In Defense of Academic History Writing

By Gordon Wood
The writing of academic history seems to be in a crisis. Historical monographs pour from the university
pressesat least 1,200 or so a yearand yet have very few readers. Sometimes sales of academic history
books number only in the hundreds; if it werent for library purchases, their sales might be measured in the
dozens. Most people, it seems, are not interested in reading history, at least not the history written by
academic historians. Although some blame this situation on the poor teaching of history in the schools,
most critics seem to think that the problem lies with the academic historians themselves. They dont know
how to write history, at least the kind of history that people want to read. After all, David McCullough and
other popular historians sell hundreds of thousands of history books. If they can do it, why cant the
academic historians write better, more readable, more accessible history?
Historians who sell lots of books have always thought that it was their ability to write well that made them
popular. Samuel Eliot Morison, a historian who was that rare bird, an academic who was a bestseller
during the middle decades of the 20th century, certainly believed that. Academic historians, he said, have
forgotten that there is an art of writing history. Instead of scintillating stories that move, they write dull,
solid, valuable monographs that nobody reads outside the profession. Barbara Tuchman, who was
Americas most popular historian in the 1960s and 1970s, likewise believed that academic historians did
not know how to write. The reason the professors of history have so few readers, she said, is that they have
had too many captive audiencesfirst with the dissertation supervisors, then with their students in lecture
halls. They really do not know how to capture and hold the interests of an audience. David McCullough
agrees, though he is too polite to put it so bluntly. History is in trouble, he suggests, because most academic
historians have forgotten how to tell a story. Thats what history is, he says, a story.
Alas, if it were only that simple. Academic historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. Instead, most of
them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history.
Narrative history is a particular kind of history-writing whose popularity comes from the fact that it
resembles a story. It lays out the events of the past in chronological order, like a story, with a beginning,
middle, and end. Such narrative history usually concentrates on individual personalities and on unique
public happenings, the kinds of events that might have made headlines in the past. Since politics tends to
dominate the headlines, politics has traditionally formed the backbone of narrative history.
Instead of writing this kind of narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of
their careers, have chosen to write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often
narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations. Recent examples include an
account of artisan workers in Petersburg, Virginia, between 1820 and 1865; a study of the Republican Party
and the African American vote between 1928 and 1952; and an analysis of the aristocracy in the county of
Champagne in France between 1100 and 1300. Such particular studies seek to solve problems in the past
that the works of previous historians have exposed, or to resolve discrepancies between different historical
accounts, or to fill in gaps that the existing historical literature has missed or ignored. In other words,
beginning academic historians usually select their topics by surveying what previous academic historians
have said. They then find errors, openings, or niches in the historiography that they can correct, fill in, or
build upon. Their studies, however narrow they may seem, are not insignificant. It is through their
specialized studies that they contribute to the collective effort of the profession to expand our knowledge of
the past.
The writing of these sorts of historical monographs grew out of the 19th-century noble dream that history
might become an objective sciencea science that would resemble if not the natural sciences of physics or
chemistry, then at least the social scienceseconomics, sociology, anthropology, psychologythat were
emerging at the same time as professionally written history. Monographic history therefore assumes that
history is a kind of science; that is, that historical knowledge is accumulative and that the steady accretion
of specialized monographs will eventually deepen and broaden our understanding of the past. Although
recent critics have mocked the noble dream that history resembles a science, the monographs written
over the past century have gradually built one upon another to the point where we now know more, and
more accurately, about more aspects of past human behavior than ever before.
All those scholarly monographs that Morison called dull and solid have advanced the discipline in
extraordinary ways over the past century. Each of them may not have sold more than a few thousand
copies at best, but, as Morison conceded, they were valuable. In their multiplicity they are the reason we

know much more about the histories of slavery, women, and hosts of other subjects than we ever knew
before. They have opened up new areas of research and have penetrated into the most private, subjective,
and least accessible characteristics of past life, including marriage, sexual relations, and child rearing. They
have exploited demographic data and all sorts of popular nonverbal behavior to reconstruct the lives of
masses of ordinary men and women who left no written record. Of course, all these gains have often come
at the expense of traditional political or narrative history.
The dream of the historians who organized the American Historical Association more than a century ago
has been more than fulfilled. Despite the sometimes gross presentism of much current history writing and
despite some historians efforts to use history as an ideological weapon in contemporary politics, most
historians writing today still yearn to be as objective and as true to the past as historians of the late 19th
century did, and most present-day academic historians still judge each others works in accord with the
standards developed by the generation that created the historical profession over a century ago.
But conceiving of history as a kind of science means that most academic history-writing will necessarily
have a limited readership. Like papers in the other sciences, monographic history is written largely for
people within the discipline. Since the monographs build upon one another, the writers of these
monographs usually presume that readers will have read the earlier books on the same subject; that is, that
they will possess some prior specialized knowledge that will enable them to participate in the conversations
and debates that historians have among themselves. This is why most historical monographs are often
difficult for general readers to read; new and innocent readers often have to educate themselves in the
historiography of the subject before they can begin to make sense of many of these monographs.
So advising academic historians that they have to write more stimulating prose if they want to enlarge their
readership misses the point. It is not heavy and difficult prose that limits their readers; it is rather the
subjects they choose to write about and their conception of their readership as fellow historians engaged in
an accumulative science.
The problem at the present is that the monographs have become so numerous and so refined and so
specialized that most academic historians have tended to throw up their hands at the possibility of
synthesizing all these studies, of bringing them together in comprehensive narratives. Thus the academics
have generally left narrative history writing to the nonacademic historians who unfortunately often write
without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive monographic literature that exists. If
academic historians want popular narrative history that is solidly based on the monographic literature,
then they will have to write it themselves.
Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and professor of history emeritus at Brown
University. His most recent book is Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 17891815. This article
was first published as a podcast on the web site of the Washington Post.

Copyright American Historical Association

Last Updated: March 20, 2010 4:41 PM

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