The Perils and Pleasures of Going "Popular"; or My Life as a Loser

March/April 2007 Historically Speaking 29 The Perils and Pleasures of Going "Popular"; Or My Life as a Loser Maureen Ogle T he historian reads an email, and dien leaps out of her chair, whooping and hollering. According to the message, her new book has: (A)won the Bancroft prize (B)been chosen as book-of-the-month by Hustler magazine (C)been shortlisted for the Pulitzer. Correct answer: B. In October 2006 I learned that Hustler magazine had selected my new book, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, as its book-of-the-montii for April 2007. At this point, many of you are groaning, sneering, or rolling your eyes. (Or, like me when I heard the news, howling with laughter.) That's okay. But stick with me. I have something useful (I hope) to say about doing history. First, a bit of background. My formal education came relatively late in life. For most of the time between the ages of 16 and 30 I waited tables, with stints as a janitor, a cab driver, and for four years, a construction worker. Those jobs brought me into constant contact with "the public," that broad cross section of humanity that, as George Bailey says in It's a Wonderful Life, does most of the living and working and dying in any given town. But when I turned 30, 1 decided to aim for another kind of life, so I tried college again (I'd made one short, bungled attempt at higher education right out of high school). I earned a bachelors degree (University of Iowa, 1985) and, in 1992, a Ph.D. in the history of technology and science from Iowa State University. During graduate school, my mentors routinely pronounced their contempt for "public " historians, denouncing them as losers. It didn't matter whether those misguided souls worked at a government agency or museum or, worse, wrote "popular" history for the general public. All of it reeked of Pariahville. Real scholars worked in academia , and under no circumstances, they warned, should I consider traveling that other route—unless, of course, I yearned for the life of a loser. Not me! I loved research and the long hours in the library communing with the documents. After years of punching timeclocks, I longed for a life free of "the boss." The nirvana of professorhood, that's what I wanted. I cranked out my tenure book (All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890) and was promptly visited by an unexpected realization: I loathed academia. Nirvana was hell. There were many reasons. I possessed zero ability to navigate the Byzantine terrain of departmental and university politics. Even worse, my job and my husband's were at two different universities and more than a thousand miles apart. But a more fundamental issue plagued my heart: academic history demanded diat I focus on narrowbordering -on-arcane topics; diat I publish my work in scholarly journals and academic presses with readerships of six; that I dwell in a universe far removed from the messy busde of the rest of the world. The isolation that I loved—sitting in a library for hours— felt toxic when writ large as the community of academic historians. Moreover, and to my dismay, my The consequences ofthe disconnect between historians and the public were obvious every time I walked into a classroom. colleagues shared my grad school mentors' contempt for the public. Oh, sure, professional organizations praised die job of providing the content of K-12 history textbooks. But that sounded and felt to me like lip service. A nuisance en route to the main event: cranking out more journal articles and monographs for that always-important audience of six. The consequences of the disconnect between historians and the public were obvious every time I walked into a classroom. There they sat, the youtii of America, high in the 1990s on MTV and Walkmans (and nowadays on cellphones and iPods). They viewed the world through a lens shaped by music videos and sitcoms (nowadays, an even narrower lens of instant messaging and wireless Internet). Most of them had no knowledge of the past, American or otherwise, and even less...