Going Popular

by Cliopatria

Through a small note in today's Chicago Tribune, I came across Maureen Ogle's The Perils and Pleasures of Going “Popular”; Or My Life as a Loser, Historically Speaking, March/April 2007. It is one of those frustrating essays where even though I agree with the spirit of her argument, it just irritated me to no end.

Her recent book, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, was chosen by Hustler Magazine's book of the month club. She takes that as a starting point for a passionate denouncement of academic histories and historians and for making a case for 'public' histories.

In her view 'the disconnect between the history profession and “the people” runs deep and wide". Academic histories are"dense, footnoted books" that focus on"narrow-bordering-on-arcane topics" which are published in"scholarly journals and academic presses" and read by"a handful of people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan". At the other end of this divide are the people who"had no knowledge of the past" as they were raised on"music videos and sitcoms" and were, in fact,"unaware of the difference between a local public library and the one found at a university, or for that matter between a library and Google."

Like I said, I agree with her underlying point that we should be writing accessible histories for the general public, but her descriptions of what actually constitutes historians, their interests, their histories, or even 'the people' is just grossly caricatured and factually wrong.

Regardless, her call for popular histories should be well-heeded.

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

David M Fahey - 6/5/2007

Everybody defines popular histories differently. The qualifications of the author? (For instance, Ogle has a Ph.D. in the history of technology and is a former college history professor.) Source material? (Ogle uses manuscript, rare book, and interview sources.) Originality of argument? (Ogle argues that American style lager is the result of 19th-century German immigrant brewers finding what non-immigrant Americans liked and not, as some microbrewery enthusiasts believe, crass post-World War II efforts to reduce the cost of materials.) In other words, Ogle's book illustrates the variety in popular history. Not all popular history is written by self-trained historians who use the books at the local public library to re-tell the story of Gettysburg. Nor are all self-trained historians bad historians.

Jonathan Dresner - 6/5/2007

In her defense, she did note the (ahem) checkered record of some of the most popular history writers.

Sometimes you have to acknowledge the existence of bad books when they're the ones shaping people's views. I feel that way about the Thomas Cahill "hinges" series. And my 20c China course next year is going to have to account for the overheated and undersourced arguments about Mao which have become common currency.

Sharon Howard - 6/5/2007

I notice she implies in the course of the article that academics don't assign popular histories in classes out of snobbery. Personally, I tend not to assign them because on inspection they frequently turn out to be full of errors, the level of analysis is at best naive, the secondary sources are dated, the primary sources are few and far between and often seemingly chosen with an eye to convenience and easy readability over substance or significance. There's one particular example which I won't name, but every time I walked past the two copies (two!) in the university library I had this terrible impulse to hide them somewhere at the back of the large-format Fine Arts shelves so my students could never find them again.

Jonathan Dresner - 6/5/2007

Just got your copy, too?

I have a similar reaction to a lot of what's in HS: it's interesting, but there's an iconoclastic attitude which gets tiresome after a while.

If things were as bad as they say, they'd have neither enough writers nor enough audience to make a dent. There's truth to a lot of it, but it's not like nobody else has noticed or done anything about it. Even the AHA, that Wal-Mart of academic history, has been stepping up its public history outreach, professional division, etc.