Historians and the Public

The creation of the World Wide Web thirty years ago led some of the walls of the ivory tower to start crumbling. At the time, doing serious reading in an academic field was almost impossible if you didn’t have an affiliation with a major research university, or live near a major public research library. In the early 1990’s, a woman I know got a job as an Assistant Professor teaching French history at the University of South Dakota. When she first walked into its library, she told me, she felt like bursting into tears. The entire French history section occupied less than an arm’s length of a single shelf. Today, however, thanks to Google Books and similar projects, everyone in the world with an internet connection has access to many times the number of books available in even the largest research libraries thirty years ago, including a very high percentage of the books in major Western languages that are now out of copyright. More and more archives are putting material online as well. Yes, the coverage is much less good in some non-Western areas, and yes, many important digital collections remain behind steep paywalls. But complaining about these very real and important problems without giving due appreciation to the miracle—yes, the miracle—of what digitization has already accomplished is a pretty spectacular form of purist carping.

And it is not only online books that have chipped away at the barriers separating ordinary readers from specialized knowledge. Universities have put free courses online in every conceivable subject. My good friend John Merriman passed away last year, too soon, and can no longer give his superb lectures on European history to Yale undergraduates, but those lectures are still available on YouTube to anyone who cares to watch. Many academics have put specialized research materials of all sorts online. And if you want to ask serious questions of your favorite academics, you need only look up their email addresses and write to them—most likely they will reply.

Of all academic subjects, history is probably the one where the barriers have fallen the farthest. History has long been both the last refuge of general education, and a magnet for serious amateur practitioners. In many academic fields, it is difficult or impossible to do serious work without a university affiliation. You can educate yourself in particle physics online, but you can’t exactly do particle-smashing experiments there. Fieldwork in anthropology and sociology is not something one can just start doing so easily on one’s own, either. But people without university affiliations can and do write excellent works of history that the guild takes seriously, all the time. Look at Stacy Schiff, or Ron Chernow, or Doris Kearns Goodwin, or Adam Hochschild, or Adam Zamoyski (a specialist in my period whose books I’ve reviewed and cited many times). Of course, non-academics were writing great history long before the internet, making use of resources like the New York Public Library, but it has become much easier for them to do so in the past few decades.

At the same time, it is easier than ever for academic historians to make their work available to a broad general public. They can put up a website to describe their research, and link to things they have published that are in open access. They can write a newsletter like this one, or host a podcast. There are more publications than ever to submit their work to. Heather Cox Richardson has made millions of dollars from her Substack, and thanks to the publicity she has gained from it, President Biden is reading her most recent book. And, of course, there is social media. My Princeton colleague Kevin Kruse became a Twitter star because of his debunking of absurd historical claims made by Dinesh D’Souza and other far-right media personalities (a thankless task if ever there was one), leading to many a white-hot online confrontation. Kevin has since quit the Muskified “X,” but at his height he had well over half a million Twitter followers. It is one reason why the recent book he co-edited with another colleague, Julian Zelizer, Myth America (to which I contributed), became a New York Times bestseller.

In general, I think that these developments are to be celebrated. Of course, I would say this. I spent some time as an apprentice journalist before going to graduate school, and throughout my academic career I’ve written for general interest publications. I published my last two major books with commercial presses, aiming at a more-than-academic audience. Since all the buzz about the Ridley Scott film, sales of my Napoleon biography have shot up, in part because of the promotion I’ve been able to do online (and here's another shameless link). So I guess you could say that I have directly profited, although I’m hardly in the same league as Heather or Kevin.

But are there reasons to be concerned? In one sense, yes, because the changes have eroded the relative insulation of academia from larger social forces—especially, market forces—that the walls of the ivory tower helped to maintain. Obviously, that insulation was in many respects extremely limited. Academia has shared in, and helped to perpetuate, dominant forms of discrimination and exclusion, not only in what was studied, but, just as importantly, in what was not studied. But neither can the history of knowledge production be reduced to a simple matter of power relations. Every serious historian today builds on a deep foundation of works written long before the political values of our own time took hold, and recognizes the deep value of these works, and of the scholarly standards that their authors observed.

As the historical profession’s boundaries have grown more porous, the temptation has increased for historians to develop projects with a wider public in mind. This is generally a good thing. But it often means that historians are developing both their subjects and their interpretations with an eye towards what they think the public wants. In doing so, moreover, they are often really drawing on the views of what powerful organizations in journalism and publishing think the public wants, At least in the United States today, these organizations tend to favor very familiar, conventional topics: recent history, and a very small number of people and events from earlier periods. In French history, the list of obviously marketable topics is very short: Vichy, De Gaulle, Napoleon, and Marie-Antoinette about cover it. Yes, projects on other topics can break through, especially when they are colorful and resonate in one way or another with American concerns: Tom Reiss’s lively The Black Count, for instance. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. And while “what the public wants” can be pretty liberal, in American political terms (liberals read a lot of books, after all), there is such a thing as liberal conventional wisdom, which can be hard for historians seeking a public audience to break out of.

In addition, the desire to appeal to the public can breed undue deference towards especially influential figures from the media and publishing worlds. A Twitter storm recently erupted when Northwestern University scholars were criticized for bringing MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to campus, and allegedly inviting her to tell the students and faculty how to write history. As with so many Twitter storms, some of the charges were inaccurate, and the rhetoric quickly grew overheated (one eminent historian claimed the critics were trying to “silence… truth about the past and present”). But the general concerns were not necessarily unfounded. Rachel Maddow is a famous liberal journalist who has also written a best-selling work of history—albeit one that has received some very sharp criticism—and she would have a lot to talk about with Northwestern historians, including Kathleen Belew, who has done quite a bit of writing for the general public herself (another contributor to Myth America, by the way). But Maddow is also an employee of a large corporation, and a celebrity with a large fan base that has certain expectations of her. Her perspective is not going to be the same as that of academic historians. That was the reason for the invitation, of course: to have a dialogue. But celebrity star power can be a difficult thing to resist, especially for young scholars hoping to make public reputations for themselves. Academic historians need to resist the temptation to treat people like Maddow as oracles, or to imitate ways of writing history that may not be suitable for the academy. I’m not saying this to criticize the Northwestern History Department—I wasn’t there to hear Maddow. But I am urging caution.

And it’s also important to remember how rapidly the landscape continues to change. Twitter (sorry, “X”) is losing its former dominance. We seem to be in a golden age of podcasting, but how long will that last? TikTok is gaining in importance. And the perennial crisis of the academic humanities and soft social sciences just grows worse and worse. Whatever the relationship between historians and the public today, most likely it will soon look very different. Stay tuned!