What makes a good history book?
I was worried by the first installment of David Greenberg’s weeklong rant in Slate about history books. Greenberg is an academic historian dismayed by popular history chronicles such as David McCullough's current "1776," and as a journalist now finishing a historical biography, I was worried that he merely had the standard academic disdain for "amateurs."
But today's installment gives a nice explanation of "historiography," a word I had never previously liked. His problem with the McCullough ilk, he says, is that they don't examine what the academic historians are saying about their topic before they dive in:
Whew! When I stumbled across Caroline Lockhart, I knew she was a larger-than-life character. But more importantly, I saw her as an intriguing personification of the legacy of cowboy myths on the development of the rural West. I struggled through a lot of dense history to understand my views -- and now that I'm editing the manuscript I'm taking out almost all of the direct discussions of that background. But I agree with Greenberg: a character is only meaningful within a larger struggle -- and a book's value depends on capturing both the character and the struggle.
Join the discussion at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/johnclaytonoutreach/, or let me know your thoughts via info at johnclaytonbooks (and you can fill in the rest).
But today's installment gives a nice explanation of "historiography," a word I had never previously liked. His problem with the McCullough ilk, he says, is that they don't examine what the academic historians are saying about their topic before they dive in:
The Barnes & Noble historian seems to treat history as a pageant of larger-than-life events and people to be marveled at, rather than a set of social, political, and cultural problems to engage.
Whew! When I stumbled across Caroline Lockhart, I knew she was a larger-than-life character. But more importantly, I saw her as an intriguing personification of the legacy of cowboy myths on the development of the rural West. I struggled through a lot of dense history to understand my views -- and now that I'm editing the manuscript I'm taking out almost all of the direct discussions of that background. But I agree with Greenberg: a character is only meaningful within a larger struggle -- and a book's value depends on capturing both the character and the struggle.
Join the discussion at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/johnclaytonoutreach/, or let me know your thoughts via info at johnclaytonbooks (and you can fill in the rest).
