Historians Look Back, and Inward, at Annual Meeting

NEW ORLEANS - Some 4,000 historians descended on New Orleans on Thursday for the American Historical Association's four-day annual meeting, replacing the chants of departing Sugar Bowl revelers with more sober talk of job interviews, departmental politics, and - at least in the official panels - the past itself.

As usual, the meeting's 300-plus sessions touched on contemporary issues like climate change, the 2012 presidential election, and the Arab Spring, along with more purely scholarly topics big (“Horstory: Equines and Humans in Africa, Asia and North America”) and small (“Trash and Treasure: The Significance of Used Goods in America, 1880-1950″). But for many in attendance, the most urgent question was the state of the historical profession itself in an era of budget cuts and declining humanities enrollments.

At a panel called “The Skyscraper Index, the Hemline Index, Champagne, Nail Polish and the Dow Jones,” scholars analyzed the colorful - and usually suspect - metrics that journalists and other commentators sometimes use to track the state of the economy.

In the official conference hotels clustered on Canal Street, it was tempting to look for similarly offbeat indicators of the perennially troubled job market for history doctorates: The number of special “historian-themed cocktails” quaffed at the conference hotel bars? The profusion of sessions with titles like “The Entrepreneurial Historian” or “Exploring a Range of Careers Outside the Academy”? The rueful Twitter post noting that the meeting was generating only .5 tweets per minute, compared with the 13 per minute for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association held simultaneously in Boston?

O r perhaps it was the hearty laughter that followed when the journalist Michael Pollan, at Thursday night's opening plenary panel, asked: “Why do people like me who use your work end up selling more books than you do?”

Tension between popular and scholarly approaches to history can get rancorous, as the recent dust-up over Steven Spielberg's “Lincoln” can attest. But Mr. Pollan's quip wasn't meant as a victory dance. The deep perspective offered by professional historians, he said, is an essential public good in a world where “every politician would have us forget what he said yesterday,” and too few journalists are willing (and perhaps able) to cry foul.

And there was little disagreement from his fellow panelists, four distinguished historians and one publisher who had been summoned to ponder “The Public Practice of History in a Digital Age.”

“If we were as lost in space as we are in time, we would be freaking out,” said Edward Ayers, th e president of the University of Richmond and a host of the popular podcast “BackStory with the American History Guys.”

But there was less agreement over what was to blame for the marginal status of academic history in a world that gobbles heroic biographies of the Founders and turns Twitter feeds like Real Time WWII into viral sensations, but takes a pass on the kind of impersonal, analytic history that academic departments reward.

For William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the outgoing president of the history association., the problem is insufficient attention to basic storytelling. Historians, he said, tend to default to a dry omniscient voice that hasn't changed since the 19th-century, despite the fact that historians no longer believe in that kind of omniscience.

“We are a deeply narrative discipline, but we give very little thought t o who the narrator is,” he said.

Niko Pfund, the president of Oxford University Press, seconded the notion, pointing additionally to the history profession's continued reliance on the scholarly monograph for tenure decisions. Historians, more than any other group of scholars, he said, remain “absolutely imprisoned in the format of the printed book,” a situation he called “borderline catastrophic.”

Not that all the panelists were ready to throw footnotes and peer-review standards out with the monograph. The designated power-blogger on the panel, Clare Potter, a professor at the New School and the author of the blog Tenured Radical, questioned the printed book's status as a professional “fetish object,” but defended the value of traditional historical training against those who have called on departments to stop training so many doctoral students who will later find themselves without jobs .

“I think we should be educating as many Ph,D.'s as possible,” she said.

In the end, the panel seemed to agree on a loose and egalitarian notion of who counted as a “historian.” Jon Stewart, several agreed, was a good public historian simply for confronting politicians with inconvenient truths about the past. A historian, Mr. Ayers added, is simply someone who has interesting things to say about the past, and can point to the documentary record to prove them.

That why-can't-we-get-along outlook, coming from scholars who had already run the tenure gauntlet, drew a mixed response from the audience. And it hardly seems likely to defuse intellectual turf wars like the debate over “Lincoln.”

At a packed panel earlier in the day on “The Emancipation Proclamation at 150,” a question about the film's “great man” view of emancipation drew an awkward silence from the panel followed by a laugh.

Kate Masur, a professor at Northwestern University who wrote a much-discussed New York Times Op-Ed blasting the film for ignoring African-Americans' active role in their own emancipation, said that her view of the film softened somewhat after she went to see it again with groups of students.

David Blight, a professor at Yale who was briefly an adviser on the film, defended it, cautiously, as delivering a useful public lesson on the 13th Amendment, even if it ended up reinforcing a simplified heroic narrative of Lincoln.

The movie, Mr. Blight said, shows us Lincoln the great abolitionist, rather than the “much messier” and more conflicted pre-1863 Lincoln who believed, among other things, that African-Americans should ultimately be “repatriated” to Africa.

“But no one is going to make that movie,” he added.