To what extent is there conflict between academic and popular history?

To what extent is there a conflict between academic and popular history?

Margaret Conrad, the President of the Canadian Historical Association, embodies a traditional historian who has “spent a decade or more mastering a discipline” and thus “sits awkwardly” at the thought that “anyone can be historian.” Indeed, as Conrad argues, in this Age of Wikipedia anyone and everyone can own history. This democratisation of history, which has been galvanised by post-modernism, has troubled traditional historians, exemplifying the conflict between academic and popular history. Ultimately, the only way to overcome such a conflict, is for the historian to be “involved in the wider world where many people have a curiosity about the past and a passion for historical research…”

Conrad’s view that history is a “discipline that has standard for practitioners” echoes the perspective of the “father of modern history”, Leopold von Ranke. Indeed, shaping history as a professional discipline in the late 19th Century, von Ranke envisaged the role of the historian as presenting the past “as how it really was” (wie es eigentlich). This “colourless” history, free of the prevailing prejudice and bias, could only be achieved through the historian’s scrupulous use of primary sources, “the most genuine immediate documents”, exemplifying Conrad’s claim that “historical analysis must follow the rules of evidence…”

Consequently, von Ranke, like Conrad, saw history as a science. Ultimately, however, despite von Ranke’s hermeneutical approach, he was far from objective, unable to escape his own context and subsequent prejudices. His understanding of the French Revolution as destructive permeated his work as he rejected Enlightenment thinking and French “philosophies” which, in his belief, were responsible for the horrors of the French Revolution. Similarly, as a devout Lutheran, his belief that history was the result of divine will, that God was reflected in the past and present, affected his construction of history whilst, as conservative Prussian, he was concerned only every with political history. Nonetheless, von Ranke left a lasting impact on historiography: his linear approach and “strict presentation of facts, no matter how conditional and unattractive they might be” has defined, what Conard calls, “good history.”

Indeed, “good history”, as Conrad explains, “has value as a way of understanding the place of human beings in the world and therefore has a role to play in the education of citizens.” An examination of the United States Holocaust Museum, for example, illustrates Conard’s belief that “history has long been central to…sharing the values upon which civil society depends.” Academic history in the USHMM is used to tell the “fundamental tale of pluralism, tolerance, democracy…” The USHMM, as described by its director, is first and foremost an American museum: it sells a nationalist narrative that seeks to create “model citizens.” Similarly, academic history, “good history”, has been used in schools to encourage a “narrowly patriotic sense of national identity”: the GSCE history syllabus in Britain has been criticised for focusing too much on national triumphs and national heroes. Indeed, although Conard may chose to ignore it, academic history has been perverted by the desire “to understand the nature of the country…”

Academic history has only been further undermined by the emergence of popular history, a legacy of postmodernism. E.H Carr’s influential book What is History? veers in the direction of dangerous radicalism. His pronouncement on the nature of facts, which “only speak when historian call on them”, and judgements, which, by attempting to find a universal standard of morality, are “unhistorical and contradicts the essence of history”, undermined the role purpose of academic history, which was merely a construction of the historian. Ironically, however, Carr warned against “total scepticism” and the Nietzchean possibility that “one interpretation is good as another.”

Ultimately, post modernism has lead to the proliferation of “popular history” and, perhaps, most importantly, historical movies and their attendant “faction.” The 300, for example, is a film adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic of the Battle of Thermopylae. It is, as described by David Wenham, “much more accessible and contemporary and sexy and violent…” However, as Miller admits, “I’m taking an awful lot of liberties with everything…If you want history, catch a documentary.” The difficulty of obtaining truth has become the justification for “historical interpretation” in Hollywood that is more akin to “tarting up the past.” This reflects Conrad’s concern of the “troubling gulf” that “separates “public and academic approaches to history.”

This “troubling gulf” has only been exacerbated, as Conard argues, by the fact that “most people are more interested in history family…than in the history of their country.” The Wettest Country in the World, a film, by Matthew Bondurant exemplifies this desire to reduce history to the personal rather than the political: it is inspired by the exploits of Bondurant’s grandfather and granduncle’s who were makers and distributors of moonshine during the Prohibition Era. The basis of the story, which is drawn for family memories and stories, is mixed with several decades of rumour, gossip and myth, are vague and specious at best, illustrating the way in which popular history has disregarded “good history.”

Academic history, however, has not been lost.