America’s Worst Historians

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg summarize the problems with journalists writing history:

We have to fight mediocrity as well as plagiarism – the two are more closely related than you realize. Journalists doing history tend to be superficial and formulaic. To the historian’s mind, they don’t care enough about accuracy. It’s a surprisingly short distance to travel from dressing up the past in order to make it familiar, to paraphrasing (actually, stealing) an earlier biographer’s ideas.

History is not a bedtime story, folks. Plagiarism is variously defined as “wrongful appropriation” and “close imitation”; it is not just blatant theft of the gist of a paragraph. Originality in writing history is something palpable and verifiable, and it’s the reason History Ph.D. candidates spend years researching and writing a dissertation, taking several years more to fashion it into the book that will earn them tenure. Good history demands the ability to judge the available evidence – a form of knowledge journalists are not asked to cultivate.

Most everyone who transgresses on the work of historians uncritically accepts someone else’s work, then tweaks it a little. That’s how the game is played. But historians are trained differently. They are taught to be suspect of authors who come to their information secondhand. The mark of a good historian is writing something new about something old and making an original argument gleaned from primary sources.

You will not find a painstaking scholar dressing up his or her material to make it more familiar than it should be, such as: “The dark eyes that gleamed behind large metal-rimmed glasses – those same dark eyes that had once enchanted a young officer in George Washington’s staff – betokened a sharp intelligence, a fiercely indomitable spirit …” This is from the opening page of Ron Chernow’s mega-selling “Alexander Hamilton,” describing Hamilton’s widow as if the author knew her personally and could verify these superior qualities. Chernow is a smart guy; he’s another Ivy Leaguer who rose from freelance journalism to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning popular historian. His bias in favor of his subject is akin to McCullough’s, though he writes better and goes deeper.

I have no principled issue with non-professional historians writing history. But the fundamental problem is that so much of this history is bad. As Burstein and Isenberg state, “History is not a bedtime story.” Absolutely correct. Too often, history written by non-historians is superficial, lacks analysis or a strong thesis, and has major problems with evidence. I do think it is a problem that more professional historians are not writing for a popular market, but we are not rewarded for that. How you combine good writing with professional standards of evidence and argument is a challenge we need to think about harder.

…..This post set off a bit more of a fierce comment thread than I thought it would, which is fine. I will say that I am writing this as someone who is probably going to write a biography-esque project for my 2nd book, something that I never thought I’d do. Moreover, this is a book project that could sell some. So the issue of thinking about combining the best of what academic historians do with the best of what popular historians do is on my mind these days.