I am almost positive that at some point in the last seven years I have written a post with the same title as this one, but I am too lazy to check. (OK–I just checked. A few have come close, but it looks like I have not written anything with the exact title).
I have stolen the title of this post from Jaime McClennen’s short post at Historical Communication. If you are a graduate student or academic historian interested in writing history for the public I encourage you to check out some of McClennen’s links, including pieces by Michael Hattem and Liz Covart (published at The Way of Improvement Leads Home), and some of my own reflections on the subject. (Thanks for the link, Jaime!).
Here is a taste of my January 2016 post “Some Autobiographical Reflections on Doing ‘Academic History’ and Writing for Public Audiences“:
…If everything goes well, sometimes academic history finds its way to the public. But often times it does not. The old quip about academics writing scholarly articles that only a small number people read is mostly true.
I applaud people who write academic monographs and publish scholarly articles. I am just not sure I want to do it any more. Did I just commit a certain kind of professional suicide by saying this? Maybe. Or maybe I did that a long time ago.
Over the last half-decade or so, ever since Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction appeared and garnered attention as a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize, I realized that my vocation as a historian was less about writing for my peers and more about reaching the public with my work.
I still try to keep one foot in the professional world of academic history. I attend conferences, write book reviews when asked, try to stay abreast of new work, and serve as an outside reviewer of book and article manuscripts. I try to expose the readers of The Way of Improvement Leads Home to the latest scholarship in the field through The Author’s Corner feature at the blog. I continue to network with my academic friends and colleagues because I want to remain in conversation with very smart people who love to talk about history. As a college teacher I also think these connections are important for my students, especially when I write letters of recommendation to supplement their graduate school applications. So by no means have I left academia or the world of professional history.
But I am losing my passion for writing academic history. Perhaps I have already lost it. The last scholarly article I published in a history journal was my piece on Philip Vickers Fithian and the rural Enlightenment. It appeared in The Journal of American History in 2003. Granted, I have written scholarly essays that have appeared in edited collections and other venues, but these were mostly pieces that I was invited to write. I still have a few ideas for scholarly essays percolating in my head. Sometimes I wonder if they will ever see the light of print.
My first book, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America, gave me my first glimpse of the power of non-academic story-telling. As a scholarly monograph, the book covers some sophisticated ground. I write about the “rural enlightenment,” the “public sphere,” “cosmopolitanism” and “local attachments.” But when I spoke (and continue to occasionally speak) about the book before public audiences I found that people were most attracted to the tragic life of Philip Vickers Fithian. They didn’t care about the “rural enlightenment.” Instead they wanted to know Fithian’s story. They wanted to hear about his love affair with Elizabeth Beatty. They wanted to hear about his experiences on the Pennsylvania frontier and what it was like to attend college at 18th-century Princeton. The K-8 teachers who attend my Gilder-Lerhman seminar at Princeton on colonial America have told me on more than one occasion that the book’s last chapter moved them to tears.
I was shocked when people dropped $30.00 for a copy of The Way of Improvement Leads Home and asked me to sign it. I was also a bit embarrassed because I knew that in the book the dramatic story I had told them in the talk was wedged between a lot of theoretical discussion that could make it a disappointing read. (Maybe this is why in the last couple of years I have found at least three signed copies of the book on the shelves of used bookstores).
My experience with The Way of Improvement Leads Home convinced me to write with those people who attended my book talks in mind. And then I started this blog and realized that I could reach more people with one post than I could with any journal article or scholarly monograph.
At some point along the way I was forced to reckon with the careerism that defines academic life. I am sure that there are many historians who write academic history for their peers out of a sense of vocation. They love to advance knowledge and feel called to do it, even if very few people will read what they write. But there are others who would balk at the approach to doing the kind of public history I described above because it might be considered a bad career move. I understand this critique. An article in the William and Mary Quarterly brings much more prestige among one’s fellow academic peers than a blog post or a book published with Westminster/John Knox or Baker Academic. Articles in prestigious journals can lead to “good” jobs at research universities and a whole lot of respect. We are fooling ourselves if we think that the writing of academic history is not embedded in a narrative of social climbing and careerism. Should academic historians write to advance new knowledge in the context of the noble pursuit of a scholarly life? Of course. Is it difficult to separate this noble pursuit from rank careerism and ambition? Of course.
In 2002 I found a dream job–teaching American history at Messiah College. From the perspective of the profession and the academy, Messiah College is, in more ways than one, an outpost. But being at a place like Messiah has made it much easier for me to think about my calling as a historian in ways that are fundamentally different than the academic culture I imbibed as a graduate student. And this is freeing.
Read the entire piece.
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