讀到一段話，還頗酸啊。 History is hot. History is big business. Millions of Americans consume it every day via museums, theme parks, and Web sites as well as books, movies, and television. For the most part, however, this enormous audience has eluded academic historians--that is, those of us who make our living at universities. We write almost exclusively for each other, not for general non-fiction readers, and the readers know it. We ignore them; they ignore us. It’s mutual. Despite their scholarly attention to the “common” man or woman, it seemed, many historians automatically disdained anything that these commoners might care to read. Indeed, they imagined their own work as so complex and sophisticated that only the most educated minds could comprehend it. Quoting a former mentor, historian Patricia Limerick wryly compared her colleagues to people that nobody wanted to dance with in high school; as a defense mechanism, they pretended that they never wanted to dance in the first place. Such scholars embraced obscurity as a badge of honor: even if a popular audience were available for their books and articles, they would not stoop to enlist it.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 14:12:36 +0000
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