Letter to the Editor

Page 23 September–October 2009 The History Market Beverly Tomek known fiction writers and poets, such as William Cullen Bryant, to write narratives that would appeal to the popular audience, removing footnotes and bibliographies and highlighting characters and plots to produce works that were descriptive rather than analytical and sometimes didactic in nature. In some cases, history was reduced to moral tales that encouraged nationalistic thinking. But this was not always the case, even with popular histories, as Pfitzer shows in his analysis of the efforts of Evert Duyckinck and Sydney Howard Gay. The more consumer-driven works relied too much on the literary techniques of fiction and sought to appeal to readers by employing themes popular at the time, while those commissioned by Duyckinck for the Library of American Books sought to “elevate the masses through exposure to ‘good’literature that they could afford rather than by catering to crude appetites.” Pfitzer created an engaging story that should have a broad appeal to anyone interested in cultural history, the history of the book, nineteenthcentury literature, and the growth of history as a profession. Popular history in general, however, came under scrutiny as history, like many other fields, became professionalized in the 1860s and 1870s. A contest developed between what Pfitzer calls “popularizers” and professional historians, as scholars who would later form the American Historical Association (AHA) sought to remove the literary devices and instead turn history into a science.As Pfitzer reveals, though the genre of popular history ultimately lost the fight, academic history cannot claim a clear victory in terms of winning the public imagination. Instead, most Americans remain fond of historical fiction, and historians continue to debate the extent to which history can incorporate narrative techniques. Pfitzer uses Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough to illustrate this point. Another obvious example would be the late Stephen Ambrose, whose 1996 Undaunted Courage provided popular audiences with, according to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, “high adventure, high politics, suspense, drama, and diplomacy” combined with enough “high romance and personal tragedy to make this outstanding work of scholarship as readable as a novel.” Both McCullough and Ambrose have been criticized by fellow scholars, but both are highly popular among the public today, and their books generate profits for trade publishers. Pfitzer’s account is an important contribution to cultural and intellectual history. Carefully woven into his examination of the rise and fall of popular history is a broader story of the professionalization of history; the growth of social history; the debate over the role of history educators, both in the classroom and in broader society; and the role of history in the life of the average person. This well-written, lively account also speaks clearly to the current interest in the construction of historical memory as it traces the efforts of historians to determine what is true and how to present that truth to the public. While Pfitzer points out early on that some popular historians made up facts, as when Mason Weems constructed the historical allegory of Washington and the cherry tree and George Lippard turned the Liberty Bell into a cultural icon, he shows that many popular historians tried to maintain the truth in their works. He skillfully traces the debate that emerged over how to determine what the truth was. He also analyzes the use of books as cultural artifacts and the efforts of publishers and marketers to control, not always successfully, what authors ultimately presented to the public. Indeed, what he reveals about the interplay between the publishers who commissioned the works and the authors who produced them is useful in understanding how the key players in his book each sought to control what the public consumed. Though beyond the scope of this work, an interesting companion study would be one that focuses more on what the readers took away from the works that were presented. Finally, by centering his account on biographical vignettes of popular historians and publishers of the nineteenth century, Pfitzer creates an engaging story that should have a broad appeal to anyone interested in cultural history, the history of the book, nineteenth-century literature, and the growth of history as a profession. Beverly...