Spotlight/Insight: USIH Prize Winners Reflect–Nick Witham

Welcome back to the S-USIH Spotlight/Insight series! Previous entries in this week’s series were for Eran Zelnik, Eli Cook, and Keith Woodhouse. Today’s interview features Nick Witham, Associate Professor of U.S. History at University College London, UK, and Co-Editor of the Journal of American Studies. Dr. Witham won the 2017 S-USIH Dorothy Ross Prize for his article “Popular History, Postwar Liberalism and the Role of the Public Intellectual in Richard Hofstadter’s The America Political Tradition (1948)”.

What are you working on now?

Nick Witham: I am currently finishing a book manuscript, The Popular Historians: US Historical Writing and the Search for an Audience, 1945-present, which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press and due for delivery at the end of 2020. The book provides a history of five high-profile professional historians and their efforts to write for “popular” audiences during the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Richard Hofstadter, Gerda Lerner and Howard Zinn. I’m interested in what motivated them to write for audiences beyond their immediate academic peers, the relationships they developed with publishing professionals, particularly editors, to support this work, and then, finally, how the books were encountered and understood by their readers as part of the everyday act of reading. I’ve found fascinating materials on all of these questions not only in the historians’ personal papers, but also in the records of their publishers.

The book’s overarching argument is that accurately placing the concept of the “popular” in post-war historical writing demonstrates the intricacies of historians’ understandings of, and relationships with, their audiences. Far from constituting a narrative of declension, in which historians gradually lost the ability to write for a singular general audience amidst the suffocating context of disciplinary specialization, the story of post-war popular historical writing helps bring into view the multiple conceptualizations of the “public” that existed in the minds of historians, publishers and readers. Unraveling this web of ideas is important because it offers new insight into the professional lives of American historians, but also because it provides an opportunity to chart the post-war fracturing of liberal ideas about an educated American populous that could produce such a general readership. In its place emerged multiple and competing conceptualizations of who readers were that owed much to the activist politics of the post-war period. This new understanding shaped not only the historical profession and the publishing industry, but the very ideas about American history that were transmitted to readers via popular historical writing.   

Within our field of intellectual history, what topics or approaches are you excited about?

Nick Witham: I’m starting to think about my next project, which grows out of the one I outlined above. I’ve found so much brilliant material in the records of publishers that I want to conduct more work on the vital role they played as co-producers of knowledge in history and other humanities and social science disciplines that crossed the boundary between the modern university and reading publics. In this, I want to fuse book and publisher history with intellectual history in new and exciting ways. My thinking on this has been profoundly shaped by reading Paula Rabinowitz’s book American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (2014). Another person who is doing this type of work with particular skill and insight at the moment is Peter Mandler, who has recently published two articles on the “paperback revolution” that break important new ground: one on British and American publishers in Past & Present and another in History of the Human Sciences on the way that the languages of social science came to impact everyday life.

Beyond this, I retain the interest I derived from my PhD and first book project in transnational intellectual and cultural histories of America in the world. In my teaching about these topics, I particularly enjoy reading and discussing with students recent scholarship on black women’s internationalism by scholars like Keisha Blain, Imaobong Umoren and Annette Joseph Gabriel, all of whose work I find hugely engaging. In the last few years I’ve also started supervising some really exciting doctoral candidates in U.S. intellectual history, who have prompted me to read to some authors – Joan Didion, Irving Kristol, and Michael Walzer, to name three – who I’d either never read, or have very much appreciated returning to.

This year, our annual meeting theme is “Revolution and Reform.” Can you reflect on how those ideas connect to your scholarship? 

Nick Witham: All but one of the historians I am writing about in my Popular Historians book (Boorstin, Hofstadter, Lerner, Zinn) were, for short periods of their lives, either members of the CPUSA or close fellow travellers. I’m interested in thinking about their various paths from Depression-era revolutionary ideology to the writing of mass market popular history, and how this shaped their ideas about authorship and audiences. What made popular history “popular” for intellectuals who were so clearly shaped by the thought and culture of the Popular Front? The exception is John Hope Franklin, who was never a communist, but whose intellectual trajectory was very clearly shaped by his career-long study of the relationship between race and reform in American history. The reception of his work, in particular From Slavery to Freedom (first edition 1947), was also molded in important ways by the ideas of revolutionary black power intellectuals like Harold Cruse and Vincent Harding. So, even though I hadn’t really thought about it until I approached your question, I guess revolution and reform are intimately connected to my current scholarship!