Jonathan Zimmerman: Hey, check out those yahoos down in Florida!

[JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century," which was published last month by Harvard University Press.]

Can you believe it?

What a joke!

Those are the types of words we’ve heard from my fellow historians about a recent Florida law, which declared that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not constructed.” And the historians are right: the measure reflects a profound and troubling ignorance about the rules, logic, and structure of our discipline. It also fits snugly into a liberal caricature of the South and especially of Florida, where—snicker, snicker—the president’s own brother signed the measure into law.

But here’s one thing you won’t hear from historians: this whole sordid episode is also—in large part—our fault. That’s right: it’s our fault. For the past four decades, most professional historians have simply ignored the lay public. And the public has returned the favor, displaying little real interest—and even less understanding—about what we actually do. Make no mistake about it: the Florida law is indeed a joke. But the joke, dear historians, is on us.

Once upon a time, the leading members of our discipline wrote books for popular consumption. Charles and Mary Beard, the most original historians of the early 20th century, authored a Book-of-the-Month bestseller; they also wrote several successful school textbooks. So did Carl Becker, another giant of the era, whose own textbook was dedicated to “all teachers…who have endeavored to increase knowledge and promote wisdom in the world.”

At mid-century, too, top historians like Henry Steele Commager, Oscar Handlin, and Richard Hofstadter cultivated a lay audience. To these authors, democratic citizenship demanded historical awareness; so they purposefully pitched their books at average citizens. They also provided devastating critiques of American habits and institutions, belying our own facile caricature of Cold War intellectual life. In the American Political Tradition (1948), for example, Hofstadter claimed that the founding fathers disdained democracy, that Abraham Lincoln was a raw opportunist, and that Theodore Roosevelt pandered to big business. And his book sold over a million copies!

Then came the 1960s and 1970s, when historians brought a new and welcome attention to formerly neglected groups of Americans—especially women, immigrants, and blacks. Condemning the “top-down” approach of our predecessors, we resolved to write a “history from the bottom up.” It would be a “people’s history,” we said, resplendent with the wondrous diversity and complexity of America itself.

But it turned out that the people themselves wanted more books about the founding fathers, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. And into that breach stepped a new generation of journalist-historians such as David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote grand, best-selling narratives about Great White Men (and, sometimes, Great White Women). The rest of us toiled away on narrow case studies of New England millworkers and Southern sharecroppers, selling a thousand or so copies of each one—if we were lucky.

What if you gave a history party and nobody came? “People’s history” generated astute, original insights about our nation and also about our discipline, which is never—I repeat, never—about “facts” alone; by necessity, the selection and arrangement of new facts will spawn new interpretations. By and large, however, historians reserved these interpretations for each other. And we ceded popular history to the likes of McCullough and Goodwin, who often put eulogy and celebration over critique and analysis.

To be sure, some professional historians continued to write for lay readers; think of my New York University colleague Linda Gordon or of Princeton historian James McPherson, whose Civil War epic Battle Cry of Freedom spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. But as McPherson himself has written, academics started to give him the cold shoulder as soon as his book got hot. If any old Joe can understand you, after all, how deep can you be? Let the laypeople eat cake! Or let them read it down at the local Borders or Barnes and Noble courtesy of David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin....

So the choice, my fellow historians, is pretty clear. If we really want to improve historical understanding in this country, we’ll create new venues—and new incentives—for public engagement and instruction. Or we can continue to speak exclusively with each other, acting shocked—shocked!—when nobody else understands us. Hey, check out those arrogant, insular historians! The more we ignore the public, the more ignorant the public will become.