History for Non-History Majors

Came across the following short piece by Gordon Wood, recently - some nice points, and a good counterpoint to Limerick (see "Dancing with Professors" page, left):
"In Defense of Academic History Writing," The Art of History column, Perspectives On History (American Historical Association), April 2010.

I actually came across it while trying to track something down for the new page I just added to this blog, "History for Non-History Majors."  The title of the page is, of course, a reference to the chemistry-for-non-science-majors class I appreciated so much at UMass.  The professor (who looked like Alfred Hitchcock, especially in profile, as he stalked about the stage in front of the projection screen) passed around a bottle of goldschlager to illustrate the difference between a suspension and a solution and screened Simpsons clips to introduce classes on nuclear technology.  It was terribly simple, for the most part, and incredibly fun.  Along the way, I managed to learn some things.  Not a lot, but, then, I wasn't meant to.  The professor's stated goal was to have his students leave the class at the end of the semester with a more general knowledge of chemistry and science, and how it applied to our day to day lives.  For example, that we be able to come to informed decisions about the pros and cons of different energy sources, and which were best suited for our respective communities, were, say a wind farm or nuclear power plant be proposed in our home states.  Or how relatively dangerous the irradiation and chemical treatment (pesticides) of supermarket produce might be.

I think the books I will slowly be listing in the History for Non-History Majors page serve the same general function, leaving readers better informed about history than they were before they started.  And entertained, hopefully!
If any one of the small handful of you out there who read this has any suggestions, please let me know - especially since I realize what I consider 'light' and 'accessible' history might not appear the same to everyone...

I [heart] Patty Limerick

Update: to make it even easier to access the awesome essay "Dancing With Professors" it now has its own page, on the left.  Hope that's not a copyright violation!

Wrote a little post on my history blog, in a frenzy of "I love Patty Limerick"-ness, but I realized that nobody reads that besides me, and for once I actually have something to say that might be interesting/helpful to other people, so I'm re-doing it here. 
C and I had to read an essay by Tony Horwitz for class today, "The History Beat: How a Journalist Covers the Past" (Harvard Review 32).  It talks about the challenges (?) of writing about history in a way that will be accessible, entertaining, and compelling for casual readers.  It's a nice article, especially because I know most of the references, but it immediately made me want to go and re-read Patricia Limerick's "Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose," which is just totally phenomenal.  She writes about how skewed the world of academia can be when it comes to pretty much encouraging un-readable writing:

In ordinary life, when a listener cannot understand what someone has said, this is the usual exchange:



Listener: I cannot understand what you are saying.


Speaker: Let me try to say it more clearly.


But in scholarly writing in the late 20th century, other rules apply. This is the implicit exchange:


Reader: I cannot understand what you are saying.


Academic Writer: Too bad. The problem is that you are an unsophisticated and untrained reader. If you were smarter, you would understand me.


The exchange remains implicit, because no one wants to say, "This doesn't make any sense," for fear that the response, "It would, if you were smarter," might actually be true.


While we waste our time fighting over ideological conformity in the scholarly world, horrible writing remains a far more important problem. For all their differences, most right-wing scholars and most left-wing scholars share a common allegiance to a cult of obscurity. Left, right and center all hide behind the idea that unintelligible prose indicates a sophisticated mind. The politically correct and the politically incorrect come together in the violence they commit against the English language.

The full text of the essay can be found here, and I really, really urge any of my friends (or siblings, M!) who read this blog to check it out - besides the fact the writing is far better than anything I can offer you, so if you are looking to waste some time at work, you'll get more out of Limerick (you can also check out her webpage) than this blog, it's a really fantastic, fantastic essay, if you have any interest at all in writing of any kind.  That's all - carry on!