There's More For Historians To Do

Joyce Appleby and James M. Banner, Jr.

The editors of the OAH Newsletter have asked us, as codirectors of the History News Service (HNS), to report to OAH members about its recent activities. We gladly do so and seize the chance to reflect on some related issues.

HNS, which started operations in 1997, is an informal syndicate of professional historians who produce op-ed essays that put contemporary issues into historical context. Those essays are distributed to over three hundred newspapers and wire services in North America. HNS writers are self-selected--HNS has does not "appoint" them, nor does it commission pieces. Anyone who can provide suitable evidence of being a professional historian is welcome to submit articles for consideration. We also send out alerts when a news story seems ripe for historical analysis. These are often distributed through various H-NET list serves.

HNS op-ed essays perform many functions, including contextualizing current events, deepening public debate about issues in the news, and sometimes correcting historical misunderstandings. Recently, as we have repeatedly discovered, our articles serve a particular function in a time of crisis. People--including historians--turn to history for the comfort that comes with knowledge, and to ease their anxieties by connecting present upheavals and conflicts to their historic roots.

The nation's two most recent public crises--the election tangle of 2000 and the events of September 11--produced an avalanche of submissions to HNS. Newspaper editors responded enthusiastically by running a record number of HNS essays on their op-ed pages during those tense weeks. They would not have done so had historians in record numbers not dropped whatever they were doing to craft thoughtful essays probing the roots and assessing the meanings of these searing events. The results have been the appearance of HNS articles in most of the nation's principal urban dailies as well as in the International Herald Tribune, and in smaller publications in more out-of-the-way places.

We have also discovered that, in addition to serving a hunger for perspective in crisis times, pertinent pieces need not draw only on recent history. HNS tries to set events in the context of all history, not just American history. Medievalists, Judaicists, Europeanists, and historians of Asia and the Near East have contributed hard-hitting HNS pieces, many of which have been among our most widely published. Our experience underscores the fact that there are audiences eager to hear from historians who can use their expertise to illuminate in all relevant ways the complex realities of today’s world.

Happily, HNS is now just one among a number of endeavors that, over the last five years, have begun to develop fresh ways to carry historical knowledge to the nonacademic public. Among those, as readers of this newsletter are no doubt aware, is OAH's Talking History. This weekly thirty-minute radio program often features interviews of HNS authors. Rick Shenkman directs the History News Network, a lively source of historical information and opinion where HNS pieces also appear. Bridging academic and public interest in early American history is Common-Place, the distinctive Web project founded by Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky.

The early success of these initiatives has led to appropriate satisfactions, and the effort to reach out from our classrooms and institutions has reached a kind of initial maturity. This satisfaction, however, must not become self-satisfaction and complacency as further changes are desperately needed. Fresh ideas from on and off campus and from professional associations about how historians can be more fully recognized and professionally rewarded for activities now considered central to the welfare of the discipline, to say nothing of historical knowledge generally, are needed. This goes not just for academic departments but for all institutions that employ historians. Professional societies and institutions of learning could raise fellowships for historians to write for the public. Public historians as well as academics could try to relax the restrictions on expressing opinions to the public. Institutional public affairs offices could be encouraged to become more involved in helping historians to reach out.

Also, the discipline of history still needs some kind of police force or "history watch" against false analogies, something that one of us formally proposed some time ago. The costs of false analogizing has long been recognized, and historians like Ernest R. May, Richard Neustadt, and Otis L. Graham, Jr., have written cogently about them. HNS can play a role in this effort and welcomes more articles from historians seeking to kill false analogies before they spread too far. HNS cannot do this alone--a discipline-wide effort is needed.

Public historians need to become more involved in these outreach efforts. That may seem a curious thing to say, given the fact that public historians are already out "in public." Yet, HNS's call for submissions has principally been answered only by academic historians. We do not know the experience of others in this regard, but in view of the fact that HNS is considered a "public history" activity, it is curious and dismaying that more public historians have not used its availability.

Outreach efforts should not stop with these few, young activities. We hope that others will initiate programs to engage the larger public. It would have been hard to imagine five years ago that so many outreach activities in the name of history would have been attempted and would have succeeded. There is still more to accomplish and more impact to be made. That will take new ideas.

Joyce Appleby is professor of history emerita, University of California Los Angeles, and former OAH President (1991-1992). James Banner is pursuing a number of professional projects, including the History News Service, of which he is cofounder and codirector, and creation of a national history center in Washington, D.C.

Information about the History News Service, guidelines about submitting articles, and a full archive of its distributed pieces are available at <http://h-net.msu.edu/~hns>.