“The interior of the Sultan Beyazıt Public Library.” Abdullah Frères, photographer. Istanbul, 1880-1893, Library of Congress.
Once, I went to a reading group meeting, for a book I greatly admired. It told a history of a region by using different objects as a prism and I was captivated by the book’s lush language. I found myself putting aside my pen and pencil while reading so I could just enjoy being a reader. But when it came to the actual discussion, the majority of the evening was spent languishing over a comment made that the book, a historian’s first book-length publication and based on their dissertation, was too simply written.“But it’s like a novel.” The critical member of our group said. “I could read it in bed.”
There’s a lot of sneering that can go on in a reading group. Oftentimes historians in such a group –and on Twitter, which has unwittingly provided historians with a twenty-four hour book club– will complain there aren’t enough footnotes or that it’s not a rigorous enough study (although these commentators often won’t elaborate how it fails to meet their standards to begin with).
But this sneering comment also begs the question: Who do historians write for?
The short answer is that historians write for other historians, that is if they’re writing in specific genres. There are four types of publications academic historians, namely those on the tenure track, write.1 The monograph, which is a full-length book on a specific subject (like some of the books on this list): it is considered essential for getting and keeping a tenure-track job. Journal articles, which range from four to ten thousand words, also are critical towards receiving tenure and are also on a specific topic. Journal articles are peer-reviewed, which means they go through a process by which a journal editor gives the article to other experts in the topic the article is on and they provide feedback advising if the article should be published.
There are also non-peer-reviewed publications. Chapters in edited volumes are similar to journal articles and while they are edited by the volume’s editors, they are generally considered less rigorous studies because they’re not necessarily peer-reviewed. Book reviews appear in journals too but are not peer-reviewed: instead they’re considered “service to the profession” as they comment on the quality of a monograph, although they really have little weight in the tenure process. Exhibition catalogs and digital humanities projects are also vaguely “things academics write,” as well as textbooks; like the book review and the edited volume, they’re also not necessarily highly considered in the tenure-track process. Some history professors, especially if they’re more advanced in their careers, can also write trade books, meant for a mass audience.
So what makes all of these different genres of historical writing specifically for historians?
To some extent, it’s access. Academic books are expensive, ranging from twenty USD to several hundred dollars, although historians don’t really get paid much for writing monographs or journal articles.2 Tenured professors might buy books for themselves or get them from academic libraries. If a tenured or tenure-track professor is lucky enough to have a research fund, they purchase academic books for their personal collections using those funds. Most journal articles are behind a paywall and even a generous research fund can’t fund access, so you need an academic library to cover that cost; if you’re not affiliated with an institution, this can be tricky but not completely undoable, just exhausting and potentially expensive.3 But there’s also the burden of knowing these books exist and keeping up with both university presses and the larger corporate academic publishers like De Gruyter and Springer. Not every bookstore or public library stocks academic books. Searching for different topics online might expose curious minds to hyper-focused academic histories. But they’re still largely not written for readers who are not historians.
But, to echo that reading group colleague who thought the book was too simple, it’s also about tone and structure. It’s not necessarily about how complicated or intricate the language of a book is. Many genres we consume on a day-to-day basis, from science fiction and fantasy to Twitter, are complex and are imbued with their own genre’s history. But unlike P. Djeli Clark’s excellent 2020 novella Ring Shout (it’s an alternative history: he’s a historian, too!4) or the 2017 film Get Out, academic writing is not necessarily written to entertain. It’s meant to convey an argument, consisting of information and analysis, and to do so otherwise is still considered frivolous.
Historians learn this style by reading other pieces of academic writing, by being in workshops with one another and by receiving feedback from mentors and peers in seminars or over emails. Language that is too “colloquial” is discouraged. There is a tendency, depending on the subdiscipline, to also favor longer sentences with multiple clauses. In historical writing, a very clear structure is expected, with lots of topic sentences at the head of paragraphs. In academic books, part of the introduction is used to introduce the structure of the book and provide a summary of its structure; journal articles might include a structure paragraph in the introductory section as well. On my less generous days, I roll my eyes at academics mocking the five-paragraph essay school-children are taught in many parts of the world, when their own work looks like a five-paragraph essay, but opened accordion-style.
I also roll my eyes at the assumption that how easy a book is to read means it’s watered down. That attitude is dismissive of the tremendous skill that it takes to tell a story beautifully, to build a narrative. I roll my eyes because it’s a comment I’ve actually heard and it’s taken seriously. Think of your audience, I’ve been told. I am thinking of my audience. I want my work to be accessible and I layer the communities I value into my work. I want my reader to enjoy reading it as much as I want to challenge myself writing it.
But focusing on a broader, more complex audience is a public history approach to history. Despite the history of it all, history and public history are separate fields. Public historians work at museums, parks, historical houses, galleries, archives, publishing companies, non-profits, corporations and more; they’re taught to think of how to balance multiple audiences. History PhD programs train historians specifically to be tenure-track university professors, not necessarily giving them the skills of historians with training or experience in public history. Public history can also refer to the writing done for the public, be it by a journalist, contingent faculty, or a high school student. What separates history and public history most of all is method: Public historians are taught to think of their audiences in conversation with themselves. They ask their public what they want out of their experiences at a museum or historical house, adjusting accordingly. They then listen carefully and try to realize it in an exhibition or even an online magazine, like *winks* Contingent, Insurrect!, Egypt Migrations, The Maydan, or Hazine, which I help edit.
Writing or producing works of public history explicitly is not considered advancement to become a tenure-track professor because it’s seen as too accessible or not rigorously reviewed, like a peer-reviewed work. Oftentimes, it receives the same sneering like that reading group I attended. It’s seen as “easy,” disregarding the tremendous amount of skill and editorial infrastructure it takes for a writer to get their work published in a magazine.
I should make it clear that I don’t wish all historians did public history. For one thing, in my field, the history of Islam, there tends to be little consideration of the global communities who actually have a connection to these histories. Historians working on the Muslim world spend little time with Muslims in their own vicinity. They don’t necessarily have the knowledge or the networks to know how these communities consume information or what information they might want. In my own communities, most of our historical expertise isn’t in the form of an academic monograph either: it’s in our artistic practices, our theologies, or our own ways of documenting oral histories. It’s also difficult to see professors who have personally sneered at the work of public history later taking it up when they’re tenured or because they’ve finally been convinced of its value. At this point, they’re taking away opportunities from people who’ve worked to build that skill.
But also, many publications for the public often – like with peer-reviewed publications – don’t always pay historians for their writing, assuming a cushy university job subsidizes the work. This in turn devalues the work done by contingent faculty and independent scholars, who, often when asked for pay, often at public history blogs run by tenured faculty or as part of a history column for a paper, are told they are paid in “prestige.” Many of these publications also offer little editorial support, too, which denies writers the space and confidence to develop their skills in the publishing sphere.
My writing, both academic and otherwise, is always inspired by the people I know. One article, on contemporary practitioners of Islamic art, like calligraphers, geometers, or ceramicists, was asked the questions the global Muslim community often posed to me, as someone who works on material history: Are there people who do Arabic calligraphy today? Can I learn how to do it? Writing the piece –titled Is there an Islamic arts ‘revival’? – mandated a different style than I was used to, but I studied the particulars of writing culture features for newspapers. I had to approach writing a culture feature with respect for the form, but also, the confidence that my own writing experience should shape the feature itself. So I took what I learned and mixed it with my expertise and my creativity. It’s not an uncommon story: most of the best people writing on history for the public are graduate students or contingent faculty who are also self-taught. But even as I experiment and learn new writing styles, I know I’ll be learning how to write and produce for the public for the rest of my life, supported by the excellent editors I meet along the way.
But maybe, when I asked Who do historians write for? I wasn’t being fair. Whether a historian is writing a museum label, a neighborhood plaque with historical information, or a script for a podcast, they’re writing for an audience that isn’t historians and as the conversation grows about who gets to be a historian, maybe things will shift. Good people, namely outside of reading groups, are doing the work to build the infrastructure and communities we will need as the university becomes less relevant to the building of historical knowledge. I’m hopeful for a future with more creativity, mentorship, and less sneering.
“The interior of the Sultan Beyazıt Public Library.” Abdullah Frères, photographer. Istanbul, 1880-1893, Library of Congress.
- If you’re unclear on the difference between tenured, tenure-track, or contingent faculty members, Contingent has two excellent breakdowns; contingent faculty also put out books and there’s an explanation of the process here.
- See Erin Bartram’s March 2019 mailbag, “How Much Money Do Historians Make From Their Writing?”
- A research project, be it a journal article or a monograph, can take hundreds of sources; a historian without institutional affiliation –let alone a tenured academic with a research budget– would not be able to afford all of this alone and not every academic library stocks every academic book published. Most independent historians rely on an affiliation with a local university or colleagues with access who can download journal articles for them.
- P. Djeli Clark is the pen name of historian Dexter Gabriel, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. For more of his work, check out his 2021 novel, A Master of Djinn.
