8/20/2019 Wood Gordon - In Defense of Academic History
Writing
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In Defense of Academic History WritingBy Gordon Wood
The writing of academic history seems to be in a crisis.
Historical monographs pour from the university
presses—at least 1,200 or so a year—and yet have very few
readers. ometimes sales of academic history
boo!s number only in the hundreds" if it weren#t for
library purchases, their sales might be measured in thedo$ens. %ost
people, it seems, are not interested in reading history, at least
not the history written by
academic historians. <hough some blame this situation on
the poor teaching of history in the schools,
most critics seem to thin! that the problem lies with the
academic historians themselves. They don#t !now
how to write history, at least the !ind of history that people
want to read. &fter all, 'avid %c(ullough and
other popular historians sell hundreds of thousands of history
boo!s. )f they can do it, why can#t the
academic historians write better, more readable, more accessible
history*
Historians who sell lots of boo!s have always thought that it
was their ability to write well that made them
popular. amuel +liot %orison, a historian who was that rare
bird, an academic who was a bestseller
during the middle decades of the 20th century, certainly
believed that. &cademic historians, he said, have
forgotten that there is an art of writing history.- )nstead of
scintillating stories that move, they write dull,
solid, valuable monographs that nobody reads outside the
profession.- Barbara Tuchman, who was
&merica#s most popular historian in the 1/0s and 10s,
li!ewise believed that academic historians didnot !now how to
write. The reason the professors of history have so few readers,
she said, is that they have
had too many captive audiences—first with the dissertation
supervisors, then with their students in lecture
halls. They really do not !now how to capture and hold the
interests of an audience.- 'avid %c(ullough
agrees, though he is too polite to put it so bluntly. History is
in trouble, he suggests, because most academic
historians have forgotten how to tell a story. That#s what
history is,- he says, a story.-
&las, if it were only that simple. &cademic
historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. )nstead, most
of
them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories" that is, they
have chosen not to write narrative history.
arrative history is a particular !ind of historywriting whose
popularity comes from the fact that it
resembles a story. )t lays out the events of the past in
chronological order, li!e a story, with a beginning,
middle, and end. uch narrative history usually concentrates on
individual personalities and on uni3ue
public happenings, the !inds of events that might have made
headlines in the past. ince politics tends to
dominate the headlines, politics has traditionally formed the
bac!bone of narrative history.
)nstead of writing this !ind of narrative history, most academic
historians, especially at the beginning of
their careers, have chosen to write what might be described as
analytic history, speciali$ed and often
narrowly focused monographs usually based on their 4h'
dissertations. 5ecent e6amples include an
account of artisan wor!ers in 4etersburg, 7irginia, between 1820
and 18/9" a study of the 5epublican 4arty
and the &frican &merican vote between 128 and 192" and
an analysis of the aristocracy in the county of
(hampagne in :rance between 1100 and 1;00. uch particular
studies see! to solve problems in the past
that the wor!s of previous historians have e6posed, or to
resolve discrepancies between different historical
accounts, or to fill in gaps that the e6isting historical
literature has missed or ignored. )n other words,
beginning academic historians usually select their topics
by surveying what previous academic historians
have said. They then find errors, openings, or niches in the
historiography that they can correct, fill in, or
build upon. Their studies, however narrow they may seem,
are not insignificant. )t is through their
speciali$ed studies that they contribute to the collective
effort of the profession to e6pand our !nowledge of the
past.
The writing of these sorts of historical monographs grew out of
the 1thcentury noble dream that history
might become an ob
