In historian Jill Lepore’s now infamous interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education, she decries the state of the humanities and public engagement among historians. Lepore regretfully argues that only the non-historian presidential biographers are sufficiently engaging with “the public,” while other historians struggle to write stories that connect with broader audiences.
Reading this, I wonder how much public humanities scholarship Lepore read before this interview, and who she imagines as “the public,” a term commonly used but no less fuzzy in its connotations. Are college students the public? People with non-academic professional degrees? My grandma? Nobody seems to know, making it seem to me at least, that all of us doing work and thinking out loud, may be trying to reach different publics.
Though Lepore’s books are are often published by trade presses and sold in Barnes and Noble, as well as academic bookstores, her main contribution to public scholarship has been her tenure writing at The New Yorker.
Most of the “public,” whatever that means, is not learning about history from the New Yorker. The New Yorker’s readers skew affluent, white, professional, if not academics themselves. This might be “a public” but it certainly doesn’t reach the kind of audiences that say, AARP magazine or Southern Living does.
Though dated now, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses if History in American Life by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, shows that most of the public engages and trusts histories presented to them by family members and historic sites and museums above else. College professors and books are much further down the list and media like magazines don’t even make it. Though written in 1998, the findings are still relevant: the indefinable “public” is reached through historic institutions and families.
In her book Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past, media historian Carolyn Kitch explores the ways in which small history museums, often those run by “non professional historians,” are where many people engage with their history.
So even if academic historians are not writing popular press books (which they are), professional public historians as well as local historians are engaging with public conceptions of the past every day.
Taken together, these books show the importance of both personal connections and public history practitioners, who are also historians, in reaching the public. The public trusts and respects museums and historic sites and many of the people reaching them are trained public historians, people actively engaging with issues of accessibility, humanistic study, and curation every day. In lambasting the profession for not engaging with the public on a regular basis, Lepore erases the contributions of the very scholars working day in and day out to engage the public with the humanities. Many of these scholars don’t have academic appointments. But many of them do, running public history graduate programs across the country.
Beyond this erasure, I’m unsure as to whether public engagement always needs to be the goal of the professional humanist. As a graduate student who blogs here at USIH, considers herself a journalist as well as an academic, and who has curated exhibits, I myself want to do publicly engaged scholarship. But scholarship doesn’t always need to be for public consumption. In Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics, brought to my attention by Professor of English at Oxford University, Merve Emre, Warner writes “should writing intended for academics in the humanities be readable for everyone when we don’t expect the same from writing in Physics? Isn’t such a demand tantamount to a demand that there be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of humanistic disciplines make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch in a discussion…be at no disadvantage compared with someone who has read widely in previous discussions of the issue.” (139). Doing good work in the humanities doesn’t mean everybody can and will read it. But there are certainly people doing good work, in public, everyday. These people range from my fellow bloggers here at USIH and at places like Black Perspectives and Public Seminar, to curators and historic preservationists at institutions big and small across the country, to academics like Kevin Kruse, fighting the good (and I am sure exhausting) fight on Twitter everyday. It’s not just the political biographers out there writing for the public, maybe we just have a different idea of who the public is anyway.
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Great post Holly. I always wonder if what we’re really after here is a public constituted of intersecting publics: the way that those “non professional historians” meet up with professional academic historians of various sorts meet up with students; the way that New Yorker readers and other kinds of reading publics (based on class, race, gender, region, taste, etc.) intersect. It always seems to me that what’s so fascinating about publics is that while in some ways they are fixed in place, the “public sphere” as a static entity, in many other ways they are more like atmospheres, they move around, they are permeable. I suspect its the margins and bridges between and among these many publics where the most intriguing historical exchanges take place. The publics called into being at the edges, in between the publics, may well be the most fascinating places of all.
Holly, thanks for this post. I read the Lepore interview with less of a critical eye — perhaps a failing on my part. I guess I’m so accustomed to the synecdoche of Harvard standing in for “higher education,” or the readership of The New Yorker standing in for “the reading public,” that I fairly glossed over what many have found problematic.
In Lepore’s defense, or at least in an effort to be charitable, I will say this: for someone coming out of grad school at Yale or Harvard or Princeton in the 1990s (or before), writing for The New Yorker as a regular practice would probably have been viewed with the same disdain, would have been seen as just as frivolous and transgressive, as blogging or Twitter is viewed by some academics today.
I was at a dinner once with a group of historians that included some Ivy League profs who were themselves products of the Ivy League. This was early in my USIH blogging career, and one of the scholars commented, “I would never allow one of my graduate students to blog.”
That was a bit of a revelation to me, for a number of reasons:
First, I learned that advisors get to “allow” and “forbid” things? Like, an advisor can say, “You may not write in this format, or for this venue,” and you have to mind them?
Second I learned that there was absolutely no value attached to “public writing” as opposed to original scholarly research and the dissertation / scholarly articles in the most elite programs. This is because the students of the most elite programs are competing with one another for those most elite jobs — the “audience” they need to reach with their work is small, and self-contained. Not even a piece in the New York Review of Books would help. And it really is the case that the old guard at elite universities (and maybe just the old guard in general) regards someone who writes for a public, any public, beyond the guild, as squandering their research time/talents.
So I guess what looks like an out of touch disdain for the hoi polloi to us non-elite, non-Ivy historians might really feel like a daring departure and a bit of a brave stand for a woman who made her way through a highly competitive graduate program, the graduate program for American Studies at the time (and probably still), among a scintillatingly brilliant cohort.
And of course, her paragraph — the nut graph for me — on how women’s intellectual authority is routinely undermined and delegitimized rang a bell and struck a chord. I have heard male scholars who aren’t a tenth as productive as Lepore in scholarship, never mind public-facing prose, dismiss the intellectual weight of her work — her Bancroft-winning work — and attribute her success to a writing style that masks a lack of substance. I am not joking. And I bet if I’ve heard it about Lepore, she’s heard it about herself and maybe to her face a hundred times. So I get how she feels like she is blazing a trail. She is.
Since she’s at Harvard — the pinnacle of the prestige economy of higher education — I would be very interested to know how Lepore advises her students when it comes to writing. Are they “allowed” to try their hand at writing for a public outside of the discipline? Does she encourage them to write other things while also thinking about their dissertation? Or is it a case of doing the hard and non-public work first as a way of “earning” the ability and the authority to confidently address a public?
In any case, I think all your observations about the places where most people engage with history are spot on. And though professors are far down the list, those of us who teach 150-300 students a semester are engaging a public. That’s a big crowd.
So I appreciate this critique, and I’m sure you’re right. I just have some sympathy for Lepore, who must have had it up to here in grad school just trying to prove, as women often do, that she belonged at the seminar table at Yale just as much as — and probably more than — the next guy.
Great post, but, as unobtrusively as possible, may I point out that if one were to remove the one line about a retreat from public scholarship, that interview remains fascinating from top to bottom? It seems surprising that commenters have not at all discussed her points about “epistemological mayhem,” political experimentation, and the possibility/desirability of moving past identity politics, all equally rich (and debatable) claims…
Oddly enough I’ve been hearing versions of Lepores lament since the 1980s and often by faculty at elite graduate schools. It was their way of rubbishing social history and bemoaning the loss off good old elite political and diplomatic history. So I’ll just point out two things. Lepore ignores public history that reaches much more diverse audiences through museums, historical sites and community history projects. And Newt Gingrich or Bill O’Reilly probably get more readers with just one of their books than Lepore has with all of her writing combined. If you find that depressing probably so did and does Howard Zinn.
True Ken, but in fairness she is talking about *writing* as distinct from other communicative practices — which it is.
It was the headline that irked me, implying that this was the reason for all the problems of the humanities. Also that the article was all about “The” public as though there was only the reading public and no others.
I haven’t read Lepore’s interview yet. Just as an addendum to LD’s comment above, I’d note that Louis Menand, with whom I share a first name but, alas, can’t claim to have much of anything else in common, is also a tenured Harvard professor and a staff writer for The New Yorker. So while I fully agree with LD that Lepore was doing some trail-blazing here, she wasn’t entirely alone.
Anecdotal on the subject of advisers “allowing” or “forbidding” their students to write for certain venues: I didn’t go to grad school in history, and my adviser was/is a political scientist. His first professional priority was his own research and writing (of which he did a *lot*), and although the issue of “appropriateness” of venues never arose in my case (I didn’t blog as a grad student), I’m quite sure he wouldn’t have given a f— where his small number of advisees wrote, or for whom. Speaking purely hypothetically, I could have written and published a comic book or a pornographic novel as a grad student, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have bothered him at all. N.b.: I was not in one of the most elite programs in my field, and I don’t claim this as any more than one person’s experience.
Louis, it’s nice that you had an advisor who didn’t try to dictate what you could and couldn’t write or when or to what audience. Perhaps that’s the norm, not the exception. But the whole notion of the advisor/advisee relationship as one in which there is a single gatekeeper — who must be appeased and even obeyed — structures a lot of academic life, especially in those elite programs. Think of the Avital Ronnell case, or the many #MeToo cases recently reported where women (and sometimes men), have put up with extraordinary bullying from an advisor / mentor out of fear of having that person sink their (future) careers with a bad letter of rec or no letter at all.
And if anyone, especially grad students, reading this is putting up with bullying from an advisor or some other senior scholar who menaces you with “consequences” if you do or don’t do X, Y, or Z, or who tells you to do something that doesn’t sit right with you and gives as an explanation, “That’s the custom in academe” or “That’s a standard practice in the academy,” I call bullshit right now. Reach out and build relationships with other scholars at other institutions, build or join horizontal/mutually supportive networks of scholars in your area of research, work with other academics on panels, etc. Very few of us will ever participate in the elite higher ed economy; in this non-elite economy, the imprimatur of one single Very Important Scholar won’t make much difference either way.
However, from Lepore’s interview, it sounds like her dissertation committee was wonderfully supportive of her scholarly work; but it’s a stretch to say that the academic culture then or now would have been or is supportive of her public-facing work.
Also, Louis, you mention Louis Menand — I’m curious how many times he’s been profiled or interviewed about his derring-do as a writer for the New Yorker, and I wonder if he too has caught a great deal of professional flack for writing books published with trade presses. Would Chronicle have drawn an illustration of him in shiny, shiny boots of leather and a star-spangled bustier? (I don’t remember the illustration of Lepore that she mentioned in the article — but that’s my mental image of Wonder Woman). Do scholars who haven’t published near as much as he has or reached near the audience that he has reassure themselves by telling one another that there’s really not much substance behind his work and it’s all in the writing style? Because I’ve heard that about Jill Lepore, and at the time I didn’t have the knowledge to judge for myself. But now I know professional envy and the wounded male academic ego when I see it.
As many commenters on Twitter have noted, and as I maintain, the heart of that interview was about a woman taking on such an ambitious project and, after all her academic and public success, still not being taken seriously.
I’m working on an ambitious project — at least it seems ambitious to me — a sweeping history of U.S. intellectual history from the Colonial era to the day before yesterday. It’s one of the reasons I’m lagging on my book under contract — I have grown world-weary of the gotdamn canon wars, and I’d rather nestle right back into historiography and the philosophy of history, where I am most at home. But I came away from USIH 2018 recommitted to my work, including the work that will allow me to keep doing my work, so sooner rather than later I will kick the canon wars to the curb in print and move on to what interests me most.
In any case, it meant a lot to me to read Jill Lepore’s assessment of her own work, the obstacles she’s faced, and the ways that more senior scholars have been supportive of her. And that line about women’s intellectual authority not just undermined but stolen — man, that packs a punch.
Well I’m planning to read the interview and once I do, I think I will agree with most or all of what you’ve said here. For now I’ll just say that the notion that her work is unserious, b.c some of it is written for a broad audience, seems ridiculous on its face. The list of historians who have written for a ‘popular’ audience is a long one, after all. So I’m fairly sure that envy, as you suggest, is at work here.
Thanks, Holly and all, for this conversation. In tandem with a 2016 workshop that brought together academic and public historians to discuss some of the ideas in play here, the Massachusetts Historical Society published this FREE e-book of thematic essays, “The Future of History: Historians, Historical Organizations, and the Prospects for the Field.” It’s a good read/springboard for more discussions: https://www.masshist.org/publications/future_history
I would also add a footnote to the effect that I doubt that Lepore’s interview is truly ‘infamous’ — I’m guessing that Holly’s remark is meant more provocatively than anything — but, more seriously, one of things that strikes me (as a non-historian) is that Harvard and Stanford have no problem handing out generous paychecks to people like Niall Ferguson, who seems to have become a sort of clubby propagandist for a set of superficial political prejudices. In contrast, both Lepore and Menand have kept to a high standard of both academic and non-academic production. Perhaps I’m misjudging Ferguson — and I suspect his earlier work had more depth — but at the very least conservative academics with a platform should be countered by colleagues with an equally visible platform on our side, and we can assist by being generous as well as critical.