Gordon Wood: A sage historian laments the "present-mindedness" of many of his colleagues
A quarter century ago Gordon S. Wood, professor of history at Brown University, stepped out of the academic cloister and began writing book reviews -- essays, really, running to around 4,000 words apiece -- for serious but non-academic publications, chiefly the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. No doubt he did so in hopes of reaching a wider readership than previously afforded him by academic journals, but he also did so out of a conviction that too many historians at American universities were drifting off into a hothouse where they talked and wrote only to each other, concentrating on theory and the holy trinity of race, class and gender.
Though not without sympathy for some of these developments, Wood was concerned about their larger implications. As he says in his introduction to this collection of 21 essays [THE PURPOSE OF THE PAST]: "The result of all this postmodern history, with its talk of 'deconstruction,' 'decentering,' 'textuality,' and 'essentialism,' has been to make academic history writing almost as esoteric and inward directed as the writing of literary scholars. This is too bad, since history is an endeavor that needs a wide readership to justify itself." As watchers of the bestseller lists are well aware, "popular historians who have no academic appointment, such as David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Ron Chernow, Thomas Fleming, and Stacy Schiff, have successfully moved in to fill the void left by the academic historians preoccupied by issues of race, gender, and multiculturalism."
Unlike many, if not most, of his colleagues in the history departments, Wood does not look down his nose at these writers: "I had great respect for Barbara Tuchman and have even greater respect for her successor as the premier popular historian of the country, David McCullough." Instead, he welcomes their work, not merely on its merits -- which of course vary widely from writer to writer and book to book -- but as an antidote to the narrow and often heavily ideological history that comes out of the universities, more often than not in "the special language that literary critics now use to separate themselves from the power structure as well as the common herd of us ordinary readers: 'interpellation,' 'exfoliation,' 'ambiguation,' 'valorized,' 'intellection,' 'narrativized,' and 'meta' this and 'meta' that."...
Read entire article at Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo
Though not without sympathy for some of these developments, Wood was concerned about their larger implications. As he says in his introduction to this collection of 21 essays [THE PURPOSE OF THE PAST]: "The result of all this postmodern history, with its talk of 'deconstruction,' 'decentering,' 'textuality,' and 'essentialism,' has been to make academic history writing almost as esoteric and inward directed as the writing of literary scholars. This is too bad, since history is an endeavor that needs a wide readership to justify itself." As watchers of the bestseller lists are well aware, "popular historians who have no academic appointment, such as David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Ron Chernow, Thomas Fleming, and Stacy Schiff, have successfully moved in to fill the void left by the academic historians preoccupied by issues of race, gender, and multiculturalism."
Unlike many, if not most, of his colleagues in the history departments, Wood does not look down his nose at these writers: "I had great respect for Barbara Tuchman and have even greater respect for her successor as the premier popular historian of the country, David McCullough." Instead, he welcomes their work, not merely on its merits -- which of course vary widely from writer to writer and book to book -- but as an antidote to the narrow and often heavily ideological history that comes out of the universities, more often than not in "the special language that literary critics now use to separate themselves from the power structure as well as the common herd of us ordinary readers: 'interpellation,' 'exfoliation,' 'ambiguation,' 'valorized,' 'intellection,' 'narrativized,' and 'meta' this and 'meta' that."...