Why is so much history either unreadable or unreliable?
Go and open a peer-reviewed history journal article, if you have access behind the paywall, and you are likely to find a silent conversation, held in a private, jargon-rich idiom and fenced in by footnotes that often outnumber the sentences.
Open a bestseller and you will most likely find sweep, swagger and a single thesis that explains everything from the fall of empires to the price of bread 2,000 years ago. One is overcooked, the other raw in the middle. But both are shelved under ‘history.
The specialist has earned the right to be cautious, that’s fair. Years in the archive teach you how little the sources will concede, I’ve learned that myself. So the paper narrows until nobody can object, then doubles down on the narrowing down until nobody outside the field cares to read it.
Is that rigour, I wonder, or a retreat into an ivory tower with the drawbridge up or blasted?
At the other end, the popular author has earned the right to be read, that’s fair too. A feel for pace, for character, for the human voice. Yet the pressure to be definitive paints over the debates that make the past worth arguing about. Some questions will never be settled, however loudly we pronounce on them. Does a book that pretends otherwise respect its reader, or merely oversell?
What if nuance were a feature of the story instead of a spanner in its works? What if doubt could be narrated, with the historian’s hesitations doing the work of suspense?
Alas, few historians walk this tightrope. It takes years in the library and the archive, a storyteller’s ear, and the humility to explain without dumbing down. It is slow, sweaty and sore.
Could each side borrow a cup of sugar from the other? The academic might learn to write for a reader who has no reason to care yet, while the popular author might learn to say “we don’t or cannot know” without flinching.