Nick Witham

Nick Witham opens his new book by lining up two articles by famous historians, written four decades apart. ‘What’s the matter with history?’ was the question posed by Allan Nevins in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1939, as he wondered why academic historians insist on specialising, to the detriment of the field of popular history. Eric Foner’s diagnosis in the New York Times in 1980 was that historians had ‘abandoned non-academic audiences to television documentaries, historical novels, and gossipy biographies’. If you are, by chance, exhausted by the repetitive online back-and-forth on this very same question that has unfolded over the past decade, you will find little relief, but some welcome catharsis, in the pages of Popularizing the Past.

Witham offers five chapters, one each for the lives and works of postwar American historians Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn and Gerda Lerner. Biographical details of the authors, some textual analysis of their keystone works, and publication histories are interwoven with a dose of reception history. The prose is sturdy and readable, and the biographies of these authors are fascinating. (Boorstin’s father defended Jewish factory owner Leo Frank when he was accused of killing teenage worker Mary Phagan – just one such revealing detail showing the way the historians’ lives intertwined with their times.)

The argument of Witham’s book is that the audience for popular historical nonfiction that explains America to itself has always been a diverse one, made up of various types of readers. The imagined past, when an idealised American reader relaxed by the fireside with a sturdy tome written by a credentialed academic, is, largely speaking, a fiction. Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948), for example, was aimed at a ‘general’ audience that, Witham writes, was considered to be made up of ‘educated and intelligent American citizens from across the political spectrum who appreciated the opportunity to learn from experts’. These ‘middlebrow’ (to use the terminology of the times) readers were more likely to encounter nonfiction than before because of the paperback revolution.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Rebecca Onion is a senior editor at Slate.… (meer)