It is hard to find good historical writing.
Well, actually, there is more out there than you might think, X.
But I'll grant there is a problem, at least in this country.
Academics here often pooh-pooh "good prose," and some actively discourage it in their graduate students. I remember the guy who taught Philosophy of History at Columbia, for example: a Dutchman, addicted to "scientific models," he warned us all that if we wrote "beautiful" prose, he would suspect us of using it to cover over our methodological weakness.
This is precisely what many writers of "popular history" do, of course. I cannot read Barbara Tuchmann, for example, because she constantly irritates me by inserting thoughts in her subjects' heads. "As he sat there, Bismarck thought: 'Blah, blah, blah..'" How does she know what Bismarck thought? Is she speculating about what he might have thought? Or is she simply paraphrasing something he actually wrote? But what you write is not necessarily what you really think. The point is that putting thoughts in your subjects' heads makes a better story, even if it is worse history.
This might seem like hair-splitting to the general reader, who might prefer being entertained to being instructed, but it is a very serious matter for professional historians. Hence the animus against "fancy" prose.
In England, for a variety of reasons, you won't see this kind of split between "professional" and "popular" historians. The former almost uniformly write graceful prose, and sometimes truly great prose. The tradition starts with Gibbon, after all.
In short, there is plenty of excellent historical writing out there. You just have to know where to look for it.
Joan |
