Popular History and Academic History

Introduction

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0:11The best works of popular history transport us through time. They make us feel like we could have been there 50 or 100 or 1,000 years ago. Seeing what those people saw, experiencing what they did, seeing how the course of humanity's long journey changed because of their actions. Documentaries, podcasts, books, whatever the medium might be, the most outstanding works of popular history make the past accessible to those who don't have the luxury of spending their life studying it professionally.

0:45Far more people consume popular history than works written by academics and for academics. That's baked into their nature. Academic work is for specialists who need to be able to operate at a level of minute detail and hyper-focused knowledge. Popular history is for the masses, or at least some targeted portion of the general populace. That doesn't make popular history better or more worthwhile, though. It just means it's geared for a different audience that has different expectations and needs. While academic history seeks to inform and persuade, popular history also has to engage.

1:20That is its first and most essential role, to hold the audience's attention in ways that academic works simply don't have to consider. But that also gives them an influence that specialist works can't match. Books like that have changed my life, not just once, but many times. And I'm guessing that if you're listening to this, they might have done the same for you. Great popular history, the kind rooted in propulsive narrative, immersion in a world, and detailed research has extraordinary power.

1:52It alters how we see the world. It shows us where we stand in the decades, centuries, and millennia of our past. It makes us more empathetic, and frankly, better people, if we can understand the lives of those who have come before us. That's what truly great works of popular history do. They make the past, and the lives lived within it, accessible to the masses.

2:16History matters, but how we tell it matters, too. Grubhub plus membership auto-renews.

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Academic Background

3:30Hi, everybody. From Audible, I'm Patrick Wyman. Welcome to another episode of Tides of History. In what now seems like another life, I used to be an academic. When I was going through graduate school, I was mostly convinced that I was going to end up in a history department at some university, teaching undergrads and maybe the occasional grad student, doing research in archives and attending conferences where I would present my work to other academic historians. That obviously didn't happen for me, and I do not regret it at all. I would have been miserable doing the hyper-specialized work and terrible at getting along in a history department,

4:05endlessly frustrated at the minutiae of academia. That's not a knock on academia. It's about my fundamental lack of suitability for what that kind of profession entails, and I'm glad I never had to find out just how badly I would have fit in that context. Having a professor you love and respect tell you that you are, quote, an academic magpie collecting different interests and topics is a pretty good indicator that you're not cut out for it, and she was 100% correct. The reason I don't regret not taking that path, regardless of how well it suited me,

4:37is because I've had the opportunity to make history for popular audiences for almost a decade. In that time, I've learned a few things about making popular history. If you write several million words of podcast scripts in two books, you should learn a few things, and if you don't, well, you're probably not particularly good at the job, and I'd like to think I'm decent at it. Being even decent at something requires some self-reflection and consideration of what exactly you're trying to do, how you do it, and why it matters. That also means reflecting on the role of academic history in how I do my job.

5:12Both how I use what I learned in my eight years of training in graduate school, and how I relate to the specialized professional academic historians and archaeologists whose research allows me to make episodes and write books.

Making Popular History

5:25Today, we'll dive deep into this topic. I'll discuss what I found unsatisfying about academia as it was constructed during my time in it, what I also found unsatisfying about popular history as I found it, and how I've tried to work between those two worlds. My hope is that you'll come away with a better understanding of what academic historians do and why popular history couldn't and shouldn't exist without that work. So I'm going to start with some kvetching. Graduate school was difficult. That's not the part I'm kvetching about,

5:56because if you want to learn more about a specific topic than anybody else living or dead, the goal of a PhD, then you're going to need to overcome some difficulties. I didn't mind reading thousands of pages of historiography a week, the coursework, or taking my qualifying exams, a three-day process of writing that, once passed, allowed me to teach undergrad courses. The dissertation was hard, but it was supposed to be hard, because you're producing original research. Anybody who sails through a PhD in any topic is either way smarter than I am,

6:27or isn't trying hard enough. That is, at the end of the day, the purpose of academic history, to produce original research based on primary source material that expands our collective body of knowledge about the past. We lost about half of my graduate school cohort between the first year and the end, and that's pretty typical. One of my very best friends left before finishing, and it was absolutely the right decision for him. Nobody has to stay in a PhD program, and beware the sunk cost fallacy,

6:58which tells you that the time you've spent will be wasted unless you finish the job. That's nonsense. If you've learned things, it's not wasted. And I truly dispute whether having the PhD in hand actually makes folks with a background in the humanities more employable. If I could offer one piece of unsolicited advice, it's to not be afraid to quit something if it's just not working. But I digress. No, my kvetching revolves around the fact that nobody guiding me and my colleagues through graduate school seemed to have a clear view of what exactly we were being prepared for.

7:33The standard answer to that question was jobs in academic history, preferably on the tenure track. To the extent I can evaluate it, the people in charge of my graduate program did a reasonably good job on that front. We were encouraged to publish in academic journals, attend conferences, network with academics who had similar interests, apply for grants and fellowships, and spread our wings to visit new archives and research centers.

8:00Here's the problem, though. Those jobs that we were being prepared for no longer existed, at least not enough of them for all of us, even the half who made it, to have a reasonable shot at getting one. In 2013, a few years before I was set to finish, I went through all the job listings in the United States and counted all the newly minted PhDs in my field, ancient and medieval history. According to my math, there was one tenure track job for 16 new PhDs.

8:31Looking honestly at my body of work and the people I knew I'd be competing against for one of those jobs, I realized that my chances of actually getting one were slim to none. If you want to put all your eggs in a basket with a 6% chance of not shattering, you can be my guest, but I wasn't going to do that. I started looking into other career paths, realizing that at best, academic history was in the midst of a serious downturn, and at worst, I was the equivalent of someone trying to get into horse breeding a few years after the Model T started to roll off the assembly line.

9:02Maybe because they already had those jobs or because they were so fully institutionalized into an academic way of working and thinking, the folks advising me and my colleagues on our career decisions never wrapped their heads around that simple fact. The jobs they were theoretically preparing us for simply did not exist. I mean that literally. There was no amount of work we could do no number of conferences we could present at, no quality of original research we could publish that was ever going to change the fundamental dynamics

9:33of the job market. I watched over and over as tenured professors retired and were replaced with adjunct faculty rather than a tenure track hire. That model was dying before our eyes, and nobody in charge seemed to either realize it or, if they did, to have a plan to work around it for us. They were talking about cover letters rather than alternative careers, and that's always stuck in my craw more than a bit. The actual options were as follows. Number one, to swing for one of those rare tenure track jobs

10:06right out of the gate. Two, to try to make yourself a more attractive candidate by doing a postdoctoral fellowship and publishing more. Three, to go into university administration. Four, to start teaching classes as an adjunct, hoping to hold on at the fringes of the academic job market long enough to get a full-time position. Those options weren't mutually exclusive. Lots of people I knew took adjunct gigs, teaching as many as four classes a semester at four different universities, making maybe $30K a year with no insurance while they applied for jobs.

10:37Only a couple of them actually made it out of adjunct purgatory to full-time jobs. A couple are still doing the adjunct stuff, and most have moved on to other careers, because that's simply not viable forever.

10:50Watching that happen, I was determined not to waste a few years chasing a dream that didn't exist, at the end of which lay a job I knew I wasn't going to like or be particularly good at. So I started doing other things. I was a big fan of mixed martial arts and combat sports, so I built a second career on the side as a writer and podcaster covering those sports. Leaving aside the fact that I was doing a job I really enjoyed, talking with other people in the media and making what seemed at the time like decent money, it was a hugely beneficial learning experience.

11:22I learned how to do interviews, how to post on social media, how to pitch media outlets, and how to write for and speak to people who weren't specialists in the material I was covering.

11:33Nobody ever said a word about any of that in graduate school, not one word. I learned by watching, talking, and writing about a sport in which people punch one another in the face.

11:47The most important thing I learned from face punching, however, was that there will always be a next article, a next podcast episode, a next interview. There was no time or room to be precious about my work. I had to produce content, and that's a much different mindset than being told your goal is producing limited quantities of original research. That was the shift that had to happen before I could even consider making popular history. I had to get used to the idea of making stuff regularly, with no weeks off and no long breaks

12:18at the end of the semester to recharge.

12:22Writing one article or appearing on a podcast to talk about history is cool. Having a job in which you create popular history content for people that you can be proud of and which supports your livelihood is a rather more challenging thing. That was where I found myself in August of 2016 when I launched my first history podcast, Fall of Rome. All of a sudden, I was in a wildly different business than I'd been when I was covering mixed martial arts or slogging through my doctoral program. I had a PhD, but I had only the foggiest idea

12:52of what it meant to make history for anyone other than specialists. I was about to get a series of long, difficult lessons in the difference between academia and the rest of the world.

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Academic History

15:12that academic history is about creating new knowledge of the past. Digging into archives nobody's been to, finding new insights in texts that scholars have been examining for ages, creating data sets drawn from disparate materials, constructing novel interpretations that reflect a changing view of the source material, and so on. When I started doing popular history with Fall of Rome, I figured that I would just try to communicate this specialist material to general audiences, cutting through jargon, theory, and disciplinary insularity

15:43to convey where we were on these topics and what we should know. That was effective and it's still a really major part of what I do on a day-to-day basis making podcasts and writing books. It's pretty straightforward if not exactly easy. I read what scholars are doing, try to summarize it in reasonably plain language, and then convey what I've learned to you all. This requires me to know how to read academic works in history, archaeology, and related fields, and then to have the requisite familiarity and control over that material

16:13in order to make its meaning clear. But that's just the baseline for making something that's worth listening to. It's not enough to summarize material, no matter how cleverly you do it or how clearly you communicate what it says. That's what became really obvious to me after I started to consume the work of real, honest-to-goodness, highly accomplished popular historians, whatever the medium they preferred. I listened to all of Mike Duncan's history of Rome. I read all of Dan Jones's books and Roger Crowley's

16:44and Barbara Tuchman's. I went through the whole Oxford history of the United States and read every winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history over a couple of decades. If I was going to make popular history, then I was going to properly learn what good popular history looked like and figure out how and why it worked. I was also extraordinarily lucky that my dad, who passed away last year, was the most intense popular history enthusiast I've ever met. Every single night, he read for about 30 minutes, working through a book

17:14or two every month. They were always history. Because he did that for decades, my dad had an extraordinarily well-developed taste in the genre. He knew what he liked to read, and he wasn't shy about telling me what he thought worked and what didn't. Something my dad said early in that process was that he read popular history for the story. That was totally foreign to me at the time. Everything in my training in academic history had implicitly or explicitly shied away from what was disparagingly referred to

17:46as narrative.

17:49What I know now is that I was trained at the high watermark of postmodern thought in my discipline, the time when narrative history had hit its lowest point of acceptability among academic historians. I was taught to distrust narrative. The act of putting events in some sort of order, of picking and choosing what to emphasize and what not to, in service of a broader story, was anathema. In fairness, there were some reasonable concerns at play in this discourse. What even was an event?

18:20Could we rely on the texts that have come down to us from hundreds or thousands of years ago to reliably tell us what happened? How could we separate the underlying information in those texts about past events from the author's presentation and interpretation of those events? Those were the kinds of questions that obsessed historians, especially of the early Middle Ages, which is what I was studying, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That's the kind of stuff I was reading in graduate school and unsurprisingly, that's what I internalized.

18:53So imagine my surprise when my dad told me that he was reading these books for the story. It's not that he didn't care about the underlying information. He was happy to learn about the past, but he didn't want to be bored by what he was reading. He wanted a book that was going to hold his interest. Comanche subsistence practices could take up a page or two, but only if the author embedded that information within a narrative about the last Comanche war chief. German industrial capacity before World War I

19:23could occupy a few paragraphs, but it needed to come in the context of a larger story about the lead-up to the outbreak of the war. What kept him engaged and reading was the story, not the information. In that, I think he was something like the median consumer of popular history. It was a profound realization for me, and I realized that I agreed with my dad and that median consumer. It was, therefore, my job to keep readers and listeners engaged, not just inform them.

19:54This meant that if I were going to learn how to do popular history properly, I would need to learn how stories worked. Then, I would have to learn how to tell them. Not to get too philosophical, but we humans are storytelling creatures. We are wired in some profound way to consume information in story form, with an expected structure and format that goes along with that. Children tell stories instinctively, and the disjointed, jarring way their stories often sound to us grown-ups

20:25is a result of our more developed understanding of how stories are supposed to work. We shape our memories and offer accounts of events in story format, often unconsciously, so that we barely even realize we're doing it. But, here's the thing. Most stories aren't all that good, in the sense that they don't hook your interest as a listener, reader, or viewer. They miss a beat or some development comes in the wrong place, or maybe the underlying stuff being discussed just isn't that compelling.

20:56Without necessarily realizing it, people tend to have, in my experience, pretty decent taste in the stories they consume. Something about them works on some level. It's easy to denigrate bad storytelling, but bad long-form storytelling on a page or screen is still orders of magnitude more difficult than telling a ripper of a one-minute yarn about how you fell face-first into not one, but two different bushes in college.

21:23Telling stories well at a structural level, what goes where, and how you move through them, is hard. Telling stories that are structurally sound while ensuring that what they're about is also compelling is harder. If you're listening to this, I'd say you're more likely than the average person to have read and enjoyed a popular history book or five or twenty. Now, think of one or two you've really loved. I'd say my favorite might be Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August about the outbreak

21:53of the First World War. I'm guessing a few of you have read it, and it serves well enough as an example here. So, at the very beginning of the book, Tuchman paints us a scene of the old guard of European monarchs at King Edward VII of England's funeral in 1910. These are the opening words of the book. Quote, So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe,

22:24could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun.

22:41This is beautifully done. Evocative, full of images, a fantastic bit of scene setting to pull in the reader before Tuchman begins to dig into the real meat of the book in just a few pages. We get the sense that Tuchman could have drawn such a portrait of practically any event, but this is the one she chooses. That choice is meaningful. Tuchman is highlighting exactly what is going to be lost in June, July, and August of 1914 through the cataclysmic events leading up to and just after

23:13the opening shots of the war. The old Europe of crowned heads presiding over prosperous, optimistic, industrial juggernauts is about to breathe its last, and the world that eventually gave us Hitler, concentration camps, and the atomic bomb is about to begin. The whole big-picture argument of the book is present in the opening scene, encapsulated in the unlikely choice of a grand royal funeral as the reader's introduction to that time and place. It's not an image of trenches,

23:43a massed infantry attack being scythed down by machine gun fire, or Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It's the funeral, the cavalcade of gold braid and plumed helmets four years before a single shot was fired.

24:00Now, I'm not saying academic historians are incapable of writing scenes like this. There is some lovely writing out there, even in otherwise dense and specialized monographs. But they're fluff, or a flourish, or a nice thing to be able to do, not a necessity. I have a distinct memory of my dissertation advisor telling me not to write something like this too well, lest readers think I'm trying to cover up substandard argumentation. For popular histories, scenes like this are the whole point

24:30of the book. They're the hooks that pull in the audience, the anchors that keep the story as a whole grounded, and signifiers of the craft that keeps readers engaged with the subject matter for hundreds of pages. Tuchman understood that at a cellular level. It's why she sold so many millions of books. How and why that scene works in the way it does is the essence of what I had to learn about making popular history.

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26:33I examined Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Named one of the best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Thoughts Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves, and how we transcend them or don't. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or binge the whole series ad-free right now on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app. Every scripted episode

27:06of Tides of History begins with a scene for precisely the reason Guns of August begins with its depiction of Edward VII's funeral. Because it's my job as the writer to grab the listener's attention and ideally not relinquish it until the episode is over. Listeners and readers do not owe me their time. They can close the book, exit the podcast app, write a negative review, delete their subscriptions to the Patreon, send me an angry email, and tell everyone they've ever met that my work is garbage.

27:37On a really basic level, academic histories are not subject to those pressures.

27:43Graduate students will need to read that monograph, a single topic book, on imperial ideology in the Roman Empire, whether it is a delightfully written, engaging 300 pages or the worst slog you've ever imagined, as long as the arguments are good enough. Scholars will engage with essential arguments contained in books without anything like a narrative or any meaningful attempt to interest the reader because it's their job to understand the underlying material and make their own arguments about it.

28:12Reading these books can be fun and interesting, but that's not a requirement, and I've read more than a few that took my advisors' ideas about not writing too well to their logical and incredibly boring conclusion. Students can get up and leave the lecture hall if it's stultifying, but their grades will suffer. In some sense, the audience for these works has to be there.

28:37We've established

Comparing Genres

28:38that popular history and academic history are aimed at very different goals. Engaging and informing an audience on the one hand and producing original insights about the past from new research on the other. Those goals aren't necessarily in opposition to one another, but it's also not hard to see how they lead to strikingly different priorities in everything from framing a project to its final execution. The best work in both genres, however, utilizes the other to meet its core goals. Academic histories

29:08benefit when they consider the reader's interest and genuinely try to keep it because the argument, the intervention in a field of scholarship, sticks better. Popular histories are far more worthwhile and lasting when they engage with academic work on their topic in a deep, sustained fashion. Not just because that means the reader gets better information, but because it makes the story itself more compelling.

29:33That's why some of the very best popular histories have been written by academic historians. Their knowledge of the underlying world is so complete that their subjects seem to glide through it. The Oxford History of the United States series, which includes books like Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson and The Republic for Which It Stands by Richard White, really exemplifies the best possibilities here.

29:59But there are plenty of less compelling ways of doing the job. As a narrative that held my interest, I absolutely loved Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynn, which was a finalist for the non-fiction Pulitzer back in 2011. It's the story of the last Comanche war chief, Quanah Parker, and the Comanche as a whole as they clashed with the United States government in the second half of the 19th century.

30:24As the story of Quanah Parker and his family, this book is borderline riveting, conveying the experiences of abduction, escape, and cultural adoption through a personal lens. As history, however, and particularly a history of the Comanche, it's somewhere between disappointing and hot garbage. The reason for that is straightforward. However much work Gwynn put in on the story of Quanah Parker, the book doesn't engage with any recent scholarship on the Comanche and their world.

30:55For its accounts of the Comanche, Empire of the Summer Moon relies on a book that was decades out of date when Gwynn was writing in the late 2000s. That source book itself was written by an amateur historian, not a specialist in Comanche history and culture.

31:10Gwynn's ideas about who the Comanche were, what they did, and what they valued are so reductive and basic that they're flat out wrong. I've been told reliably that Comanches today hate Empire of the Summer Moon and it's not hard to see why. Since I first read Empire of the Summer Moon at the time of its release, I've read a lot more about the Comanche and the indigenous peoples of the Americas more broadly. Knowing what I know now, I cannot believe I ever liked the book at all.

31:40Most popular audiences, however, do not have the luxury