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Professional Boredom
By William Cronon
From the From the President column of the March 2012 issue of Perspectives on History
One of the paradoxes of history is that no other academic discipline has done a better job of retaining a large public audience—even though many nonhistorians find most academic history boring in the extreme. If one takes as rough-and-ready measures of public interest the allocation of topics among History Channel programs, museum exhibitions that draw large crowds, or books that make it onto best-seller lists, the distribution of subjects they cover is generally quite different from specialties represented by the faculties of history departments at most colleges and universities. When one also acknowledges that many of history's most popular interpreters lack graduate training in the subject—think here of Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough, Ken Burns, Robert Massie, Dava Sobel, or even past AHA President Allan Nevins—the complicated relationship of professional history to its public audiences becomes all the more intriguing.
I doubt that I need to defend the virtues of professional scholarship to members of the American Historical Association, which is, after all, the largest organization of professional historians in the world. As I type that sentence, though, I'm mindful that not all AHA members would necessarily choose the label "professional historian" as their own primary self-description, and that is part of the problem I want to discuss here. Is a high school history teacher a "professional historian"? Is a writer of high-quality popular histories? A producer of historical documentaries? A curator of historical exhibitions? A designer of historical web sites? For myself, I would answer with a vigorously enthusiastic "yes" to every one of these questions, but I'm not sure all my colleagues would do the same—not even some of the people whose professional practice of history places them in one of the groups I've just named.
I'd go further still. If the AHA isn't unambiguously a welcoming home for everyone who practices serious history, we should worry that there's something about our conception of "professional history" that is getting between ourselves—those of us who embrace this label—and those who don't feel fully accepted as "professionals" even if they earn their living by exploring and interpreting the past. This has in fact been a longstanding source of tension for the AHA. Almost everyone affirms that the organization does a good job of representing "professional historians" who work in academe and produce historical monographs. But it has had to work much harder, with greater uncertainty, to determine how best to serve the interests of those "professional historians" whose work in other settings expresses itself in quite different ways. Although the digital revolution compounds this problem, it is hardly new.
When one defines professional history according to the norms of the academy, certain attributes tend to be valued above most others in defining what counts as "good history"—which is to say, history that professional historians recognize as "good." Good history is accurate. Professionals work extraordinarily hard to avoid errors, and can be quite contemptuous of those who make foolish mistakes when describing the past. Getting facts right generally trumps good storytelling. Good history is rigorous in its argumentation, deeply grounded in archival sources, fully in dialogue with the best recent work by leading scholars, and richly nuanced in its interpretative claims. The best professional historians spend years of their lives immersing themselves in the primary and secondary sources of their chosen subjects with the goal of attaining such a complex understanding that only scholars comparably immersed will recognize just how well the resulting work of history reflects the past it interprets. If such history is also written with elegance and grace, then it is very good indeed.
More: http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1203/Professional-Boredom.cfm
From the From the President column of the March 2012 issue of Perspectives on History
One of the paradoxes of history is that no other academic discipline has done a better job of retaining a large public audience—even though many nonhistorians find most academic history boring in the extreme. If one takes as rough-and-ready measures of public interest the allocation of topics among History Channel programs, museum exhibitions that draw large crowds, or books that make it onto best-seller lists, the distribution of subjects they cover is generally quite different from specialties represented by the faculties of history departments at most colleges and universities. When one also acknowledges that many of history's most popular interpreters lack graduate training in the subject—think here of Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough, Ken Burns, Robert Massie, Dava Sobel, or even past AHA President Allan Nevins—the complicated relationship of professional history to its public audiences becomes all the more intriguing.
I doubt that I need to defend the virtues of professional scholarship to members of the American Historical Association, which is, after all, the largest organization of professional historians in the world. As I type that sentence, though, I'm mindful that not all AHA members would necessarily choose the label "professional historian" as their own primary self-description, and that is part of the problem I want to discuss here. Is a high school history teacher a "professional historian"? Is a writer of high-quality popular histories? A producer of historical documentaries? A curator of historical exhibitions? A designer of historical web sites? For myself, I would answer with a vigorously enthusiastic "yes" to every one of these questions, but I'm not sure all my colleagues would do the same—not even some of the people whose professional practice of history places them in one of the groups I've just named.
I'd go further still. If the AHA isn't unambiguously a welcoming home for everyone who practices serious history, we should worry that there's something about our conception of "professional history" that is getting between ourselves—those of us who embrace this label—and those who don't feel fully accepted as "professionals" even if they earn their living by exploring and interpreting the past. This has in fact been a longstanding source of tension for the AHA. Almost everyone affirms that the organization does a good job of representing "professional historians" who work in academe and produce historical monographs. But it has had to work much harder, with greater uncertainty, to determine how best to serve the interests of those "professional historians" whose work in other settings expresses itself in quite different ways. Although the digital revolution compounds this problem, it is hardly new.
When one defines professional history according to the norms of the academy, certain attributes tend to be valued above most others in defining what counts as "good history"—which is to say, history that professional historians recognize as "good." Good history is accurate. Professionals work extraordinarily hard to avoid errors, and can be quite contemptuous of those who make foolish mistakes when describing the past. Getting facts right generally trumps good storytelling. Good history is rigorous in its argumentation, deeply grounded in archival sources, fully in dialogue with the best recent work by leading scholars, and richly nuanced in its interpretative claims. The best professional historians spend years of their lives immersing themselves in the primary and secondary sources of their chosen subjects with the goal of attaining such a complex understanding that only scholars comparably immersed will recognize just how well the resulting work of history reflects the past it interprets. If such history is also written with elegance and grace, then it is very good indeed.
More: http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1203/Professional-Boredom.cfm