Practicing History without a License

Historically Speaking March/April 2008 Historically Speaking March/April 2008 Vol. IX No. 4 Contents Do You Need a License to Practice History? Practicing History without a License2 Adam Hochschild Responses toAdam Hochschild H.W.Brands6 John Demos7 Joseph J. Ellis8 John Ferling9 Felipe Femández-Amnesto10 Thomas Fleming11 James Goodman and Louis Masur1 2 A Correspondence John Lukacs14 Joyce Lee Malcolm14 Wilfred M. McClay15 GregNeale16 Joyce Seltzer17 Barry Strauss18 Derek Wilson19 John Wilson20 JayWinik20 Adam Hochschild's Response21 / Wish I'd Been There24 Byron Hollinshead and Theodore K. Rabb Tunnels, Territory, and Broken Promises: 25 Franca Betrayed by the Anglo-Saxons? Margaret MacMillan An Interview with Daniel Walker Howe30 Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa Moral Dimensions of World War II: A Forum Popular Culture versusAcademic34 Culture in Narrating World War Il Michael Bess Comments on Choices Under Fire36 Sanford Lakoff Critique ofChoices Under Fire38 Eric Bergerud Comments on Choices Under Fire41 Michael Kort A Commentary on Choices Under Fire 43 Harry S. Stout Response to Comments by45 HarryS. Stout, Michael Kort, Eric Bergerud, and Sanford Lakoff Michael Bess Letters50 The Historical Society's 2008 Conference: 55 Migration, Diaspora, Ethnicity, & Nationalism in History Do You Need a License to Practice History? ONE YEAR AGO, WE PUBUSHED MAUREEN OGLE'S WINSOME ACCOUNT OF LEAVING academic history to "gopopular. " Two issues later, the HistoricalSoriety'spresident, EricArnesen, himself afrequent writer of reviewsforthe Chicago Tribune, wrote an essay expressing concern thatso-calledpopufar historians do notmake sufficient effortto incorporate thefruits of academichistoricalscholarship in their books. Arnesen selectedtwo books to illustrate his concern . One of themwasAdamHochschild'sBury the Chains, on theabolition of theBritishslave tradeandslavery. Hochschild, an accomplishedwriterandeditor, respondedtoArnesen with a thoughtfulletterthatwepublishedin theNovemberIDecember 2007 issue. He also suggested that he wouldwelcomefurther discussion on the relationship betweenpopuhrandacademic history . We invited Hochschild to write a think-piece, "Practicing History without a License. " Historically Speaking editor DonaldA. Yerxa then recruited agood number ofprominent historians and editors to respond to Hochschild. These include severalauthors of bestsellinghistory books (one of whom won the PulitzerPri^e), editors ofpublicationsgearedtogeneralreaders , andan editorof one of the world's leading academicpresses (which also has a trade division). Hochschildthen drafteda rejoinder . Practicing History without a License Adam Hochschild Being asked to write for the readers of Historically Speaking feels a bit like being a plumberwho, by accident, has been invited to speak to a conference of heart surgeons. For I've had no graduate training, in history or anything else. And sometimes I encounter an assumption that writers of history for the general public (like me) and historians inside the academy belong, like plumbers and heart surgeons, to two separate professions; each with its place, perhaps, but with an unbridgeable gulf between us. Writers of history for the public, the assumption goes, skip over complexities, prefer heroic subjects and, like Doris Kearns Goodwin or the late Stephen Ambrose, carelessly borrow others' words widiout attribution. Or they sometimes simply invent details or conversations , as did Edmund Morris in his biography of Ronald Reagan. Academic historians, on the other hand, deal in subdety and paradox , and are meticulously careful, but their writing is always pedantic, dry as dust. This assumption that there are two cultures of history writing surfaces in odd ways. Sometimes people presume that if a piece of writing is lively enough to draw them in, it has to be made up. From time to time I get letters or e-mails from readers telling me, in reference to one of my books, how much they enjoyed my novel. When I answer, I have to prune out the exclamation marks. "No!!!" I want to say. "There are more than 800 source notes! Look at the bibliography ! I didn't invent anything!" Or, the nonspecialist reader browsing in a bookstore assumes, anything written by a professor of history must be deadly dull "Sacred to Liberty Justice and Peace," an allegory Illustrating the writing if the Constitution. Clio sitting, writing in open book, 1788. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-45513]. and not worth reading, and so "academic" becomes a term of opprobrium. Not so long ago, of course, almost all history was written for the general public. The Greeks felt that historical writing should...