Popularizing the Past

To academic historians in the United States, it feels like the worst of times. The number of undergraduates majoring in the field has been dropping steadily for the past fifteen years. All over the country, departments are cutting faculty positions or not replacing professors who retire. Just a third of the historians who finished their degrees in 2016 or 2017 landed a tenure-track job five years later; some just stop trying. Many college administrators who lavish research funds on biologists and computer scientists expect their colleagues who stick to the past to fend for themselves. Whenever a history-loving student asks me whether to apply to graduate school, I first ask, “Can you imagine doing anything else in your life you would enjoy nearly as much?”

Yet I cannot recall a time when Americans outside academia argued about the past with the ardor they do now. Politicians from both parties battle over how or even whether to teach the history of slavery, racism, and homosexuality. The controversy the 1619 Project stirred up with its claim that the War of Independence was in part a war to preserve slavery provoked the Trump administration to launch the 1776 Commission, which advocated teaching nothing but “patriotic” history. The conservative group included not a single professional historian, and its report slammed leftist scholars whose work produces “at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.” Trump revived the commission just a week after returning to the White House this year.

Moms for Liberty and other “parents’ rights” crusaders fight to remove from school libraries books that highlight “divisive concepts” in the national story. In 2023 Joe Biden responded in a post on X to such groups: “Now is the time for all Americans to speak up when history is being erased, books are being banned, and diversity is being attacked.”

This March, as if in rebuttal, President Trump issued an executive order that defined “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” as purging the Smithsonian museums of any “divisive narratives.” The order declared that “all public monuments, memorials, statues,” and “markers” must now “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” Expect MAGA loyalists to demand a sculpture of Trump, fist raised high, to be erected somewhere on the Mall before the end of his term.

My fellow professors and I rage among ourselves in private or just shrug with the frustration of having no idea how to reverse the decline of our beloved discipline. Graduate students envy our good fortune for having tenure-track jobs that may soon become as rare as courses that require undergraduates to read several hundred pages of history per week.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, a select group of professors succeeded in writing books that sold large numbers of copies and bridged the gap between a general public that cared about history and those who studied and taught it for a living. They gained a modest though palpable influence on how millions of educated Americans understood their nation’s past—and also spurred some to agitate to transform its future. In his short yet empirically rich study, Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham, a professor at University College London, explains how five of these historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—each adopted a distinct perspective and crafted a style that sacrificed neither intellectual depth nor political bite.

Hofstadter was the debunking liberal. In The American Political Tradition (1948), he portrayed revered leaders from the founding of the republic to the New Deal as representatives of a “common climate of American opinion” that “accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man.” With chapters like “Thomas Jefferson: the Aristocrat as Democrat,” “John C. Calhoun: the Marx of the Master Class,” and “Franklin D. Roosevelt: the Patrician as Opportunist,” Hofstadter used his great gift for irony to strip away the mythic veneer of such figures and reveal their adeptness at promoting change without fundamentally altering the US political economy.

Boorstin delighted in essentially the same capitalist ethos that Hofstadter believed restricted the scope of legitimate ideas and social policy. In a sprawling trilogy entitled The Americans (1958–1973), he celebrated entrepreneurs and advertising executives, the inventors of the sleeping car and the credit card. All of them spurned received creeds and traditions to build “everywhere communities” defined “by what they made and what they bought, and by how they learned about everything.” “Life in America was to give new meaning to the very idea of liberation,” he wrote in the first volume. “Cultural novelty and intellectual freedom were not to mean merely the exchange of one set of idols for another; they meant removal into the open air.”

Hofstadter scorned the gospel of self-reliance, while Boorstin gloried in the chance that every American had to become a “go-getter” in the practice of law, in scientific research, and particularly in the pursuit of wealth by harnessing technology and public relations for immensely profitable ends. His work won praise from conservative intellectuals like Russell Kirk and others in the circle of National Review, the postwar flagship of the intellectual right, while Hofstadter did his elegant best to “speak truth to the liberal mind” in publications like The New York Times and The New York Review.

Witham explains that Hofstadter and Boorstin appealed to general readers who picked up their books—“nonfiction that sat somewhere between vulgarity and scholarship”—to develop a more sophisticated grasp of America. Franklin, Zinn, and Lerner sought to reach a narrower, if growing, segment of the public, “those involved in, or at least sympathetic with, the period’s protest movements.”

Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom (1947) was the first comprehensive history of Black Americans to reach a sizable audience and one that bridged the color line. It opened with chapters on ancient Egypt and the “Early Negro States of Africa” and has been updated nine times—most recently by the Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham—to keep up with developments in law, popular culture, women’s history, and politics: Barack Obama waves from the cover of the ninth edition, which appeared in 2010, a year after Franklin died. Although his prose lacked the imaginative flair of Hofstadter’s and Boorstin’s, the book’s chronological sweep and thoughtful treatment of everything from the beginning of the slave trade to the flowering of Black Power made a convincing case that the history of African Americans had always been vital to the evolution of the nation.

Zinn, whose first teaching job was at Spelman, the Black women’s college in Atlanta, firmly believed that every work of history was basically a political document. He titled his thick survey A People’s History of the United States (1980) to ensure that no potential reader would wonder about his own beliefs: “With all its limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.” That judgment, he announced, set his book apart from nearly every other account of their past that most Americans were likely to read.

A People’s History, festooned with vivid quotes from the one percent Zinn despised as well as the exploited 99 percent he hoped would liberate themselves, has gained more renown and provoked more hostility than any of the other books and authors in Witham’s study. It has sold well over four million copies, and its ideas have filtered into mass culture. In the film Good Will Hunting (1997) Matt Damon’s character, a working-class wunderkind, praises it. In a 2002 episode of The Sopranos, Anthony Jr. cites Zinn’s view that Columbus was a brutal enslaver of indigenous Bahamians, only to get slapped down by his mafioso father: “He discovered America…. He was a brave Italian explorer. And in this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.”

Politicians and journalists on the right routinely vilify the book. “American education is a sewer of left-wing ideology, and Zinn’s work is an especially ripe excretion,” the editors of National Review snarled in 2013. In 2019 the conservative historian Wilfred McClay published Land of Hope, a survey of US history clearly intended to dethrone his enormously popular competitor on the left, who was by then deceased. In a promotional interview, McClay dismissed Zinn for creating “simplistic melodrama” that appeals to “many Americans who have felt disillusioned by our natural flaws.”

For Lerner, the central flaw was the unnatural one of male domination, which she historicized in a style less demotic than Zinn’s but with the same confrontational aim. Lerner, an Austrian émigré, based her histories of women on the assumption that feminist ideas held the key to unlocking the inequalities plaguing not just the US but every nation. “Throughout the millennia of their subordination,” she wrote in 1993,

the kind of knowledge women acquired was more nearly correct and adequate than was the knowledge of men. It was…practical knowledge derived from essential social interaction with their families, their children, their neighbors.

Her books probably sold far fewer copies than the most popular titles by the four men Witham discusses. But nearly everyone who took courses in feminist studies during the final quarter of the last century encountered her work. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, her longtime academic home, she established the first US doctoral program in women’s history.

Witham shrewdly details the authorial strategy each member of his quintet preached and practiced: “They all wanted the same finished product: history that was at once intellectually credible, engagingly readable, and politically relevant.” But they also had salient features of the middle-class consumer society to thank: their most prominent works appeared at a time of expanding college enrollments, when inexpensive paperbacks were ubiquitous in drugstores and history syllabi alike.

Each historian also benefited from the surge in political activism on both the left and the right that began in the 1950s and gathered strength in the decades after. The social movements of this era helped win legions of readers for Franklin, Zinn, and Lerner. Boorstin owed his posts as director of the National Museum of American History and then librarian of Congress to admirers who served Republican presidents. Hofstadter, whose only overt political act once he became a professor was voting for Democrats, gave Zinn and others on the left reasons to question the nation’s capitalist consensus. In 1965, when John Lewis set off on the Selma voting rights march at which Alabama state troopers would fracture his skull, he carried in his backpack a copy of The American Political Tradition.

Witham gives scant attention to the source of these writers’ commitment to reach both Americans who would never take a college history class and those who did. When they were young in the late 1930s, all four white historians either belonged to or were close to the Communist Party USA. This was the period when the CPUSA nurtured the political culture of the Popular Front, from which sprang works of art of enduring influence, such as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” Richard Wright’s Native Son, Dorothea Lange’s photos of Dust Bowl migrants, and Sidney Buchman’s screenplay for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Hofstadter attended meetings of the Young Communist League and briefly joined the party in 1938 before recoiling from the Moscow show trials and the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Boorstin’s time in the CPUSA lasted less than a year, while Zinn read a lot of Marx but always claimed he had not joined the party, FBI reports to the contrary. Lerner became a party member only in 1946, but her husband, Carl, had joined years before, and both were part of the Hollywood left during World War II, when CPUSA members formed its vital core. Only Franklin, a graduate student at Harvard at the time, avoided the party’s aura. He did, however, show a fondness for Christian socialism, although he seems to have been drawn more to the racial liberalism of the NAACP than to any radical group or doctrine. Writing a pioneering history that challenged the brutal normality of Jim Crow may have been rebellion enough.^*

Even after they abandoned and denounced the Communist cause, the four white authors, in both the subjects they chose and the style in which they wrote about them, clung to the idea that history should engage “the people.” Even Boorstin, in his celebratory texts, placed the lives and deeds of industrious folk, most of whose names were new to his readers, over those of the famous and the powerful. And what Witham says about Lerner’s ambition applies to her male counterparts as well: “While she had rejected any intellectual or political debt to Marxism…she nonetheless retained its commitment to grand narratives of historical development.”

It nearly escapes Witham’s notice that every white subject in his book was a secular Jew. He does grasp the obvious: “By the middle of the twentieth century…Jews were a fundamental part of the nation’s intellectual scene, but in a way that left much about their specific contributions to political debate unsettled.” What he misses is that in rewriting the past, Hofstadter and his fellow academics were seeking to accomplish in their field what Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, Philip Roth and Susan Sontag were accomplishing in theirs: to unsettle verities about the powerful that most Americans took for granted. Ginsberg’s chant against “Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone!… Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!” is no echo of Hofstadter’s claim that “as an economic thinker, Lincoln had a passion for the great average.” But they shared an antinomian ambition.

Whether the “popularizers of the past” can still provide insight or pleasure is a different matter. Lerner drew too hard a distinction between how all women and all men thought and behaved. Franklin’s survey still reads as a masterful textbook, but as with most textbooks, its earnestness makes it hard to get an argument going. Boorstin delighted too easily in all his go-getters achieved. In his many pages about clever entrepreneurs, labor unions and strikes rarely appear. More enduring are the critical judgments in his book The Image (1962), about the media creating “pseudo-events” and his definition of a celebrity as “a person who is well-known for his well-knownness.”

Zinn’s agitational volume is more a skillful polemic than a thoughtful narrative. To him the American ruling elite is a transhistorical entity, a virtual monolith; neither its interests nor its ideology changed much from the days when many of its members owned slaves and wore knee breeches to the era of global supply chains and the Internet. I still enjoy reading Hofstadter and assign his work to students. But although his sentences are unmatched in their clarity and wit, he was more intent on puncturing romantic myths about mass movements and so-called great men than on examining how some of those people recognized their limits and struggled to transcend them.

Nearly every historian would love to emulate the sales and influence of these five predecessors, even as they generally have significant criticisms of one or all of them. But at a time when big debates about the past tend to be displays of snark and anger rather than respectful exchanges, it may be impossible for even the most skillful writers to match them.

As Witham points out, the “general” audience of politically curious, economically comfortable readers that Hofstadter and Boorstin attracted no longer exists. The closest parallel to Witham’s quintet of writers today is probably Ken Burns. The Civil War, his multipart documentary first televised in 1990, certainly nudged millions of Americans to ponder, at least for a few evenings, the bloodiest event in our history. The sharply opposed, equally eloquent commentaries in the film by the white conservative Shelby Foote and the Black leftist Barbara Fields also suggested that good historians can engage in a series of reasonable arguments.

Yet none of Burns’s many subsequent productions, while always entertaining and pungent with social conflict, has stirred the same kind of response. For most Americans, he may have become more a brand than an auteur. At least one Republican lawmaker has proposed employing Burns’s breakthrough documentary to slash the ranks of academia even further. In the middle of a tight reelection contest in 2016, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson declared during a candidates’ forum:

If you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in fourteen hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done?

Near the end of his book, Witham brings up the work of Jill Lepore and Ibram X. Kendi, contemporary professors who have the knack for writing history that many people outside the classroom want to read. Yet neither has gained the cultural influence their predecessors enjoyed. Like Hofstadter, Lepore is a liberal who writes historical essays that are consistently perceptive, concise, and witty but are often on subjects that Hofstadter, who died in 1970, could know nothing about, such as data science, cryonics, and the Internet. These Truths (2018), her grand synthesis of US history, resisted the temptation either to condemn the national project or to praise it. “Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other,” she writes, “lies an uneasy path.” Lacking a contentious point of view, her book appealed to a smaller audience than she routinely attracts in The New Yorker.

In contrast, Kendi aims, as Zinn did, to provoke his readers and stimulate them to join a movement for radical change. His vivid prose and uncompromising judgments made him an intellectual tribune of Black Lives Matter. However, a dogmatic impulse prevents him from making the kind of distinctions that separate a judicious historian from a polemical one. In Stamped from the Beginning (2016), which won the National Book Award, Kendi contends that “to think something is wrong with Black people” is always racist. Fair enough. But using that definition, he damns as racist Barack Obama’s criticism of Black men who neglect their children and Richard Wright’s creation in Native Son of a “bewildered” protagonist who longs to integrate into the white world and turns violent when he cannot. Throughout the book, Kendi argues that anyone, Black or white, who for any reason endorses “assimilationist” ideas or behavior is promoting a racist project.

He neglects to mention that Zora Neale Hurston, one of the eminent writers he hails for attacking “the lunacy of Black assimilationists,” was a steadfast political conservative. She denounced the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision that began the desegregation of public schools in much of the nation. She lambasted W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson for parroting the pro-Soviet line of the white-led Communist Party. And in 1952 she backed the presidential campaign of Ohio senator Robert Taft, who opposed a federal mandate to protect Black workers from discrimination on the job. If more African Americans had adopted Hurston’s positions, the postwar civil rights movement, an interracial enterprise from the start, might never have succeeded at all.

More academic historians certainly ought to acquire the skill of writing for large audiences. To do so gratifies the ego, swells the bank account, and may give pause to those who, knowingly or not, distort what actually happened and why. But creating more popular texts would probably do little to reverse the job crisis alarming the profession. History departments boomed in the decades after World War II because college education was, for the first time, within reach of a large and growing number of young Americans. A four-year degree essentially guaranteed that one would be able to lead a secure, middle-class life. Those who flocked to social movements were hungry for books that offered them a “usable past.” Most contemporary students view a college education in more functional ways. Many of them might prefer to major in history, but the STEM disciplines appear to offer a more direct path to a stable career, if not always a fulfilling one.

Perhaps all historians can do is write books and articles in a plain, empathetic style that anyone who reads a newspaper can understand and enjoy. But we will continue to struggle with the benefits and the perils expressed in the old maxim: History is what the present wants to know about the past.