Why I'm a Writer, Not a Historian
Back in March, I was happy to be invited to the offices of the producers of the Ken Burns “American Revolution” documentary to preview a few of the sequences where I appear, and some other sequences, and in the ensuing discussion, the onscreen ID-tag issue came up: I think “William Hogeland, Historian,” was what they were going with at that point in the edit. My memory of how we got into the subject is vague, but I was noticing that some other talking heads and I aren’t historians in the professional, certified sense; there’s a mix of highly trained professors and pop historians like me.
I think they’d already been considering the ID matter. Someone suggested using “Writer” as the tag instead, which I endorsed because I generally prefer it, and in the clips I’ve seen since then, that’s what they’ve done.
It’s not that I’d like to be considered a professional historian and yet nevertheless feel called upon, in the interest of full disclosure, to acknowledge that I lack all-important credentials. I want to assert—it gets too cumbersome sometimes, but wherever it’s reasonable, I try—that I’m not a member of the profession, because on the one hand, I depend on the profession in order to do my work on the American past, and on the other, both as a writer and as a member of the general public, I find the profession all too often fails me and therefore inspires me to criticize it, which has become something of a sideline in my work as a writer.
Now that the PBS documentary is airing, these questions—who’s a historian and who's not? why do I generally prefer to be identified with what I see as my actual profession? what’s a non-historian like me doing criticizing the history profession anyway?—are taking me back to those touchy, meanspirited, and ignorant characterizations that were posted on Bluesky (the supposedly nicer, smarter Twitter, whither many of the supposedly nicer, smarter historians have fled), after I published, on Slate, in July of ‘24, a criticism of efforts especially by Heather Cox Richardson, and also by other liberal historians, to intertwine their scholarship with political resistance to Trumpism and offer free advice to the Democratic Party on tactics and strategy. I’m not going to review the argument in that essay (I'll post a link in “Further Reading”), but I’m pretty confident that I made the case, thanks in part to able editorial help, since aside from a certain strutting display of aggrieved ‘tude, I couldn’t find any serious objection to what I was actually saying.