Historians and audiences: comment on Tristram Hunt and Geoffrey Timmins.

Historian Claude Bowers was one of the great speakers of his era. As a high school student in Indiana in the 1890s, when debate was more important than basketball, he was a champion debater and also won the Indiana State High School Oratorical Contest with a speech on "Hamilton the Constructionist." Out of that experience as an Indianapolis schoolboy, he developed a lifelong enthusiasm for history and for Hamilton's opponent, Thomas Jefferson. In 1925, he published his best-selling study of Jefferson and Hamilton. Four years later, he sealed his reputation as one of the most widely read historians (albeit one who had himself never graduated from college) of the interwar period with, The Tragic Era, which had a first printing of an incredible 100,000 copies and went through twelve subsequent printings. Bowers's history profoundly affected public debates and his historical writing both grew out of and reinforced his own active political role, which led him among other things to be the keynote speaker at the 1928 Democratic National Convention. (1)

There is a darker side to this model of the publicly engaged historian. Bowers's Tragic Era popularized for an enormous audience the scholarly and racist version of Reconstruction, which saw it as an atrocity perpetrated on a blameless South by "emissaries of hate" from the North and incompetent, egotistic and lustful Southern African Americans. Bowers had a direct partisan purpose in his book, hoping to discredit the Republican Party in the South and re-solidify Southern support for the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the nomination of the Catholic Al Smith.

Bowers's story serves as a reminder, if we need one, that the question of historians and audiences is complicated one, that involves who is speaking, what they are saying, the venues in which they are speaking, and the relationship between the speaker and the audience rather than just the sheer number of people reached. One of the key and understudied questions about public history is not the message or the messenger but how diverse audiences receive the message.

Tristam Hunt's excellent essay on "Reality, Identity and Empathy: The Changing Face of Social History Television" is well attuned to many of those complexities. Rather than a rant or a rave, he provides a mixed picture of good news and bad news about social history on British television.

The good news is that history is booming. Large numbers of Britons are signing up with heritage institutes, record numbers of visitors are flocking to historic sites, more students are studying history at collegiate and pre-collegiate levels, historical programming fills TV screens and radio channels, and book shelves overflow with historical titles. Americans will nod their heads in agreement at many of these findings--history enrollments are up in the United States as well, for example, as are sales of history books, although the picture for history museums seems pretty gloomy, especially at outdoor history museums, which have seen long-term declines in visitation. (2)

The further good news at least from British shores is that there is some very good history being presented in these venues, including the one about which professional historians are likely to be most skeptical--television. Historical drama documentaries, Hunt reports, show that social history "can be adapted intelligently to a television audience." And he offers a number of praiseworthy examples such as the Georgian Underworld, which "delivered a collection of rich social insights into the forgotten eighteenth century." Similarly, the BBC Series, The Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl provided "a nuanced, sophisticated narrative of class identity and social structure." Even Reality TV supplies, according to Hunt "elements of insight into the lived experiences of the past."

But while British historical television is not a vast wasteland, it also does not offer grounds for celebration and, in the end, the bad news in Hunt's report overwhelms the good. Social history, in general, and politically committed Marxist social history, in particular, has faded from the screen and "the vast majority of history on television is oriented around biography, battles and quick fire narrative dramas." British television history, Hunt writes, is "broadly a story of military tactics," "little removed from a Carlylian vision of 'Great Men'." "White, male individuals are the rain-makers of the past with marginalised people, ideas, social structures or processes making only fleeting appearances," Hunt concludes. "The intellectual, social or economic context within which choices are framed or decisions made is generally avoided." Americans who tend to romanticize the BBC as the quality alternative to the American boob tube will be surprised to learn that the BBC seems to have embraced the programming strategies of the History Channel, known as the Hitler Channel for its fixation on re-fighting World War II.

And while Hunt admires some features of historical reality shows, he is also troubled about the way in which it turns history into "entertainment, pure and simple, without the capacity to teach about the past or shed light on the present." Historical reality programming "marks ... the demise of social history on television as a political project; as an approach which meant in effect for many years the organizational and ideological history of the labour movement, and above all the Marxist labour movement." He laments the "predominantly conservative bent of so much television history: narratives of kings and queens, Whiggish national identities built around continuity rather change, and 'living history' which invites few questions about the nature of the past."

It would be difficult to counter Hunt's well informed, nuanced portrait of British television history--and impossible for someone like me who hasn't been in Britain for more than two decades. But rather than give up on the job of critical commentator, let me raise one question about the framing of Hunt's argument. At least at times, Hunt seems to pose the problem before us as an either/or situation. He contrasts a social history concerned with "fundamental questions of structures" with a popular history dominated by "biographies, battles and high political drama." The choice seems to be between popular versions of Hobsbawm and Thompson, on the one hand, and Treveleyan and Namier, on the other hand.

Like Hunt, my own sympathies are with the first pairing. But I also wonder if popular history audiences might actually be inclined toward neither. My speculation about this comes out of the survey I did in collaboration with Dave Thelen back in the 1990s. We telephoned 1,500 Americans to ask them about their views about the past. In part, we were looking to see where these people lined up on the continuum that Hunt marks out. But what we found was that most embraced the past for very different reasons than professional historians, whether Marxist social historians or conservative political historians. (3)

Although our data showed an almost ubiquitous sense of connectedness with the past (the embrace of the past that Hunt suggests), it also suggested that the familial and intimate past that mattered most--a finding that pervaded both the quantitative and qualitative answers gathered in the survey. The activity that made people feel most connected with the past was "gathering with your family," and the other activities that made them feel connected with the past were ones they usually did with family members--visiting museums and historic sites and celebrating holidays. Only sixteen people in the entire national sample gave gathering with their family the lowest possible connectedness score of a "1."

The most straightforward demonstration of the significance of the intimate past for most Americans was in the answers that our interviewees gave to the question about which area of the past was most important. Asked whether the past that was most important to them was the past of their family, their ethnic group, their community, or the United States, two-thirds named the past of their family, followed by 22% who named the United States, 7.6% who chose the past of their racial or ethnic group, and 3.9% who chose their community. (One group that gave significantly higher rankings to the United States were white males over 65, precisely the group that favors the History Channel and apparently BBC history programming.)

Harder to quantify but still evident in the answers offered are the "uses" that Americans make of the past. Most fundamentally, Americans make what could be called "intimate" uses of the past; they turn to the past to live their lives in the present. Through the past, they find ways to understand and build relationships to those close to them and to answer basic questions about identity, morality, mortality, and agency. Individuals turn to their past experiences to grapple with questions about where they come from and where they are heading, who they are and how they want to be remembered, and whether and how they can make a difference in the world. What was noticeably missing was more than a handful who turned to the past for the kind of social structural analysis that Hunt and I both favor.

There is some evidence that Americans use this same intimate and familial frame when confronting the national and nationalistic history often reflected in popular culture. Several years ago historian David Glassberg analyzed letters written to filmmaker Ken Burns about his wildly popular PBS series, The Civil War, and reported that many letter writers thanked Burns for helping them understand their own families. Nearly one-third of the letters "mentioned family members, suggesting that these viewers saw national history presented in the film through the lens of their family history." (4)

Such evidence indicates that our task as social historians may be both easier and harder than Hunt suggests. On the one hand, we may not need as much to displace nationalistic and Great Man myths. But, on the other hand, it appears that we may have a long way to go before we get people to embrace a view of the past as a route to understanding fundamental social structures and processes. The cognitive psychologist Sam Wineburg has suggested that historical thinking is an "unnatural act," and it may be that getting people to think unnaturally is not going to happen readily through television. (5) Here I would endorse a point from James R. Green's perceptive reflections on the problems and possibilities of reaching a wider audience for what he calls "movement history." Green's answer is that "making movement history" requires public dialogue about the past and the same kinds border-crossing relationships that are part of building social movements. (6) In other words, the message for social historians concerned with the death of social history on TV might be "don't mourn, organize."

Or perhaps teach, since the other place where such dialogues can take place is in the classroom. This brings me to Geoffrey Timmins's very interesting essay on "The Future of Learning and Teaching in Social History: The Research Approach and Employability." As the title suggests, Timmins's article is largely programmatic rather than descriptive; it is about setting an agenda for us as educators rather than describing our current practice. As such, it offers an agenda that most readers will readily embrace. They would surely agree with him on the importance of social history in the curriculum, on the need to focus on skills rather than rote memorization of historical facts, and of considering what he calls "progression." As he rightly argues, we need to insure that "the teaching of social and other types of history ... be made more challenging for students as they proceed through their programmes of study" by incorporating in-depth study in introductory courses and especially by providing students opportunity to work with primary sources.

Such sentiments are so reflexively endorsed by historians that one might ask whether they need to be said at all. But, in fact, the practice of college teaching of history in the United States may be a good deal less progressive than we would assume from reading journals like the History Teacher, which are filled with reports by innovative history teachers. Consider the findings of my colleague Dan Cohen based on a study of close to 800 syllabi for U.S. history survey courses. The study was made possible by a data tool that Cohen created and we make available at the Center for History and New Media called the Syllabus Finder. Cohen's sample is thus not random but it appears to be representative. Based on the 800 syllabi, Cohen concludes that "a large proportion of U.S. history instructors appear to take a more pedestrian, by-the-book approach. They depend heavily on a textbook, on a textbook-based course's favorite type of graded work--the examination--and on the conventional ways of teaching American history that a textbook enshrines." Fully one third of all survey courses assign no other reading beyond the text. Two thirds of the grade in an average survey course comes from examinations, and often those exams focus on the regurgitation of factual material. (7) So, Timmins may not be preaching as much to the choir as it might at first appear.

While I endorse the general recommendations being made by Timmins, let me offer two qualifications. The first concerns skills. Like many others, I have long criticized a fact-based history curriculum and urged the incorporation of the teaching of skills into the history classroom. But I would maintain that these skills need to be closely tied to historical work, that is we should teach skills of historical analysis, thinking, reasoning, and writing--not a set of skills that are abstracted from historical work. Part of the reason for that position is simply that of competence. We are trained in historical thinking and that is what we should be teaching. But I also believe that such skills have a value in our society and a value to our students. Thus, I would question Timmins's questioning of the value of "essay writing skills." I would be very hesitant abandon assignments that require students to grapple with contradictory evidence and interpretations and to synthesize that evidence into a narrative or argument. This may not be precisely what is demanded of our students as workers in a bureaucracy. But it is precisely what is demanded of them as citizens in a democracy.

My second comment concerns on the potential for online learning. Given my job as director of the Center for History and New Media, I am obviously not a neo-luddite opponent of new technology. But so far I remain a skeptic about many of the claims that were early made for distance education, particularly claims about cost savings. Thus, I would question Timmins' assertion that "on-line seminars ... can involve larger numbers of students ... and may involve little teacher intervention" or that "on-line provision can prove highly ... cost effective." The evidence that I have seen so far suggests that good quality distance education is more expensive and labor intensive than in-person instruction. (8) Its convenience may still recommend it, especially for students who live in distant locations or who have family obligations that preclude easy travel, but I think it is an illusion to imagine that any money will be saved without a commensurate sacrifice of quality.

To return to my earlier point, it is in the one-on-one or small group dialogue, whether live or virtual, that preconceptions are most likely to be challenged and that real teaching and learning are most likely to occur. While the large audiences won by popular history--whether authored by the BBC or Claude Bowers--are worthy of notice and engagement, we should not neglect the hard day-to-day work of changing minds that is familiar to the organizer and the teacher.

Both Hunt and Timmins have provided us with perceptive comments on the supply side of the equation--the social history that TV and teachers provide. But we need to devote equal attention to the demand side, to our audiences. There are good reasons for historians to engage the social history that is given to our audiences, but they should not neglect the social history of our audiences.

Center for History & New Media

Department of History

Fairfax, VA 22030

ENDNOTES

1. On Bowers, see Claude Bowers, My Life: The Memoirs of Claude Bowers (New York, 1962); Holman Hamilton and Gayle Thornbrough, Indianapolis in the "Gay Nineties:" High School Diaries of Claude G. Bowers (Indianapolis, 1964); Michael Bordelon, "Claude G. Bowers" in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 17: Twentieth-Century American Historians, ed. by Clyde N. Wilson (Detroit, 1983), pp. 86-92.

2. On enrollments, see Robert Townsend, "Latest Figures Show Sizeable Increases in History Majors and Bachelor's Degrees," Perspectives (April 2004), http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2004/0404/rbtstudents0404.htm. On declines in history museum attendance, see, for example, Jayne Clark, "Putting Life Back into Living History," USA Today (April 16, 2004), 1D

3. For the results of our work, see Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998).

4. David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst, 2001).

5. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia, 2001).

6. James R. Green, Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements (Amherst, 2000).

7. Daniel J. Cohen, "By the Book: Assessing the Place of Textbooks in U.S. Survey Courses," Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1405-1415, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/91.4/cohen.html. For Syllabus Finder, see http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/.

8. See, for example, Report of the University of Illinois Teaching at an Internet Distance Seminar, 1999, http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/tid/report/toc.html.

By Roy Rosenzweig

George Mason University