Adam Hochschild: Practicing History without a License
Being asked to write for the readers of Historically Speaking feels a bit like being a plumber who, by accident, has been invited to speak to a conference of heart surgeons. For I’ve had no graduate training, in history or anything else. And sometimes I encounter an assumption that writers of history for the general public (like me) and historians inside the academy belong, like plumbers and heart surgeons, to two separate professions; each with its place, perhaps, but with an unbridgeable gulf between us.
Writers of history for the public, the assumption goes, skip over complexities, prefer heroic subjects and, like Doris Kearns Goodwin or the late Stephen Ambrose, carelessly borrow others’ words without attribution. Or they sometimes simply invent details or conversations, as did Edmund Morris in his biography of Ronald Reagan. Academic historians, on the other hand, deal in subtlety and paradox, and are meticulously careful, but their writing is always pedantic, dry as dust.
This assumption that there are two cultures of history writing surfaces in odd ways.P<> Sometimes people presume that if a piece of writing is lively enough to draw them in, it has to be made up. From time to time I get letters or e-mails from readers telling me, in reference to one of my books, how much they enjoyed my novel. When I answer, I have to prune out the exclamation marks. “No!!!” I want to say. “There are more than 800 source notes! Look at the bibliography! I didn’t invent anything!” Or, the nonspecialist reader browsing in a bookstore assumes, anything written by a professor of history must be deadly dull and not worth reading, and so “academic” becomes a term of opprobrium....