Historians need to stop obsessing over writing books

Why are his­to­ri­ans so obsessed with writ­ing books?

Now that I’m on my sec­ond quar­ter of a PhD pro­gram in the History of Science, I am con­tin­u­ing to think about why I am doing this and what his­tory  has to offer, both to me and to the world at large. One con­cern I already have is with the appar­ent obses­sion with the book as the pri­mary mech­a­nism of dis­sem­i­nat­ing the work of historians.

To begin with, I’ve noticed a ten­dency in the dis­ci­pline of his­tory — com­mon in many dis­ci­plines, of course — to focus inward (or back­ward?) and to avoid engage­ment with the rest of soci­ety. In depart­ments of his­tory right now, there is a dis­tinct, and under­stand­able, pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with bud­get cuts and the lack of tenure-track fac­ulty posi­tions. The lat­ter issue has caused a cer­tain sense of cri­sis in his­tory depart­ments, espe­cially amongst grad­u­ate stu­dents who are now con­sis­tently warned about the lack of jobs and the chal­lenges of adjunct teach­ing. The for­mer should lead to an increas­ing desire to jus­tify the place of his­tory (and its depart­ments) in acad­emy and soci­ety. Surprisingly, how­ever, I have not seen a great deal of such jus­ti­fi­ca­tion as yet. Mostly I have instead seen the dis­ci­pline con­tinue to focus on the itself and its own con­cerns — to draw inwards. Academic dis­ci­plines are con­ser­v­a­tive, though, and a shift to engage with con­tem­po­rary soci­ety in a real way is not easy.

That said, cer­tainly I have seen a newer gen­er­a­tion of his­to­ri­ans focus on socially rel­e­vant issues, includ­ing cul­ture, eth­nic­ity, tech­nol­ogy, etc. I have not, though, seen this focus reflected in the mar­ket­ing or com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the dis­ci­pline. The shift to greater soci­etal engage­ment, then, is not so much about con­tem­po­rary issues, but is instead a prob­lem of a fail­ure to engage effec­tively with mean­ing­ful mech­a­nisms of mod­ern communications.

While I do believe that Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other forms of social media are one poten­tial means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion yet to be engaged with fully by his­to­ri­ans, I see this fail­ure reflected more basi­cally in a dis­ci­pli­nary obses­sion with full-length books (as opposed to article-length pieces or other shorter schol­arly works). The ten­dency in my his­tory sem­i­nars is to assign these long books for dis­cus­sion. Legal, med­ical and sci­en­tific schol­ars, on the other hand, pre­fer jour­nal arti­cles to books (with the excep­tion of text­books, which serve a dif­fer­ent purpose).

History val­ues the book first. Publishing your dis­ser­ta­tion as a book is essen­tially required if you want a chance at a tenure-track posi­tion. Reading at least a book per week per sem­i­nar is manda­tory. Google Books is rev­o­lu­tion­ary, as it pro­vides elec­tronic access to books, some­thing that is hardly rev­o­lu­tion­ary when it comes to arti­cles!

Books can be won­der­ful, and can cap­ture the sweep of his­tory in a way that an arti­cle can­not. Such a sweep­ing approach, pulling the reader along for the ride, can make for good story-based his­tory if well writ­ten, well edited, and not too caught up in his­tor­i­cal detail. (General read­ers don’t want foot­notes!) If more his­to­ri­ans pro­duces this kind of work, that might be a great thing for pub­lic under­stand­ing, and might even ben­e­fit the dis­ci­pline. But those aren’t the books I’m talk­ing about.

Most of the books I see in his­tory are aimed at other his­to­ri­ans (though they might pre­tend to be read­able by the pub­lic, to try to entice a pub­lisher to bite). Even the really good ones could often have been cut in half with some good edit­ing. They cer­tainly would have been more use­ful to me as a scholar if they had been pub­lished as a focused series of arti­cles. And despite my sense that a good book aimed at the gen­eral pub­lic can be a great thing, wouldn’t more shorter pieces that are acces­si­ble at least to inform jour­nal­ists — or as resources beyond Wikipedia — also ben­e­fit the pub­lic rather directly? I think peo­ple gen­er­ally are expect­ing shorter, tighter, more focused writ­ten work today, for good or ill. I also think his­to­ri­ans should stop fight­ing that trend, and start embrac­ing it.

Honestly, I don’t know whether the gen­eral pub­lic would read more his­tory if it were shorter. (Despite my hopes, I sus­pect not.) But I do think the work of his­to­ri­ans could be more read­ily acces­si­ble to other dis­ci­plines — law, med­i­cine, soci­ol­ogy, and so on — if their works were pack­aged in a more focused form than the book. This might go a long ways towards jus­ti­fy­ing the util­ity of his­tory within the acad­emy by encour­ag­ing other dis­ci­plines to make use of its work. Combine this greater acces­si­bil­ity with greater use of social media and mod­ern self-marketing tools, along with a strong dose of the ongo­ing trend to engage with con­tem­po­rary issues (while inform­ing that engage­ment with a strong dose of his­tor­i­cal under­stand­ing)  and I think his­to­ri­ans and their dis­ci­pline would receive a much higher val­u­a­tion from both within and with­out the university.

So how about it, his­to­ri­ans? Can you give up your pre­cious books?