| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Ian Tyrrell. Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 348. Cloth $57.00, paper $23.00.
In this painstaking account of American historians and their relationship to the public, Ian Tyrrell seeks to place current controversies about the teaching, writing, and wider understanding of American history in context. He succeeds admirably.	1
Tyrrell's departure point is contemporary criticism that academic historians have lost their influence with the American public. He claims a "great American jeremiad" holds sway in contemporary America that traces this decline to professionalization in the discipline of history, a preoccupation with "multiculturalism and cultural fragmentation" (p. 12), and the relentless narrowing that has accompanied specialization. Into the breach have rushed "nonacademic" purveyors of historical knowledge—filmmakers, amateur historians, popularizers of various stripes—who have managed to displace, in the public eye, highly trained scholars as authoritative experts on the American past. Historians themselves, Tyrrell notes, have engaged in much hand wringing over this alleged state of affairs. Ongoing discussion about how to "reconnect" with their potentially vast audiences and achieve restoration in the public eye continues to animate the discipline and reinforce the notion that much ground has been lost.	2
Tyrrell invites his own readers to act like historians and take a longer view. He examines "the cycles of public involvement" of academic historians, "charting their ups and downs" (p. 3) from 1890 to 1970. In truth, much of his study focuses on the period before 1950. (The 1960s surface now and then and are quickly surveyed in a brief epilogue.) Throughout, Tyrrell finds a much more complex story than the current mythic tale of declension would allow. Not only have historians been deeply engaged with the public throughout the last century, the debate and the hand wringing over how best to advance popular engagement in and understanding of the past are not new either.	. . .

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