Historians as Public Intellectuals

Last week I blogged , using Gordon Wood’s book The Purpose of the Past as my guide, about the differences between historians and public intellectuals. Now, over at the new blog The Broad Gauge Gossip, Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce III writes about several Ph.Ds in history who have left the halls of academia for work as public intellectuals.

I will raise the question here that I raised in my earlier post. At what point does a history Ph.D who speaks to public matters cease being a historian? How should historians understand their moral responsibility to the larger public? Is the past valuable only for its role in promoting a particular moral agenda in the present? Or is the very act of reconstructing past worlds and explaining these worlds to others a moral exercise in and of itself? Consider the words of Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg in his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts:

For the narcissist sees the world–both the past and the present–in his own image. Mature historical knowing teaches us to do the opposite; to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeing moment in human history into which we have been born. History educates (“leads outward” in the Latin) in the deepest sense. Of the subjects in the secular curriculum, it is the best at teaching those virtues once reserved for theology–humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of human history.

Again, how do we reconcile Wineburg’s thoughts about the moral role (“virtues onces reserved for theology”) of historical thinking with the somewhat presentist agenda of public intellectuals?

I start teaching my general education history survey course (US History to 1865) next week and I plan to raise this question with my students as an introductory exercise that I call “Doing History.”

I hope to hear from some of my “historian” readers.