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10/27/2004

Comments

Michael

A very interesting post. I might write a piece about the article soon, but I do have several comments to share. As an academically trained historian, I do understand Hoffer's concern about historians who hide behind jargon and footnoes (although I disagree with his conclusions about the problems this creates). You are right that most of the professional history books that get covered in the mainstream press employ a muted "rousing narrative" -- but these are a tiny percentage of the professional history books that get produced each year. Most academic historians (unfortunately) write only for trained specialists, in the way that academic physicists write for each other, or medical researchers do. More important, most professional historians have also largely abandoned narrative because of its limitations, especially in monographs and scholarly journals (textbooks, however, still sometimes employ narrative). Now, if "popular" histories would follow the same path, they might have more to offer than they typically do.

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