Pop History

ie non-pop history = badly written? i don't follow the distinction you're making? isn't history the only academic discipline to affirm the herodotian belle lettriste tradition as part of its whatever...

macauley-gibbon-ajptaylor-epthompson??

macaulay i mean (and gibbon comes before obv)

Pop History as in "History which gets in the [book] charts" duh!

Ans. to your question - no, thanks to those pesky Europeans. Basically the choice I was presented with at Oxford was belle- lettriste tradition (readable, essentially narrative) vs Annaliste revolution (which led variously to micro-detail unreadability, post- structuralist unreadability, interdisciplinary unreadability, generally history which abjured a non-specialist audience).

In fact this choice was already proved bogus by Ladurie's Montaillou but I - and everyone else pre-Longitude - was too thick to realise that you could have more than one work of modernist history that still read like a bestseller and so my degree was much more of a slog than it should have been. Now I rather regret giving it up.

Also it's a distinction of subject matter. Gibbon Macaulay etc were writing hugely readable books about kings and queens, not Cod.

I've read a couple of semi-clones of Longitude, but I'd argue there were a few good examples of the approach if not the actual type of focus in earlier years, like Parkenham on the Struggle for Africa. King Leopold's Ghost is arguably the most affecting of the recent efforts.

eg readable micro-detail? (re those pesky europeans: it is the bad imitators who are unreadable anyway, not the originals? mannerist jargoneers blah blah)

The originals may well be readable - I haven't tried for several years, there's a couple volumes of The Meditteranean on my Mum's shelf though, I might give it a shot.

Specialist books are necessary, as are books which take certain knowledge for granted or certain analytic frameworks for granted. That's history as science. Then readable and popularizing tomes are necessary too and vital as the visionary-mystic social re-invention/rediscovery. And don't forget the tradition of the Biography in that regard. Historians who KNOW THEIR STUFF are often suXor writers, writers who don't suck are often suXor with history. So when its done well, GREAT! (Also a historian who can't write is only half a historian).

So I mean these books have been around for-evah. The change is ppl reading them. & History of science is a difft. field anyway, and to some extent one which has been seeking legitimation ANYWHERE in the first place.

Yup. Love it. I feel slightly ashamed saying that - I mean, I haven't touched a non-bestseller history book since I finished my A-levels. But I think they're great! The one about Elizabethan Explorers settling in Virgina - "Big Chief Elizabeth" - I really enjoyed.

My only problem with this has been how much the "pop" aspect has bled over onto subject matter as opposed to solely presentation: the natural-history-of-common-object field is well and crowded and almost seems inspired by alt-rock band naming ("I'll write a comprehensive history of . . . Sugar!"). The "pop history" concept as Tom's delineating it, though, basically amounts to confidence, or possibly "applied history" -- i.e. having a theoretical framework clear and defensible enough that one can simply use it rather than academically developing it.

brilliant history of sugar written in early 80s (ps "brilliant" = the review in nyrb was a revelation to a still-youthful mark s) (eg cane sugar consumption of average european went up by !!!600 times!!!! between 1600 and 1950, dates from memory)

Tom, read A basque History of the World, it's pop history at it's finest. On the other hand I tried to read Herodotus and gave up, I found it really dull, instead I did some Greek history learning from a book called Courtesans and fish cakes, which was quite pop.

Oops, Mark: the recent one I was thinking of was actually salt (which is incidentally also a mid-90s alt-rock band).

(And voila it's by the cod fellow!)

In my neck of the publishing woods we will soon be doing glass; I don't doubt that plenty of these titles are fantastic *, but I seem to sense an unfortunate trend toward pinning popular history on near-random bits of material history which makes me imagine historians sitting around thinking "Bestseller ... about ... peaches? No, not peaches ... Bleach? No, not sexy enough ... Forks? Maybe utensils generally so I can do comparative chopstick stuff?"

* Particularly all of ours! They are such brilliant things that you should read all of them!

Herodotus is great! Talk about a friendly garrulous liar.

Nitsuh I would honestly love to have histories like that about all kinds of shit.

Salt by the bloke who wrote Cod is great. Fascinating. I don'te eat anchovies or sprinkle my flatmate's expensive Guerrande Sea salt on my chips with out htinking of the massive historic ramifications of it all.

Seriously, it's a good read.