Barry Strauss

18 Historically Speaking March/April 2008 Do You Need a License to Practice History? history might "integrate narrative and analysis," be "pure history, path-breaking, opening up new vistas , where everything is documented," and appeal to general audiences. Unfortunately, that sets the bar rather high for most practitioners. Historians are more likely to base their choices as to subject, aim, and scope on dieir particular research interests , and this will determine the appeal and audience for their work. Sometimes they might believe that the "flea" will reveal more about a subject than the "whale," even if the former indicates a smaller scale and less dramatic protagonist In any case, their primary consideration must follow Hume's imperative "to be true and impartial" to past human experience. In order to capture the complexity and challenge of die human condition in odier times and places, the historian needs to know his or her discipline 's methods and literature. This is what the academic historian has hopefully accomplished in graduate studies. Thus when one begins doing history , there is an awareness of the depth and breadth of the historiography on any particular subject and of the many exemplars who have carved earlier paths to understanding it. Nonacademic historians might also immerse themselves in the historiography and the thorny issues it reveals, but they are more likely to focus on finding the dramatic and engaging tale than on making a significant and original contribution to a field of study. This is especially true today when substantial financial incentives from commercial publishers are involved. Of course, one doesn't need a license to do history, but one does need a powerful professional commitment to use history as honesdy as possible . If we all agree on that, we can rejoice in the fact that so many people continue to explore the past fully and deeply in hopes of better understanding the present. Joyce Seltzer is senior executive editorfor history and contemporary affairs at Harvard University Press. Barry Strauss They're singing songs of spring in academe these days, as Adam Hochschild writes in his gracious and lively piece. We professors are turning to popularization in ever-greater numbers. And why not? College teachers love an audience, and the public is hungry for history. The key thing, as Hochschild argues, is to bring together the high standards of scholarship with the narrative verve of popular history. I've been a fan of Hochschild ever since reading his moving book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son (Viking, 1986), followed by his powerful King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in ColonialAfrica (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Now I can thank him for this further service to the historical profession. Hochschild's call for a reconciliation of the "two solitudes" of historiography , the academic and the popular, is music to my ears. But then, I have been dancing to diat tune for several years, however clumsily and with many a missed step. Since I am a professor who writes for a broad audience as well as for specialists, I, too, practice without a license, as it were. I'd feel more sure-footed if I had years in the city room of a major metropolitan daily under my belt, but I have to make do with my student newspaper days. Or, I would have to make do with them, if I didn't have the happy memories of graduate school to turn to. I was lucky enough to study widi giants. They never said that it was part of a historian's job to write well, but they taught by example. They wrote pellucid prose and set standards to last a professional lifetime. I know, because I read it in the wonderful work that my fellow students of diose days still write. The main lesson of our teachers was the need for academic rigor. They were right Mind you, I'm all for popularization, which I plan to keep on practicing as long as I can get away with it. I have no doubt, however, about our main task as academic historians: to expand the knowledge of the past according to the strictest...