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March/April 2008 Historically Speaking coves where specialists carry on a conversation designed to be inaccessible to outsiders. It's really the Willy Sutton principle again, this time applied to academic culture. In this case die academic version of the bank is the tenure and promotion system, with its attendant promise of job security and salary; the scholarly journals and professional conferences, where merit is displayed and evaluated; and the peer review system, which imposes an admirable form of detached rigor, but all within the most insulated, jargon-choked language imaginable. Let me put it more simply. The major reason most academic historians write only to each other is that die incentives of die profession have been designed to reward such cloistered conversations. If you gave them a copy of LuckyJim, they would not recognize themselves. If you asked them to submit a publishable essay to the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly, they could not do it. And why should they try, since even a successful effort would have no appreciable bearing on their academic status? My sense is that Hochschild is right to suggest that a surprising number of academic historians, most especially those who are securely tenured, harbor a secret and suppressed desire to write for a larger audience. But the psychological machinations within this group are strange. They are like members of a tribe who have achieved success within the tribal culture, want to break out, but don't know how to do it widiout acknowledging the narrow compass of their current bailiwick. They tend to claim that writing for a larger audience is much easier and less demanding than writing for their professional peers, but somehow very few of them can do it well. In a sense, they have been trained not to do it. One recent and wholly admirable effort to address the problem only served to expose how ingrained it is. In 2006 the Organization of American Historians announced a new initiative to identify the ten best-written scholarly articles on American history and publish them as a separate volume. (Full disclosure: one of my essays was selected.) If you gave diis volume to a group of well-educated and well-read non-scholars, the vast majority would judge it to be a lifeless piece of pedantry, unworthy of their extended attention. The rules of the scholarly game as most historians understand and practice them are apparently incompatible with cogent and vibrant prose. For this reason, Hochschild's idea of combining novelistic writers with expert scholars to create some kind of hybrid historian strikes me as the kind of happy-talk that he earlier criticizes as a congenital flaw in most popular history. (By the way, I don't think his criticism applies to most of the recent books on the founders, which reject filiopietistic celebrations in favor of warts-and-all portraits of "flawed founders.") I hope I am not engaging in die same kind of happy-talk by ending on an upbeat note. The surprising number of serious works of history that have found their way to the New York Times bestseller list over the past decade or so is incontrovertible evidence that there is a substantial readership out there eager to purchase books about the past. The fact diat most of the successful authors are not card-carrying historians strikes me as a professional embarrassment . If you take the calling of Clio seriously, addressing die public instead of the professoriate is not a sellout but a deliverance. And those historians interested in recovering the voices and lives of ordinary people in the past should be in the vanguard of scholars writing for ordinary readers in the present. JosephJ. Ellis is Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. His most recent book is American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (Knopf 2007). John Ferling I have a soft spot in my heart for those who write popular history. I first became interested in history by reading Bruce Cation's books on the Civil War and William L. Shirer on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In fact, their books influenced my decision to...

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