Prejudice Against Popular History: The Costs and Benefits of Holding the Course

My interest in history—particularly military history, which is my specialization—goes back to childhood. This turns out to be something I share with many military historians; less so with historians in other fields, who found their vocations only as undergraduates and even, in a few instances, graduate school. Because during my childhood and teenage years I read mainly works for general audiences—what is usually termed "popular history"—I acquired an early interest in writing that kind of history myself. For me, making history come alive was a central part of my interest in the subject. The greatest single moment I've had in the field of publishing came not when my first book appeared, but rather my first article, in the large-circulation magazine Civil War Times Illustrated.

I began my graduate career oblivious to the extent to which many academics regard writing for popular audiences with disdain. Indeed, the writing sample submitted in my application to graduate school was a 25,000-word article on Robert E. Lee, commissioned by Civil War Times Illustrated. Obviously I was admitted anyway, in part because the article displayed good structure, flow, and writing style; and in part because an applicant who could write so lengthy an article would likely be able to succeed in completing a dissertation. That dissertation, in fact, was published by Cambridge University Press as The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865, which won the Lincoln Prize in 1996 and has become a standard work in the field.

An 1882 lithograph of Robert E. Lee. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-pga-03298].

I take great pride in that achievement. Even so, I have not ceased my efforts to write popular history. I agree with a remark made long ago by the popular historian Bruce Catton, who opined that "we are not yet wholly rational beings. We approach true understanding through our emotions rather than through our intellects. . . . [The] intangibles [of history] reveal themselves most readily to those whose feelings and imaginations have been touched. . . . They come in moments of insight born of emotional understanding."¹

Since 1995—the year Hard Hand of War appeared—I have published some thirty-eight columns and articles for magazines of popular history. I also co-wrote two book-length battlefield guides—one for Gettysburg and another for Shiloh—which might properly be described as commercial rather that academic works. Those columns, articles, and books received scant attention from my department. (I am not telling tales out of school. I am simply assuming that my department is representative of most.) Even so, as long as I clearly separated my popular history from my academic work, I did not experience any adverse attention.

Indeed, from time to time the academic profession has shown an interest in writing for a general audience. It would be wrong to create a false dichotomy between the two. Quite a few historians write academic history that is also history of a high literary order. The attempt to reach a general audience also proceeds in a more modest, but no less significant, fashion. My department publishes an online magazine of a sort, called Origins.² It features historians— largely drawn from our own department—who supply historical perspectives on significant current events. And occasionally the American Historical Association (AHA) has dipped its institutional foot into the realm of popular history as well.

In 1981, for example, the AHA's newsletter broached the subject. "There is grave danger," it noted, "that if the historical profession persists in writing on obscure subjects and in language intelligible only to other scholars it will become as moribund as yesterday's obituary notice and, for the nonprofessional reader, considerably less interesting. It is essential, therefore, that historians have a literary outlet that will encourage storytelling and will permit the specialist to speak to someone other than another specialist."³

Of course, this was scarcely the AHA's sole concern. Had it been, the association might simply have...