The English historian J.A. Froude was famously gloomy about the ultimate prospects for his chosen branch of literature. “To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult,” he said. “It is impossible.” Froude’s words came to mind the other day when I encountered Tucker Carlson’s interview with the podcaster Darryl Cooper, whose opinions about World War II may politely be described as “controversial.”
No summary could do justice to the parade of oversimplification, decontextualized pseudo-astonishment, one-sided gotcha-ism, casuistry, and moral lassitude on display in the conversation. But moral preening shouldn’t be our response to what Cooper is doing when he calls Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War” or blames his alleged aggression on the influence of unnamed “financiers.” Outrage will only feed Cooper’s self-conception as a Promethean figure, carrying his benighted listeners out of the darkness to which they have been consigned into the pure light of historical knowledge.
The Cooper imbroglio is symptomatic of a larger problem: the epistemic gulf between the current consensus—however broadly defined—of practicing historians on any given subject and the attitudes of the ordinary person of general education. This holds true, as far as I can tell, across all subject areas.
Cooper’s most serious error is his tacit assumption that, until now, none of us could possibly have encountered anything like his depiction of an ineffectual Hitler—in reality, the mainstay of an entire school of mainstream academic historiography; or for that matter, his unsentimental presentation of interwar English politics, his deflationary reading of Churchill’s legacy, or his horror at Allied war crimes. He likewise presents as taboo questions which have been openly debated since 1945 in every Western country, including those that legally prohibit explicit Holocaust denial. In vain does one protest that the interpretation of the Final Solution as the end result of a haphazard process of “cumulative radicalization,” rather than as the original overarching goal of Nazi policy, was pioneered in West Germany by Hans Mommsen, grandson of that Mommsen—for of course, most of Cooper’s fans have heard of neither.
The Third Reich is by no means the only era for which public knowledge remains largely oblivious to the labors of historians. The “late antiquity” thesis inaugurated by the great ecclesiastical historian Peter Brown has barely made a dent in the public’s understanding of what Gibbon had called “the decline and fall” of Rome. Facile notions about “the Dark Ages” and the so-called Renaissance—a dated, ideologically loaded term that shows no sign of giving way to “early modern” in popular parlance—continue to hold sway over the imaginations of well-meaning readers of quality newspapers. The advent of humanism, the rise of the “scientific method,” and the breakup of the Latin Christian order are widely understood as if they were parts of a single inexorable process. For most Americans, an entire millennium of European history—from roughly AD 500 until the end of the 16th century—exists as a single more or less static prospect, the dim one afforded by A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchester’s salacious and error-filled bestseller. Almost immediately after the book’s publication in 1992, the wrath of the entire historical profession descended upon Manchester, to no avail. It remains part of the AP history curriculum in schools across the United States, and I expect to hear its bogus clichés about supposed medieval stagnation repeated until I am well into my 80s.
Why does the established public image of an event or period tend to lag so far behind the evolving interpretations of historians? Until recently, one could plausibly have argued that it was because, with a handful of exceptions, most significant advances in modern historical understanding have arisen from the cumulative work of specialists, rather than from single epoch-making books written with a wide appreciative readership in mind. The insights of most professional historians, however influential within their narrow spheres, remain unknown to the public, buried in the pages of $130 monographs or locked behind the paywalls of scholarly journals.
There are also other reasons, best illustrated by a juxtaposition of two notable historians. Here is how Sir Steven Runciman begins the first volume of his History of the Crusades, first published in 1951:
On a February day in the year AD 638 the Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem, riding upon a white camel. He was dressed in worn, filthy robes, and the army that followed him was rough and unkempt; but its discipline was perfect. At his side was the Patriarch Sophronius, as chief magistrate of the surrendered city. Omar rode straight to the site of the Temple of Solomon, whence his friend Mahomet had ascended into Heaven. Watching him stand there, the patriarch remembered the words of Christ and murmured through his tears: Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet.
Compare the opening of the third edition of Jonathan Riley-Smith’s Crusades: A History, published 25 years later:
For historians writing in the early 1950s, the only authentic crusades were those launched from Western Europe to recover or defend Jerusalem. Campaigns in other theaters of war—the Iberian Peninsula, the Baltic region—or against internal enemies of the Church such as heretics could be loosely termed crusades, but being of a different order, they were hardly given a second thought. Crusading was considered to have ended with the fall of the last beachheads in Palestine and Syria to Islam in 1291, although some interest was being shown in what were thought to be the movement’s death throes in the later Middle Ages. Little attention was paid to religious motivation. Historians allowed that it may have been a factor, but they found it morally repugnant and were more attracted by the idea that the settlements in Palestine, Syria, and Cyprus marked the first phase of European colonialism. The popes may have had political reasons for proclaiming crusades and the recruits masked their desire for material advancement under a veneer of piety. Crusading was a safety valve, releasing spare human capacity from a Western Europe that was becoming seriously overcrowded. And the military orders were thought of not so much as religious orders, but as great financial institutions managing huge estates in Europe to resource their operations in the East.
As these two extracts suggest, Riley-Smith was a sounder and more scrupulous historian than Runciman; he was careful, precise, analytical, but he wrote with considerably less élan than his predecessor, for whom the Crusades were essentially a series of barbarian invasions—the sacking of the refined and cosmopolitan East by the uncouth and venal younger sons of minor French lords. This vision—which owes as much to Sir Walter Scott as it does to the author’s continent-spanning archival research—was all but totally dispelled in a series of books written between over the span of half a century by Riley-Smith, who, at the time of his death in 2016, was universally considered the preeminent authority on the Crusades in the English-speaking world.
Yet it is Runciman’s version of the Crusades that has endured and proved more culturally pervasive. His de facto title as prince of crusader historians—acknowledged or otherwise—has survived both the eclipse of his own academic reputation and the disappearance among Anglophone historians of the high literary ideals to which he aspired. Even—indeed, perhaps especially—among those who have never heard of him, his Crusades still live. “Style,” as Logan Pearsall Smith once put it, “is a magic wand; everything it touches turns to gold.” To write as well as Runciman did, while politely disdaining what he called “the mountainous heap of the minutiae of knowledge,” is to guarantee one’s place among the elect of Clio.
“Historiography is becoming stuck.”
But suppose some golden-voiced follower of Riley-Smith’s were to emerge. Could he finally displace Runciman? I suspect the answer is no. It is now difficult to imagine the mass of general readers—assuming they exist—being reached even by a historian of genius. The exigencies of modern academic publishing, declining levels of general culture among historians themselves, and, in some cases, what occasionally looks less like sloppiness or indifference and more like a positive hostility toward good writing among peer reviewers, above all the atrophying of readers’ own attention spans—for all these reasons, it seems to me unlikely that we will ever see a classic on the order of Runciman capture the public imagination. Historiography is becoming stuck.
But this is getting us very far afield from Cooper, who has stumbled upon the role of purveyor of high vulgarization (emphasis on the latter word). His career—as far as I am aware, he has no plans to publish a book on Nazi Germany—suggests that we are no longer faced with a gap between specialist knowledge and what remains of the reading public, to be spanned by belletristic popularizers; but one between historians who write without any hope of reception, much less wealth or literary fame, and a very different, more or less post-literate audience who would prefer that whatever historical edification they might receive come via podcast or even tweet.
Is the disappearance of public literary culture the worst possible fate for historians? Perhaps not. In the Oxford of Gibbon’s youth, the dons were “decent easy men…. Their days were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common room, till they retired, weary and well satisfied, to a long slumber.” But what if the slumber now awaits history itself? Far more than his errors and distortions, which (for now anyway) are easily corrected, it is the glimpse Cooper affords us of this future that we should find disturbing: one in which history as we know it will sooner or later cease to exist; it will first go unread, then it will cease to be written, before, finally, disappearing altogether.
