Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman: The Imperative of Public Participation

Anthony Grafton (Princeton Univ.) is the president of the AHA. Jim Grossman is the executive director of the AHA.

As the two of us were thinking last summer about our prospective leadership roles at the AHA, Jim decided to make his position clear from the outset: we historians ought to take seriously our role as mediators between the past and the present. Three months later, in his inaugural column, Tony attacked the issue from a different angle. He pointed to the direct relevance of historical scholarship—even scholarship that might seem arcane: "Historians of everything from drought in ancient Egypt to the economy of modern China do, in fact, have knowledge that matters—knowledge based on painstaking analysis of hard sources, which they convey to students and readers as clearly and passionately as can be managed."2

We remain committed to these braided notions of the role of historians and of historical scholarship in public life. From the start, we wanted to insist that our research has value for the world beyond the classroom and scholarly journal. It stimulates critical thinking, it contributes to our knowledge of our neighbors and ourselves, and it provides vital context for contemporary conversation. Wringing your hands over our "academically adrift" educational system and the inability of our youth to take ideas seriously? Read Plato. Want to wrestle with the concept of peer culture as an aspect of that problem? Read Paula Fass's The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. But we were also urging our colleagues to be proactive. Write an op-ed piece about higher education, drawing on your historical expertise. Run for the local school board to give your community the benefit of your learning. Help create an exhibition at the historical society or the library. Our scholarship is useful in one context in the form of the books and articles that we write for colleagues and students. It is useful in other, equally significant, ways in more public venues. "Public culture," Jim wrote, "would benefit from the voices of historians."

Be careful what you wish for.

In March, the incoming president of the American Historical Association, William Cronon, created a blog, entitled "Scholar as Citizen." As the title indicated, Cronon planned to draw on his expertise as a historian to comment on public affairs. In his first post he suggested that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that drafts model legislation for state legislators around the country, had played a shadowy but significant role in organizing Wisconsin Republicans to attack the state's public service unions (see the sidebar for the list of the links to this blog post and to the others mentioned in this essay). An environmental historian, Cronon had encountered ALEC before, since it had opposed environmental regulation. He now offered fellow citizens of Wisconsin a "study guide": a long series of links to online material with which they could examine the work and influence of ALEC and see if his arguments checked out. He also urged all players to come out into the open and called for a restoration of civility. In short, he demonstrated how a scholar could act responsibly in the public sphere, as a citizen and a historian, mobilizing his expertise at careful research, analysis, and synthesis....