It is a fair question. Historians spend an extraordinary amount of time complicating things. We complicate heroes. We complicate villains. We complicate timelines, motives, causes, categories, and outcomes. We discover exceptions to rules and then rules to explain the exceptions. We write entire articles to explain why a term meant something slightly different in 1849 than it did in 1850.1 We are, professionally speaking, difficult people to the majority of those outside the discipline.
This reputation is strong enough that many crossover works, in particular, popular history podcasts, seem to define themselves against it. Titles like History That Doesn’t Suck or Digging a Hole succeed in part because they both satirize common perceptions and presumably promise listeners something different from what many imagine academic history to be: less jargon, fewer caveats, maybe even a story with a satisfying conclusion. This contrast seems to explain one of the most common questions I encounter outside of the academy: If history is just what happened, why do you all make it so complicated?
In academic settings, my audience consisted of other historians, and our basic assumptions were largely shared. Nobody needed an explanation for why a source could be simultaneously valuable and unreliable, or why the discovery of new evidence might force a reinterpretation of familiar events. Those habits of mind were simply part of the terrain.
Now, as a public historian, I recognize how critical it is to justify these methods upfront. This becomes especially relevant when context, legal nuance, or archival contradiction threatens a cleaner story or unsettles narratives that have long felt settled to the general public. In those moments, what a historian understands as necessary precision, an outsider may perceive as unnecessary obstruction. Historians complicate, clarify, and add context not because we enjoy making stories harder, but because context can change what a story actually means. And yet, when historians are interpreting the past for non-academic audiences, we must complicate without the help of lengthy discursive footnotes. Doing this effectively and responsibly is a matter of civic importance. In the corners of the discipline where I spend most of my time—legal history and religious history—historical narratives rarely remain confined to the past. They shape institutional identities, inform contemporary debates, and can even carry legal consequences.
I first encountered the practical side of this divide in my first job after college, working on a Mellon Foundation Monuments Project funded initiative at Washington National Cathedral. The project’s guiding ideas were familiar ones to historians: Do monuments reflect contemporary values? How should institutions tell fuller stories about the past? On paper, these seemed like straightforward historical questions.
Washington National Cathedral, Photograph by Duane Lemke, Public Domain CC0 1.0.
Monuments, after all, are unusually public historical objects. Most people never read a scholarly article or visit an archive. But they walk past monuments—sometimes they protest them. They argue about them in online forums and at dinner tables. Unlike a museum exhibit, a monument remains in place, becoming part of the landscape and, often, part of an ongoing argument about the past.
The Cathedral’s 400,000+ annual visitors comprised a diverse public. Some arrived with graduate degrees and a decades-long interest in history. Others were middle school students making their first trip to Washington. What united them was shared curiosity more than expertise. And again and again, I found that public audiences asked questions that differed from the historiographical concerns that had shaped my education.
A grotesque of Darth Vader has looked down upon visitors since the 1980s. Public Domain.
Most of the time, the questions were simple. Visitors wanted to know who had decided to put a particular figure or image there, or why a statue looked the way it did. Tourists frequently pointed to the building’s modern installations and voiced interest in carved stone images of modern icons like Mother Teresa and Darth Vader sitting right next to traditional religious stories told in stained glass windows. They wanted to know how such different figures could occupy the same spaces. The questions revealed what people noticed, what mattered to them, and where the story could connect to their lives. My job wasn’t to show off all the complexities I knew or to translate niche facts of church and architectural history. It was to weave those complexities into a story that made sense to them.
That was the challenge and the opportunity for the main project I staffed—work related to the replacement of two stained-glass windows that depicted and honored Confederate Generals Lee and Jackson. The existence of these windows sparked years of debate. In 2017, Cathedral leadership announced that the windows would be removed. But what would replace them? To ensure an inclusive decision and foster critical conversations, the Cathedral invested heavily in public engagement. There were public forums, educational programs, K–12 initiatives, a book, an oral history project, a documentary, archival work, and countless smaller conversations that rarely appeared in official reports. The project brought together people who might otherwise never have shared a room: nationally recognized experts, community advocates, church members, students, and visitors simply trying to understand changing historical narratives. We introduced historical complexity by creating space for conversations in community.
The Cathedral’s convening power created a space where expertise mattered, but it did not stand apart from public experience. Instead, the two were asked to meet each other. By the end of the project, I had learned that many people were not necessarily asking for simpler answers. They were just as much asking us to explain why the complexity mattered. Now, visitors to the National Cathedral see “The Now and Forever Windows,” created by Kerry James Marshall to illustrate African American resistance and resilience.2
“The Now and Forever Windows” by Kerry James Marshall at the Washington National Cathedral. Photograph by Daniel Lobo, Public Domain CC0 1.0.
After my time at the Cathedral, I moved into a very different setting: an appellate law firm that worked at the intersection of legal history and constitutional litigation. Here, historical narratives were not just contextualized and interpreted, they were mobilized for a larger policy purpose of some form or another. Briefs drew on history to make arguments in cases involving voting rights, racial justice, and other areas where the past carried direct legal weight: take, for example, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024), where some constitutional advocates in law firms and legal historians in traditional academic settings considered histories of “cruel and unusual punishments” and nineteenth-century vagrancy laws in making their cases.
Working in development at the firm meant thinking less about interpretation itself and more about how that work was supported and sustained. History became something you had to make legible not only to judges and clerks, but also to funders and institutional partners who were deciding whether the work would happen at all. And it raised a familiar question in a new form: in settings where you cannot simply bring a senator, a celebrity, or a national stage directly to a particular stakeholder—whether it be the public, media, a funder, or courts, among other possibilities—how do you communicate the value of historical work? What tools, strategies, and collaborations actually allow history to travel beyond expert spaces without losing its complexity?
I never quite found clear answers to those larger questions, though they stayed with me as I moved to my current role. I now work at a trade association for lawyers where one of my responsibilities is supporting a traveling exhibit program. While the setting is different, the underlying challenge remains familiar: figuring out how to make historical research resonate. My audience these days is a professional community that is itself highly specialized, deeply attentive to detail, and not always inclined to take claims at face value. In practice, that has meant thinking about traveling exhibits, programming, and communications for a field of experts trained to scrutinize every claim while still finding ways to make history feel relevant rather than ornamental.
250 Years of Independence traveling exhibit on display at American University Washington College of Law, Pence Law Library in September 2025. Photograph courtesy of the author.
Many of the people I work with now aren’t casual audiences of history. Most lawyers have relatively strong foundational knowledge, but they are still outside the discipline itself. The real task is figuring out how to translate disciplinary language and habits without stripping away difficult historical contradictions to fit a neat public narrative. A secondary obstacle to complexity: the traveling exhibit form itself. In contrast to tens of thousands of words in a book or article, our small exhibit scripts cap narratives at roughly a thousand words, creating the challenge of preserving accuracy in a compressed format where brevity and clarity are valued as much or more than precision. Across numerous drafting sessions, early feedback served as constant reminders to avoid textbook or lecture language in favor of more engaging language for a crowd who wanted something driven by human stakes. This forced a shift in my own approach, moving away from trying to compress precise, technical historical narratives into shorter word counts, and toward designing entry points that allow people to engage, care, and converse with history.
250 Years of Independence traveling exhibit on display at American University Washington College of Law, Pence Law Library in September 2025. Photograph courtesy of the author.
The 250th anniversary of the United States, a moment of heightened public engagement with the past, offers public and academic historians an opportunity to show how historical methods can deepen and enrich public understandings of American history. The question is not whether complexity will enter those conversations, but how it will be made legible, and ultimately what kinds of conclusions a public already invested in competing versions of the past will be willing to accept.
In 2026, this question feels especially urgent amid renewed attention to the nation’s past. Compared to even a few years ago, public trust in institutions is more fragile, and political polarization has made sustained engagement across difference more difficult. Debates over which stories are remembered and which are sidelined are louder than ever, yet they often produce little sense of resolution or shared understanding. And if this milestone only ends up reaffirming familiar narratives of the Revolution and the Founders without engaging the harder questions beneath them, then historians working across a range of institutional and public settings will have missed a significant opportunity.
As Beverly Gage writes in This Land Is Your Land, historians tend to be “myth-busters. We love to declare that things are not as they appear, that they’re messier than you think, and that some version of what people are experiencing today has actually happened before.”3 I think that instinct is central to the discipline. But as a public historian, I know from practical experience that myth-busting is not enough. The work is not only to reveal that stories are more complicated than they first appear, but to make that complexity usable—to leave people with ways of thinking about the past that can actually hold up in the world outside the archive.
- For instance, H. Robert Baker, “The Fugitive Slave Clause and the Antebellum Constitution,” Law and History Review30, no. 4 (2012), 1133-1174.
- Indeed, the Cathedral continues to welcome public feedback. People can share their thoughts and experiences of the new stained-glass windows online—just scroll toward the bottom of the page.
- Beverly Gage, This Land Is Your Land: A Roadtrip through U.S. History (Simon & Schuster, 2026), xvi.