to stroll through from a holiday beach. Lowenthal's point is all but proved by the low sales figures for his well-written and provocative book.
Why do the public want this? Perhaps we should look at the style of the big books the current popular historians have tried to emulate. It's in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that we find a contemptuous account of the popularity of "verbose and fabulous" biographers in fourth century Rome: "The libraries, which they have inherited from their fathers," says Gibbon, quoting Ammianus Marcellinus, "are secluded, like dreary sepulchres, from the light of day." Gibbon believed that the rejection of serious history and serious literature led to the cultural flatlining of Rome. Perhaps we should be worried.