Historically Speaking

20 Historically Speaking March/April 2008 Do You Need a License to Practice History? John Wilson Adam Hochschild is a fine historian with a keen sense of human folly and self-deception . No surprise, then, that his essay begins with good sense. Yes, academic history and popular history alike are vulnerable to temptation, each in its own distinctive way. Nodiing revelatory there, but it has the merit of being true. At that point, alas, Hochschild simply goes off die rails. He vents about the disproportionate emphasis on the Civil War, World War II, and the founding fathers, ludicrously exaggerating the extent to which diese subjects—"die Big Three," he calls them—dominate "nonacademic history." He cites "the selections available on a History Book Club Web site." Is this how a historian uses evidence? Has Hochschild looked dirough a season's worth of publishers ' catalogues lately? Has he ever visited Amazon ? Worse still, he gratuitously insults historians who take up these subjects and the readers who buy their books or check them out from the library. With "rare" exceptions, Hochschild asserts, "the torrents of books on the Big Three find so many readers mosdy because they are reassuring." Rubbish. Not one of the books I've read recendy on these subjects —books such as Max Hastings' Retribution, on the last year of the war against Japan, or Andrew Ferguson's sardonically witty Landof Lincoln:Adventures in Abe's America—fits Hochschild's patronizing description. Do such sentimentalizing books exist? Of course they do—just as there are hagiographies devoted to Martin Luther King,Jr., alongside the far more substantial volumes by Taylor Branch that Hochschild mentions with approval. Why not acknowledge that diere are good books on World War II, say, and bad books, and some mat are just middling? Why not add that the same is true of popular history and academic history in general? No, what Hochschild wants is "a synthesis of diese two types of writing." As a lifetime reader of history , I have no idea what he is talking about. Among the most enjoyable new books I read in die past year were Dominic Green's Three Empires on the Nile: The VictorianJihad, 1869-1899 and Sabine MacCormack's On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, andPeru. Green's book—issued by a trade publisher, Free Press—is popular history at its best, fast-paced but far from superficial. MacCormack's—under the imprint of Princeton University Press—is academic history at its best, fantastically learned but not pedantic, not narrow. Both books take up what Hochschild calls "bold" subjects. Both do what they set out to do very well. Neither one, I suspect, has been very widely read, but that is the fate of many good books. Those who have read diem, I'm sure, are grateful to their authors, and have urged the books on friends and colleagues. Running throughout Hochschild's essay is an unbecoming tone of moral superiority. What audience did he have in mind when he wrote that he'd make an exception for books on the Big Three subjects "that truly challenge our traditional picture of diese events"? Whose "traditional picture"? It's as if he imagines a crowd of simple-minded folk, ready to lap up another dish of "reassuring" kitsch—and he's signaling the reader, You andI are not like that, are we? We want the challenging stuff. We want to look rightinto the heart of darkness. Good for you. By all means probe the enigma of Russia in the 20th century, the dark epoch of Stalinism and the gulag. It's not exacdy a neglected tiieme, but neither has it been exhausted. Another good book on the subject, a book widi die scope and the moral depth of Hochschild's on King Leopold's Congo, will hardly be redundant. But please don't put on airs. History is as various as humanity, and a steady diet of self-consciously Important Books is the last thing we need. John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture, a bimonthly review. Jay Winik Anyone reading Adam Hochschild's articulate essay can see both the elegance of his pen...