The Abusable Past

Talent Rewarded

As the History Channel casts about for a new and more photogenic generation of historical talking heads (see RHR 86), the BBC confidently anoints new "popular presenters" for their invariably "acclaimed" history series. Recently joining the ranks of David Starkey, Simon Schama, and Niall Ferguson is Andrew Roberts, who introduced last spring's "acclaimed" BBC series, Secrets of Leadership: Hitler and Churchill. Leadership, as it happens, is Roberts's specialty. The pudgy, blond, conservative Cambridge grad and society gadabout acquired a high profile in Britain through a series of biographies of great imperial figures of British history: the Duke of Wellington, Robert Cecil (third marquis of Salisbury), Edward Wood (third viscount of Halifax) and, in an obligatory Bloomsbury gesture, a collective portrait he called Eminent Churchillians. The man is prolific, but when you're in a race with the tireless Niall Ferguson, you can't afford long pit stops, even to chat with your dear friend, Baroness Margaret Thatcher. Especially so when the BBC has asked you to lose a little weight.

Next up for Mr. Roberts? An official biography of Henry Kissinger (Prince of Darkness).

The Envelope, Please

For years now, in the deepest recesses of darkened cocktail lounges at OAH and AHA conventions, elder scholars have been heard to lament the absence of a Nobel Prize for history. At best, they complained, one could sneak into the Nobel's economics competition with a work in econometric history, but otherwise, there was no hope for the historian apart from the assorted book prizes and the ever-mysterious MacArthur Genius grants.

This fall, however, those same grumpy old men can look to a new opportunity for wealth and fame when the $1 million John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences is to be awarded for the first time. Kluge is the seventeenth-richest man in the world, having made his first fortune by creating Metromedia out of former DuMont stations and turning it into the network of reruns. The German-born businessman made his second fortune by taking Metromedia private and then selling its television stations to Rupert Murdoch for a cool $2 billion. With luck, those same grumpy old historians can take their commentary on the Kluge Prize winner out of the cocktail lounges and onto Fox News, where they will be accorded a fair and balanced hearing.

Who Wants to Be a Historian?

It is twenty-five years now since this journal introduced the slogan "Earn Big Money, Become a Historian" by putting it on yellow matchbooks for distribution at the OAH annual meeting. Now, evidence is emerging that it might be true. Some of it, as we have seen, comes from the ivy-covered halls of academe, where a figure like Columbia historian Simon Schama can strike a deal with the BBC (for three books and two TV series) that will net him $4.5 million.

But consider also the more humble case of retired truck driver Kevin Smith, who this past February became the first million-dollar winner on the daytime version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Not a professional historian, to be sure, but someone who has clearly been hitting the history books. Three of the final four questions were from U.S. history (the home state of Joseph McCarthy got him $125,000 and a 1936 Life cover photo by Margaret Bourke-White earned him $250,000). But it was the million-dollar question that really hit home for us: "The U.S. Icon 'Uncle Sam' was based on Samuel Wilson, who worked during the War of 1812 as a what? (a) Meat inspector; (b) Mail deliverer; (c) Historian; (d) Weapons mechanic."

While we were reeling from the discovery that Uncle Sam had not been based on the figure of Samuel Eliot Morrison, Kevin Smith instantly chose the correct answer—a—proving that when it comes to history, or meat, it's best to keep on truckin'.

Maybe They Could Phone a Friend for Help

Smith's $500,000...