Just catching up with the "controversial" @chronicle article featuring Jill Lepore, and aside from a couple random responses, I would like to say the following. THREAD
First, I consider Jill to be a friend, so if you want to engage her fairly, fine. But you go through me first.
Second, Jill isn't on Twitter, and trashing her here is unbecoming. Twitter trashing -- says . someone who has been the object of it -- is unbecoming in general. But do y'all crap on your colleagues when they are not in the room? Because that is basically what you are doing.
Third, as someone who has been involved in public writing, & now edits a publication (everyone who reads this is invited to submit to @PublicSeminar, whether you agree with this thread or not) & I can tell you that the claim of academic historians to serving a larger public is...
...VASTLY overstated. Many historians are afraid to do it, or publish with a commercial press, or write to a general audience, because they fear they will be punished by senior colleagues and that they will not realize their ambitions.
This is what Jill is talking about when she says the academy is responsible for its frequent irrelevance to public conversations. It is not the fault of individual historians -- you, for example -- but there are few senior historians who can honestly say...
...that they would encourage a younger colleague to write a first, or even a second, book for a commercial press; or encourage a colleague to write for the @NewYorker or @DissentMag, rather than writing a highly specialized article almost no one will read.
Furthermore, most academics don't know *how* to write for the public. And if you are thinking, yeah, but what about public history -- dude, do you know how badly public historians, archivists, and digital scholars are treated in most departments?
At @wesleyan_u, my colleagues in history thought my public writing -- not just blogging, but writing for the @nytimes and @chronicle, @jacobin and other places was a f^cking joke. It's people like Jill Lepore who made what I aspired to be respectable.
So, as I said, say what you like -- it reflects poorly on you to trash Jill Lepore -- but I, for one, have her back. @ThreadReaderApp unroll
