Engaging the public in history

I'm never quite sure whether I agree with Tim Burke so much because I've taken a class with him and happen to find him tremendously engaging or because of the strength of his arguments. A combination of the two, no doubt. In any case, this entry on historians engaging the public (commentary on Simon Schama's thoughts here) addresses some of my fears about ivory tower academicism and some possible solutions. The short version: academic historians should be expected (and trained!) to engage the public about history. As it stands, academic historians are primarily concerned with writing for other academic historians. In the words of David Starkey, "A lot of books have become rarely animated footnotes. In fact, they should really be written upside down, with the footnotes at the top and a drip of text underneath. Footnotes aren't new, but what is new is our worship of them."

Tim's point about the value of monographs and how they allow large-scale syntheses that appeal to a wide audience to be written bears reiterating.

What I'd like to add to this topic is that general readers have a real interest in history. And, as Rosenzweig and Thelen's The Presence of the Past reveals, Americans are fascinated with the past, even if the elements of the past that interest them the most are local and personal details that they can relate most closely to. My point is that there's a wide market for history in the public sphere. Far better for well-trained an academic historian who have a thorough knowledge of the scholarly literature to write a widely accessible book on a given topic than a history hack who happens to write well. History should be presented to the public by those who know history best. If that requires a new skill set to be taught in grad school, as Tim suggests, bring it on.