Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 1932-2012

Randall Stephens

Like so many others, I was sad to hear that Bert Wyatt-Brown passed away over the weekend in Baltimore.  His wife Anne relayed the news on Sunday. 

Bert is best known as an accomplished writer, historian, mentor, and leader of the historical profession.

Bert on the Maine coast, 2006

He served as President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (1994), St. George Tucker Society (1998-99), and Southern Historical Association (2000-2001).  He was a longtime supporter of the Historical Society and regularly wrote for Historically Speaking.  (See my interview with him here on this blog.)

He was the author over 100 scholarly articles and essays and wrote a variety of acclaimed books.  His Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Novelist Walker Percy called the book "A remarkable achievement--a re-creation of the living reality of the antebellum South from thousands of bits and pieces of the dead past."  "Unlike so many historians who have been interested in handing down judgments, favorable or unfavorable, on the Old South," wrote Harvard historian David Herbert Donald, "Wyatt-Brown has studied Southerners much as an anthropologist would an aboriginal tribe. An important, original book which challenges so many widely held beliefs about the Old South."

True to form, Bert just completed his last book not long before his passing.  I saw him and Anne in September and he was thrilled to have completed the project.  We were emailing back and forth last week about the images to accompany the text.  Titled A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation at Home and Abroad, it will soon be rolled out by the University of Virginia Press.

Maybe most importantly, Bert taught and mentored numerous students at the University of Florida, Colorado State University, the University of Colorado, the University of Wisconsin, and Case Western Reserve University.

As one of his many grad students, I can attest to his generous, wonderful spirit.  With funds from the Milbauer chair he filled at the University of Florida, Bert would help students attend conferences like the Southern Historical Association, the Saint George Tucker Society, the American Historical Association, and others.  He provided research money to students as well.  Many a dissertation was sped along by his help and keen interest.  Bert was a great prose stylist, more than happy to help his charges eliminate passive voice, dangling particles, unidentified antecedents, you name it.  He was tireless in his big-picture, content edits to dissertations, conference, papers, and articles.  (I can't imagine that my first book would have ever seen the light of day without his heroic reading of so many of my bad drafts.) Even after Bert retired he continued to meet with new graduate students at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.

Those who studied with him, knew him as a colleague, or friend will deeply miss his sense of humor, his joy for living, dinners and visits with him and Anne, and so much more.

He is survived by his wife Anne, a daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandchildren.

“No More Plan B”—Apocalypse or Opportunity?

Dan Allosso

Graduate students in the humanities are well aware that, in the words of Inside Higher Ed this week, many of our disciplines have promoted alternate career paths outside the academy while at the same time encouraging us to hold onto the hope that although others might need them, we won’t. Now, however, the president of the American Historical Association (AHA) has apparently committed his organization to admitting to history grad students that there are not enough jobs to go around, and the situation is not getting better.

These sentiments appear in a statement issued by Anthony Grafton, president of the AHA, and James Grossman, its executive director. The essay, titled “No More Plan B” and posted on the AHA website on September 26th, criticizes the traditional department’s approach to grad students on the grounds that it “ignores the facts of academic employment . . . it pushes talented scholars into narrow channels, and makes it less likely that they will take schooled historical thinking with them into a wide range of employment sectors.”

Now it would be easy to blame faculty for candy-coating both the overall change in the academy (or at least, in the humanities), and for making their program seem like one where these issues need not concern grad students. Would we be angry to find how few people our department has placed into significant, tenure-track positions in the last five years? But we’re all adults: why didn’t we know this going in?

Or—and this is where it gets interesting—if we really did suspect that the old center would not hold, why did we come anyway? Forgetting about the traditional academy and its appointment with oblivion, and remembering what we each, individually love about our discipline and subjects might be the key to personal solutions that will change not only our own outcomes, but the academy itself.

Yes, departments that can’t place PhDs should probably stop producing them. But what if this apocalypse for the academy liberates us, the grad students, and forces us to refocus? What do we hope to achieve by our work? What difference do we want to make in the world? Do we see ourselves teaching undergraduates in ten years, opening young people’s minds to creative, critical thinking; sharpening their analytical and interpretive skills; helping them learn to read, write, and speak effectively? If this is our core mission, does it matter whether the students are sitting in front of us in a lecture hall or convening in an online forum? On the other hand, if our main interest is research, or writing—either for expert audiences or for the general public—then perhaps the breakdown of the traditional professional model offers us a chance to focus on what we are really good at, and leave the rest behind.

The scary part is, we’ll have to really be good at it. The authors of “No More Plan B” hint that there’s something wrong with the idea that “the life of scholarship” protects us from “impure motives and bitter competition.” We shouldn’t see non-tenure track employment, they tell us, as a fall from “the light of humanistic inquiry into the darkness of grubby capitalism.” But it goes beyond simply embracing the market or awakening from a dream of the idealized, highly compensated academic life. The academy, after all, exists within society and the market, and responds—albeit slowly—to the needs and desires of students.

The rest of society has been struggling for a generation with many of the issues now facing the academy. Technology has been replacing humans on assembly lines, in service professions, and even in “Knowledge” work for decades. Globalization, outsourcing, and new media have changed or obsoleted entire industries. Along the way, the two questions that have been continually asked of each individual are, “what are your specific responsibilities?” and “what is your value-add?”

Steve Jobs was famous for promoting a corporate culture at Apple centered on the idea of the “DRI,” or directly responsible individual. Unlike many people at other companies (especially in Silicon Valley!) who rarely achieved anything from one staff meeting to the next, Apple workers got used to seeing a DRI name next to every task and action item. Individual responsibility helped the bottom line, of course; but it also gave people a way to say “I did that,” and know what they had contributed.

I’m not arguing that the academy should adopt direct individual responsibility—there are too many interests arrayed against it. I’m suggesting that each of us grad students can find a way out of the “Plan B” trap, by deciding what we do that benefits society (or the discipline, or the advance of useful knowledge, etc.), and then articulating it and doing it. What is our personal value-add? Regardless of whether we’re given an opportunity to do it in the institutional format we expected. After all, whose “Plan B” was it, anyway?

How Can Anyone Hope to Be a Successful Grad Student?

Heather Cox Richardson

Dan’s post of earlier this week coincided nicely with a conversation I had recently about what makes a good graduate student. While there is no doubt that the academy is changing very rapidly right now, I would argue that it hasn’t been the “traditional” academy since at least 1980. The changes Dan identified have been underway for decades: the market for PhDs has been appalling, the role of adjuncts has been growing, the nature of college and its students have been changing. It’s just that we’re only now acknowledging these changes.

So how can anyone hope to be a successful graduate student?

A conversation I had last week with another academic might shed some light on that question. This scholar is in cognitive psychology while I am in history, but otherwise our experiences in the academy have been similar. My friend graduated from the same university I did back in the early 1990s (although we met only a decade ago when our daughters became friends). Like me, she had a fairly rocky start in the profession—we were both denied tenure at our first jobs—but worked her way back up to a position at a top-notch university, a more prominent place than the one that denied her tenure at the start of her career.

Our histories are significant because, although we are in very different disciplines, when we got talking about what we thought made a successful graduate student, we agreed completely. It seems likely that our agreement came in part from the fact that the “traditional” academy did not serve us terribly well, so our careers anticipated the crisis to which Dan has recently called our attention.

Neither one of us is much impressed by students who are what we called the “stars.” These are the students with stellar grades who can reel off all the established studies in the field, who usually write beautifully, and are enamored of Becoming Academics. (Most students know these people from how badly they intimidated the rest of the students in introductory courses.)

In our experience, those people rarely have a future in the modern academy for two simple reasons.

First, they are very good at figuring out what’s expected of them in school, and of performing it with excellence. The problem with that sort of successful experience is that such students rarely can think outside the box. They do brilliantly in classes that cover established material, but they cannot come up with big new ideas on their own. They’re rarely very interested in deep research, preferring to cover established studies and engaging in only cursory investigations of primary material. Their class work is impressive; their own scholarship is not.

The second problem with the “stars” is they’re used to being at the top of everything. When they inevitably get sent back to the drawing board over something—and about 90% of what we do involves reworking our material—they simply fold. They have no resources to figure out how to beaver away at a project until they actually succeed. They’ve never had to.

My friend and I agreed that what we look for in students is passion. She told the story of one of her best students of all time, who came to her from a mediocre school where his grades had been up and down. But she took him because he had sought her out at a conference on her fairly rarefied scientific field when he was an undergraduate, and in their discussion, she discovered that he had paid his own way to the conference although it was a hardship for him. He loved the material so much he couldn’t be kept away. She accepted him into her lab, and he became the most productive and innovative scholar she has had. (She later learned the up-and-down grades had come from a family crisis.)

Students with passion can’t be discouraged. They’re in the profession not to Become An Academic, but because they cannot imagine life without studying their chosen field. When you hand back a dissertation prospectus for the fifth time covered with comments and criticism, they dig back in, not to please an advisor but because they really care about getting it right. When they do emerge with a final product, it’s new and exciting, saying something no one has said before. Because they’ve worked so hard on it, it’s also well executed and well written. It moves the field forward.

In the past such students might have been lost. They do not necessarily fit naturally into traditional departments. But now, the changing academy and the opening of the world with the internet means that such students can build a community and find new opportunities outside traditional channels.

Academia seems to be becoming more entrepreneurial than it has been in the past. This certainly poses problems, but it also offers an enormously exciting opportunity to advance scholarship in new ways and to reintegrate scholarship into the world outside the academy.

For the right kind of graduate student, the glass is at least half full.

Calling All Grad Students

Dan Allosso

Part of the title of my last blog post was “Notes from Grad School.” This is the tentative title of a series of posts by me and other graduate students, about our thoughts and experiences as we prepare to become professional historians. We’re hoping some of these posts will come from grad students who read this blog, whether or not they have posted with us before.

Graduate students in history face a series of challenges and opportunities. Some of these are similar to those faced by all grad students, some of them are shared primarily with grad students in the humanities, and some of them are ours alone. Among the topics we might cover in this series of posts:

Why did we enter a Masters or PhD program in history?

What do we hope to do and what do we expect to do when we complete our programs–especially if those two things differ?

How do we see and how does society seems to see the role of historians in our culture–especially if those two things differ?

How will changes in economics, technology, academic standards, and the nature of the historical profession impact our career choices and opportunities?

What is our sense of mission, and do the changes going on all around us signal new opportunities?

These are just a few of the topics on which it might be interesting to see the perspective from graduate school–there are probably many others that will occur to us as contributors come forward, and as the column develops. Contributors need not be experts in order to venture their opinions (as my prior post demonstrates), but in general this is envisioned as a place where criticisms are paired with suggestions for change, and the overall direction is toward solutions.

The perspective of the graduate student, of course, is the perspective of someone who is relatively new to the profession and seeing it with fresh eyes. Naturally, there will be some degree of “reinventing the wheel,” as a new generation of budding historians makes discoveries that may already be well known to older members of the profession. But, since every generation encounters a unique set of circumstances, and since our generation enters the profession during a period of remarkable technological change, we hope these notes will be fresh and interesting for the blog’s general readers.

If you are a grad student interested in sharing your observations about these or other issues, please contact me at dan@danallosso.com. Even if you have just a brief idea or a reaction to something, and you don't want to put together a blog post, drop me a line. I may be able to add your reaction to those of others, and say something more general about what people think as a result. And, if you're not a grad student but have some ideas you really want to get off your chest, fire away! The world is changing all around us--what does it mean for historians?

Teaching: An Imaginary Course on Very Cool Books

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, I killed some time creating an imaginary American history course. Its theme was not an investigation of some specific period of time. Instead, it was historiographical . . . in a peculiar way. It covered all the books that were revelations to me early in my career.

My course was chronological through my study of history. It started with Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a book that has been criticized from every direction and yet still seems to me to have gotten the most important part of a book right: it tried to answer a crucial question that sits at the heart of the conception of America. How did men who owned human beings come to espouse a philosophy of human freedom?

The next, obvious, book for my course was Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, a book I’ve cited so many times it’s the one citation I know by heart. The idea that political ideology was a world view created from ideas and experiences was such a revelation to me that I have spent my life studying it.

Richard White’s Middle Ground held me so spellbound that I read the entire thing standing up in the middle of a room; I couldn’t take the time to sit down on the couch ten feet from me. Who knew that you could look at American History from a completely different geographic perspective and tell a story that made sense—even more sense—than one told from the coasts?

I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in that same house, reading it cover to cover through the night during a week when I was the sole caregiver for a toddler and an infant—a good reflection of the significance of the book, but not a good decision for an already sleep-deprived mother. That anyone could weave such a textured portrait of colonial life out of the jagged threads of jotted phrases proved to me how much could be done in history, if only one had imagination and dogged determination.

At this point, though, my enthusiasm for my course slowed. The problem should be easy to see, perhaps, but I hadn’t seen it until I actually taught White’s Middle Ground in a historiography class once. These books were such classics from the minute they appeared that their ideas have been incorporated into our general understanding of the past. While I was wildly excited about Middle Ground, my students remained unmoved. Finally, one of them explained that while the book must have been a revelation when I read it, they had never known any historical world in which what he wrote wasn’t common knowledge. They couldn’t get excited about something that was to them, as she explained, “wallpaper.”

So I went back to the drawing board for my fantasy course. This time, my “classics” would either be newer, or less widely known.

Elliott West’s Contested Plains makes the cut easily. It’s a thorough portrait of the relationship of humans to the environment through a close study of the Colorado gold rush of the 1850s, but West doesn’t stop there. His larger point is the immense power of ideas, and he steps out of the safe tower of the academic historian to suggest that it is imperative for humans to imagine new ways of living together.

Eric Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley is still my favorite example of just what strong narrative technique can do to illuminate history. His rip-roaring portrait of the search for just why Leon Czolgosz murdered the president does more to bring the late nineteenth-century to life than almost any other book I can think of. Hey, he even explains that Czolgosz was pronounced “Cholgosh.” For that alone, the book belongs on a list of classics.

Like American Slavery, American Freedom, Bonnie Lynn Sherow’s slim volume Red Earth asks the right question. If Indian, black, and white farmers all got land in Oklahoma at the turn of the century, and if they all lived under the same laws, why did the white farmers end up with all the land? Her careful, detailed study of the answer to that question has a number of surprises, and complicates our picture of race in America.

OK, here’s a surprise one: Robert Mazrim’s The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln is about archaeology . . . mostly, sort of. Mazrim is an archaeologist, and he puts the archaeological record back into his investigation of the human history of the Sangamo region of Illinois. The book combines history with an explanation of how archaeologists work and the meaning of what they find. And Mazrim has an unerring eye for the great anecdote or piece of evidence. Who knew a book about dirt in the Sangamo region could be a page-turner, but it is.

I’m going to leave this here, with four old classics and four new ones. But I’m not going to drop this idea (there is, after all, always time to kill). Other suggestions for books that introduce new ways to look at the historical world are most welcome.

Visualizing Historiography

Dan Allosso

As a grad student preparing for Oral Exams, I spend a lot of time in a library carrel with piles of books. I’m trying to keep track of the connections between them, and simultaneously wondering how to think about historiography, for my particular project. Does it make more sense to trace the development of sub-disciplines like new social history? Or to group labor historians, regardless of the techniques they used? This question becomes even trickier, since the subject I’m exploring (American rural history) has much fuzzier edges than labor, or even than its own counterpart: urban history.

Nerd that I am, I naturally look to the computer for tools. I love Endnote, but it doesn’t really give me the note-taking and visual elements I want. So I’ve started using Tinderbox. It lets me extend the “post-it note on the plate-glass window” metaphor to extremes. But looking at the historiography visually has advantages.

I thought I’d draw American historiography as a tree (click image below to enlarge), so I’d be able to see how the different topics I’m tracing emerge like branches from a less differentiated body of earlier work. My reading list also includes a lot of iconic authors in the “trunk” area, but more single texts in the “leaves” area at the top. Time will tell, I suppose, which of the historians of the last three decades will emerge as “trunk” material. Or whether some of our current sub-disciplinary divisions will become permanent, leaving us without a single trunk at all.

The inclusion, placement, and arrangement of the authors and titles is completely arbitrary, of course, and represents my evolving ideas not only about how this material fits together, but about how it becomes meaningful to me. One of the interesting things I noticed, as I began building this list, was how much historiographies reflect the interests of their makers. The crowd of red on the left, for example, represents labor historians discussed in Francis G. Couvares, et. al., Interpretations of American History, which was one of my initial sources. I assume that, as I look at each of these authors, some will fall out of my tree. Similarly, as I continue reading environmental histories, I’ll be able to add more blue leaves to the tree, and make the appropriate connections between them.

The hidden advantage of Tinderbox is that all the content is XML, which means that it’s live and searchable. That means I can create agents that will sift all the pages behind these leaves, where I’ve attached my abstracts and reviews of these titles, ideas for my own writing, and even random notes. So it will be easy to see all the historians who’ve responded to Charles Beard or Frederick Jackson Turner, or all the books that discuss free banking or the agrarian myth.

The output side of this process is still a little sketchy in my mind. In the long run, I’d like to post something that would allow readers to navigate through the tree, and explore some of the material behind the leaves. But that’s several steps farther than I’ve gotten in exploring the software and refining my ideas. Thinking about output helps me grapple with the differences between learning this material myself, and communicating it to others--with taking what I’ve picked up on a personal journey through this material, and finding what’s relevant and interesting to other people.

So You Want to Go to Graduate School?

Randall Stephens

A big hat tip to Matt Sutton who passed along this hilariously bleak cartoon. It's a conversation between a college student and an English professor. "Humanities is under attack . . . You will begin to question the nature of your own existence."

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 2: Notes on Friday Sessions

Donald Yerxa and Randall Stephens

On Friday morning, Allan Kulikoff (University of Georgia) was offering a provocative proposal to solve the crisis in the history profession that included wholesale changes in the way graduate school programs are structured. (Listen to audio from the session):



And two rooms down the hall, sociologist Ricardo Duchesne (University of New Brunswick) suggested that "restlessness" was at the heart of Western uniqueness. Duchesne's presentation couldn't have been more different from Peter Coclanis's (UNC-Chapel Hill) plenary address the night before (which should appear soon on C-Span). And it is perhaps indicative of the culture of open conversation that the Historical Society works hard to foster that Coclanis, a past Society president, engaged Duchesne rather than dismiss him.

In the afternoon, there was a terrific session on the "Comparative Ways of War," featuring Brian McAllister Linn (Texas A&M and current president of the Society for Military History), Robert Citino (University of North Texas), and Peter Lorge (Vanderbilt). They combined formidable expertise in (respectively) American, German, and Chinese military history with healthy doses of caffeine-enhanced humor.

In the evening's Christopher Lasch Lecture, “How History Looks Different Over Time: The Case of the First World War," Adam Hochschild traced the development of two views of World War I in Great Britain that continue to confront each other today. One considers the war as noble and necessary. (Listen to the audio file here.)



It was the dominant view during the war and throughout most of the 1920s. But there was a minority view of the war during the same period that saw it as senseless slaughter inflicted by an incompetent military leadership. In the 1930s this second view gained ascendancy. World War II took center stage in the 1940s and 1950s, but since the 1960s the senseless slaughter view is almost universally held in Great Britain--save among academic military historians who have been influenced by Fritz Fischer's findings of Germany's bellicose intentions prior to 1914 and who have a greater appreciation for British generalship. As we approach centennial commemorations of WWI, Hochschild predicts that the competition between these two views will be on full display.

Liberal Arts, Humanities Roundup

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The following appeared in recent days. Just when you thought there could not be any more essays or forums on the decline in liberal arts education of the crisis of the humanities. . .

Nancy Cook, "The Death of Liberal Arts," Newsweek, April 5, 2010
. . . . But there's no denying that the fight between the cerebral B.A. vs. the practical B.S. is heating up. For now, practicality is the frontrunner, especially as the recession continues to hack into the budgets of both students and the schools they attend.>>>

Richard A. Greenwald, "Graduate Education in the Humanities Faces a Crisis. Let's Not Waste It," Chronicle Review, April 4, 2010.
I was recently reading Dr. Seuss to my 2-year-old daughter, when, bored of The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax, I picked up a lesser book from the Seussian canon: I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew. To my surprise, the plot of that little-known children's book reminded me a great deal of the current crisis of American higher education.>>>

"Graduate Humanities Education: What Should Be Done?" Chronicle Review, April 4, 2010.
Does graduate education in the humanities need reform? By nearly all indications, the answer is yes. The job picture is grim. The Modern Language Association is projecting a 25-percent drop in language-and-literature job ads for the 2009-10 academic year, while the American Historical Association announced that last year's listings were the lowest in a decade.>>>

Simon Jenkins, "Scientists may gloat, but an assault is under way against the arts" the Guardian, March 25, 2010.
Which is more important, science or the humanities? The right answer is not: what do you mean by important? The right answer is a question: Who is doing the asking?>>>

Elizabeth Toohey, "The Marketplace of Ideas: What’s wrong with the higher education system in the US and how can we fix it?" Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 2010.
The structure of the American university has long been a subject of contention, and now is no exception, especially given the current economic climate. Last year, Mark Taylor called for an end to tenure and traditional disciplines in The New York Times op-ed, “End of the University as We Know It,” and William Pannapacker’s column, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” was among the most viewed links on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website.>>>

Teaching the Writing of History Roundtable in January Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall J. Stephens

Graduate students know the drill well. Bulking up on historiography for qualification exams is a time-honored tradition. Who argued what, when, where, and why? What are the contours of the field or subfield? What did the transition from the orthodox position to the revisionist and then post-revisionist schools look like? Graduate students pore over books in dusty libraries and stare, red-eyed, at digitized articles.

Those who train historians pay a great deal of attention to arguments and counterarguments, theses and antitheses. In graduate and undergraduate research seminars professors also stress the importance of analyzing evidence, applying theoretical models, and making a plausible case. But is the same amount of energy and study devoted to the writing of history? “Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature,” wrote English historian C.V. Wedgwood, “history cannot be intelligibly written.”

In the lead piece of a roundtable on "How to Teach the Writing of History" (Historically Speaking [January 2009]), Stephen Pyne discusses the importance of train historians how to write and offers useful examples of pedagogy. His remarks are followed by reflections from Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, and John Demos. I post excerpts from each here.

[The full forum will be available at Project Muse. Subscribe to HS to read more.]

HOW TO TEACH THE WRITING OF HISTORY: A ROUNDTABLE, Historically Speaking (January 2009)

Riding the Melt*
Stephen J. Pyne

History is a book culture. We read books, we write books, we promote and award tenure on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. We’re a book-based discipline. But we don’t teach how to write them. It’s an odd omission. We accept statistics, geographic information systems, languages, oral history techniques, paleography, and other instruments as legitimate methodologies; we don’t accept serious writing. Good writing seems to mean using the active voice, not confusing “it’s” with “its,” and where possible, shunning split infinitives. We obsess over historiography, note the distorting power of literary tropes, and list the fallacies of historical arguments, but don’t understand the medium that carries our message. Literary craft remains a black box, like the software running our laptops. Yet we cannot avoid words, and careers rise and fall on the basis of what we publish; we just don’t explain how to transmute research into texts. The kind of writing we do doesn’t even have a name. So while many practitioners seem keen to unpack texts, few seem eager to teach how to pack them in the first place.

Why? It may be that the simple production of data has become a sufficient justification for scholarship. . . .

A few years ago, on a stint as a visiting professor, I was asked to lead a morning seminar on writing. That sparked my amorphous concerns into a desire to offer a graduate course that would address the theory and practice of making texts do what their writers wished. It would be English for historians, as we might offer statistics for ecologists or physics for geologists. It’s been the best teaching experience in my career. . . .

* An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Chronicle Review, July 12, 2009.

Historians on Writing
Michael Kammen

Historians distinguish themselves in diverse ways, yet relatively few are remembered as gifted prose stylists, and fewer still have left us non-didactic missives with tips about the finer points of writing well. Following his retirement from Cornell in 1941, Carl Becker accepted a spring term appointment as Neilson Research Professor at Smith College. Early in 1942 he delivered a charming address in Northampton titled “The Art of Writing.” Although admired as one of the most enjoyable writers among historians in the United States, Becker’s witty homily for the young women that day concerned good writing in general, and his exemplars ranged widely. He cited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, because “the author’s intention was to achieve a humorous obscurity by writing nonsense. He had a genius for that sort of thing, so that, as one may say, he achieved obscurity with a clarity rarely if ever equaled before or since.” . . . .

. . . Samuel Eliot Morison, who took Parkman as his model, lamented that American historians “have forgotten that there is an art of writing history,” and titled his homily “History as a Literary Art.” Subsequently Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., George Kennan, and C. Vann Woodward also provided instructive essays explaining how and why historical writing might flow in a creative manner that can engage the general reader. . . .

How to Write a Paper for This Class
Jill Lepore

I have got a handout I’ve been using for a while now. It’s your basic, How to Write a Paper for This Class. Everyone’s got one of these handouts. Pyne’s new book amounts to a handout that might be called How to Write a Book for This Profession. I’m glad he’s written it and can’t think of much he’s said, in this excerpt, that I’d disagree with, except that I happen to think that learning how to write essays is just as important as, and maybe more useful than, learning how to write books. I am not convinced that books ought to be the measure of merit in our profession. Nor am I convinced that all historians ought to write books— and, in any case, not all do. Everyone has got to know how to write an essay, though. That quibble aside, I certainly don’t dispute Pyne’s premise: historians generally don’t care much about writing, and they should, although a surprising number believe, pretty fiercely, that they shouldn’t. . . .

Response to Stephen Pyne
John Demos

My first reaction on reading Stephen Pyne’s essay was “hooray!” And so was
my second. And my third. Without much recognizing it, historians have—for several generations now—downgraded the writing part of their task. Time was when writers of history held a solid stake within the larger domain of serious literature: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott are the first, most obvious, names to come to mind. No doubt the change, the downgrading, has had much to do with professionalization; as the discipline became, in fact, a discipline, priorities shifted. Perhaps there was something of a seesaw effect: when concern with research and interpretive technique went up, prose composition went correspondingly down. What “good writing” has come to mean, in the minds of most historians, is clear and effective communication: getting your point across.

It ought to mean so much more. Pyne is absolutely right to spotlight the importance of evocation alongside exposition, and voice as much as thesis. . . .

I believe, however, that Pyne is mistaken in one respect: his insistence that history be sharply distinguished from fiction. No boundary line divides the two; at most there is a wide and nebulous borderland. Open any work of history, even the most conventional sort, and you will find statements that involve a degree of “making it up.” We are always filling little holes in our evidence with bits of inference or outright invention—whether we acknowledge this or not. (And better, for sure, if we do.) . . . .

P.S.: Robert Townsend has alerted me to an interesting piece he wrote at the AHA blog back in 2008: "From the Archives: Why Can’t Historians Write?" He discusses the perennial conversation about bad writing within the profession. A 1926 AHA report, linked to the post, reveals similar concerns from yesteryear. "Instead of the current bugaboo of postmodernism," writes Townsend, "the authors blame the scientific pretensions of their day for elevating 'Facts' over a more 'humanized' form of writing. And where errant politics is blamed, they cite the excesses of commercialism and the nationalistic sentiments marked by First World War."

Training Graduate Students in the Writing of History

Randall Stephens

In the Chronicle of Higher Education Stephen J. Pyne writes: "History is a book-based discipline. We read books, we write books, we promote and tenure people on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. But we don't teach our graduate students how to write books."

Pyne concludes: "Before writing can be taught seriously to graduate students in history, their professors will have to agree on what good writing means, decide that it matters, and accept themes as well as theses."

Pyne's essay is based on his recent Harvard University Press book on the same topic. In Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction he argues that literary considerations should enhance the writing of history. Pyne looks at how setting a scene, creating suspense, and shaping the narrative arc all improve works of history.

Pyne has summarized his arguments in a piece that will appear in an upcoming issue of Historically Speaking. His essay will serve as the starting point for a roundtable on the subject. Other historians will weigh in and speak about their experience in and outside of the classroom.