Sharon Ullman says the work of historians is becoming increasingly invisible

… Our work as historians is becoming increasingly invisible. I was reminded of this recently when, in June, I read a New York Times review of the play "The Twentieth-Century Way," then running off-Broadway. The reviewer of the play, which explores a gay sex scandal in 1914 in Long Beach, Calif., concludes that the playwright "deserves praise for exposing an unhappy episode in the history of gay and privacy rights."

Well, someone does. I thought so too when I wrote a dissertation chapter in 1990 that focused on "the twentieth century way." And then turned that chapter into an article, published by the Journal of the History of Sexuality in 1995, titled "‘The Twentieth Century Way’: Female Impersonation and Sexual Practice in Turn of the Century America"; and then used the term again as a chapter title in my 1997 book, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (University of California Press).

The general plot is the playwright’s own, but his characters are the historical figures I unearthed, and snippets of the dialogue they speak appear in the archival evidence presented in my book.

Friends alerted me to the play in 2010, when it first had an award-winning run in Los Angeles. I cheerfully contacted the playwright, assuming he might want to chat with me, since the title of his play was my discovery and his characters historical figures that I had first described in print.

I politely suggested that perhaps he could acknowledge my work in the future. That didn’t immediately happen, as I learned when I went to see the play in Philadelphia two years later. We met and had a cordial conversation, and he offered to publish a full acknowledgment in future publication and performances. This he has graciously done.

It’s an interesting story about what happens to the work historians do and our sense of connection to the events and people we discover and write about. So I tell it at a lot at parties. But I also feel uncomfortable when I do. What are my concerns here exactly? Why was that acknowledgment so important to me? Don’t we do our work so others will read it and spread the history more widely? Isn’t this playwright doing just that? Can I really feel a sense of ownership over this history simply because I "found" it? In fact, I did not "find" the Long Beach sex scandal. It is public record, and historians have written about it for years.

But I did uncover "the twentieth century way." And somehow that matters to me. ...