Simon Schama protests too much. He claims that academic history is obsessed with scientific data and obsessive footnotes rather than good storytelling and calls for a return to a “golden age” of historical writing — Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle. This mostly seems like promotional fluff for his new TV series. Yet Timothy Burke and Invisible Adjunct broadly concur with Schama, though as cogs in the “juggernaut of academic history” that he condemns they add the caveat that “a broadly communicative, publically engaged rhetoric of history is dependent upon the existence of a body of much more meticulous scholarship.” That’s true — but it’s more than a caveat!
Schama’s Great Historians fused authoritative judgment, great range and vivid prose and brought the result to large audiences, helping to define the practice of history as they went. What fun it must have been. He wants those things, too. Yet although he speaks to an audience bigger than any of his heroes, Schama must know he can’t occupy that niche, because it no longer exists. The vast differentiation of the academic division of labor over the past century and a half destroyed it. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of excellent, accessible narrative history written for a mass audience by respected historians. Schama’s complaints notwithstanding, you’ll find your local bookshop stocked full of the stuff — far more, alas, than you’ll find excellent and accessible sociology, political science or economics. But, unavoidably, these histories are written on the back of all those footnoted monographs, and they cannot command the field in the way that Carlyle or Macaulay might have.
Once asked what he specialized in, the sociologist Daniel Bell replied, “Generalizations.” It’s a line worth stealing for job interviews, but it tells an important truth. Being a generalist these days is itself a kind of specialization. Like any other role in an advanced division of labor, it depends on thousands of others, most notably all those monographic specialists dug into the archives. Timothy Burke would like to see historians be trained “to write well, to seek audiences outside the academy, to stretch their powers of persuasion.” Those are worthwhile goals, but whereas the mills of academic specialization can grind exceeding small, we can’t all have our own BBC miniseries. Besides, I don’t think Schama simply wants historians to write better prose. Rather, he himself yearns to play the same role today that Macaulay or Gibbon did in their time. He covets the way they could grasp their subject whole and bring it to almost the entire reading public. Which of us scribblers wouldn’t want to do the same? But his off-lead qualifications and dilutions suggest that, deep down, he knows that’s the sort of anachronistic wishfulness that historians teach us to avoid.
Interesting that David Starkey is supporting Schama. When I saw him speak back in November, he particularly dismissed Alison Weir as more novelist than historian and emphasized scholarship over entertainment value.
That said, as someone who has read a lot of British histories over the last several years, some are certainly more readable than others, but carelessness with the facts is a definite turn off.
I find the dismissal of footnotes annoying, though. Given modern technology, footnotes should be easy to format accurately. But too many books rely on endnotes, requiring an inordinate amount of page flipping back and forth to match text reference and endnote.
But too many books rely on endnotes
Publishers don’t much like footnotes, unfortunately. They think it turns off prospective readers, even though I agree that footnotes are better than endnotes.
What I find even worse than either footnotes or endnotes are unmarked endnotes. Blackhawk Down had them, as does Antony Beevor’s book on Stalingrad; instead of a superscripted number clearly indicating the endnote, the end matter is full of partial quotes indicating passages in the text. At least with regular endnotes you can bookmark them and easily locate the one you’re looking for.
It’s not just footnotes that commercial publishers don’t like. They assume — rightly, I think — that lay readers don’t like superscripts of any sort in a text. So authors who want to reach a popular audience but also include their sources have to use the system that Josh decries. It is an awkward system, but if it’s done rigorously, I don’t think there’s much loss in terms of information. In fact, it’s better than the way some writers use footnotes, footnoting an entire paragraph with multiple sources without indicating which piece of information came from where.
I should say, though, that I fully agree with Kieran’s take on Schama. At least in the U.S., there are stacks of well-done, well-crafted, and accessible works of history published each year, many of which become bestsellers. But it’s hard to imagine many of those being written if less popular, and perhaps less rhetorically adept, academics weren’t spending their days in the archives.
I loathe endnotes. Even worse, though, are notes of any kind that use op cit -endless frustration to save maybe twenty characters of small type.
Okay here’s what I hate - footnotes with no bibliography. What are you supposed to do, write down every reference as you come to it? Memorize them all? What good is it to find a note in chapter 8 that cites just the author when you don’t remember where you saw the original reference (or even if you did see it, if [you should pardon the thought] you’re reading chapter 8 before reading 1-7) and have no idea what it was? Are you supposed to read 50 pages of notes every time you want to find a reference? What the hell is up with that system?
That’s the system in Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice, for example, and it drives me absolutely bonkers because that book is dense with very interesting-sounding (in fact just the kind of diligent if not necessarily popular or easily readable scholarship that the more accessible stuff draws on) references across a range of disciplines - but there’s no damn bibliography! Arrrgh.
What this kind of soggy nostalgia usually misses (because they haven’t enough history to know in the first place) is that historians of this so-called “golden age” were aping the realistic novel of the time.
Even fiction has changed since then, so why can’t we?
The NCMH volume is nice, though it stops in 1795, but if I’m sending someone to one overview of the French Revolution, I’ll choose Lefebvre or Schama. It’s better than non-specialists might think. I imagine his Embarrassment of Riches is similar.
For the Revolution, balance is fundamental, between blood and dreams if you like. And the big picture: Poland and America, to start with. Lots of people miss it, Schama and Lefebvre don’t.
So that’s my turf, and he did OK.
Thank you Kieran,
I think you are right both about the self-promotional aspects of Schama’s “attack” on academic historians and the environmental conditions that have kept us from having another Macauley or Gibbon. There are, as you note, oodles of well-crafted, accessible history books in most big bookstores. Some are by the academic division of the New York Review of Books crowd; others are by the big publishing house editor division of the same crowd. Still others are by representatives of the upwardly striving — academics at second or third tier schools, freelance journalists. I’ve read enough nineteenth century narrative histories to know that the average quality of contemporary popular histories is higher. But, as with the monographic literature, it is now much harder to get noticed in the avalanche of new material. There’s only so much time to read. Changes in the professional attitude towards meticulous scholarship are unlikely to solve that problem. And, pace Burke, I think that if a historian applied for a grant to do something that really achieved what Gibbon or Carlyle achieved, s/he would get it in a heartbeat. Schama and Ferguson have written some fine history. I suspect they have gotten their fair share of grants. But they will never be Gibbon or Macauley for the reasons you have identified.
John, please tell me what the grants are that support on their merits big, popular-audience works of history. The grants that get given for projects like that get given to people who have already established a reputation for doing that kind of work. The first time you try it, you’re going to have to do it by pretending you’re writing a monograph.
I agree that the ambition to be Gibbon is a non-starter, and also that there are plenty of works on the shelves that fit the description of what Schama is calling for. But I don’t agree that there is a value system within academia that broadly recognizes the filling of bookstore shelves with that kind of work as a systemic ambition that we ought to have, to be recognized with the kinds of incentive systems that we maintain. We recognize instead in an entirely entrepreneurial, idiosyncratic way, that it’s just Schama or Ferguson or Demos, etc., that’s it’s just those guys doing what they do.
I also think Kieran understates the degree to which the books on the bookstore shelves are sneered at routinely in the day-to-day work of academics, both in teaching and otherwise. I have over the years gotten a lot of low-level sniping directed at syllabi in which I give pride of place to broadly communicative works by scholars (and non-scholars like journalists); I’ve found that there’s vastly less interest among scholars in discussing works like Schama’s once they cross the line into seeking popular audiences as part of a scholarly historiography. I think I’d like to see success in the public sphere as carrying more weight backwards into how we build historiographical canons and construct our pedagogies.
I don’t accept that aiming for the public needs to mean deep-sixing erudition, caution and responsiveness to the totality of historiography—I was just criticizing Niall Ferguson on exactly that point over at Cliopatria. I’m flexible on the exact form of footnoting, but even popular work should still be citationally rich.
Overall, what I would like to see is less of an assumption that the purposes of scholars and popularizers are in some sense in permanent tension. And honestly, I do see that a lot in academia, a presumption that to move towards a communicative sensibility is to move away from scholarly rectitude and scholarly value.
I loathe endnotes. Even worse, though, are notes of any kind that use op cit -endless frustration to save maybe twenty characters of small type.
What gets me too are endnotes where the chapter title isn’t given. So you have to flick back to the start of the chapter (to get the number, as it isn’t generally at the top of each page of text) before you can find the right note. It’s just unneccessary.
I put this Roy Foster quote up on my site a while ago, thought it applied here:
“Historians are often exhorted to write for ‘the general reader’, and some try to - though for most practising academics, the ‘general reader’ is a bit like the stray neighborhood cat: you feel vaguely sympathetic towards it, you know it’s someone’s responsibility to look after it, but you’re damned if you’re going to do it yourself.”
I quote C.L.R. James here.
Is Schama seriously claiming that there is a dearth, in the modern age, of historians who combine academic rigor with good storytelling? Where is his evidence for this? In the last year or two I’ve read bunches and bunches of counterexamples. Norwich’s Short History of Byzantium, Tuchman’s The March of Folly, Segev’s One Palestine, Complete, Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, to name a few. And that’s not mentioning the biographies; there is a tremendous modern renaissance of terrific, well-researched biographies— does Schama not think these count as history?
I would second Timothy Burke’s opinions here. Though some general works have been written by trained historians, all too many are the product of authors not thoroughly familiar with the underlying literature (or too familiar — and insufficiently familiar with the primary sources!) and lacking the background to put their stories in context.
I don’t know exactly what Schama was calling for, but I certainly would welcome more openness in academia to training generalists. In many respects, it is the more difficult task: mining data in an archive, for example, may qualify in spades as original research, but is comparatively easy next to making sense of it all. The study of history needs both data miners and interpreters, and as the amount of data grows, the interpretation necessarily must take place on multiple levels if anything meaningful is to be gained.
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review