Invisible Adjunct

This idea has some merit. Could I add some more marketing ideas?

- video games. X-Box versions of great debates and speeches in American history based on all of those martial arts fighting games. Depending on the oratory, opponents may bleed or even have their heads explode (think exciting visuals here). For example, have McKinley and Bryant face off. If Bryant wins, he actually crucifies his Republican challenger on a real golden cross. One may have to take some liberties with the evidence, or even create entirely imaginary scenarios, in the interest of entertainment. We need to be open to that challenge.

If someone wants to cross the Atari stand-by "Combat" with a social and cultural history of colonization in francophone Central Africa, then they should drop me a line.

- painters caps and tote bags. Don't they work well for NPR and public television stations?

Household tips. "Are a lot of severed heads cluttering up the house? Stack them in pyramids like the Mongols!"

Actually, my line of study might be profitable sometime because of reenactment societies and other military buffs.

What really needs to happen is the professional historians need to take back the writing of history from hack journalists. I'm sick of seeing history books selling well and then noticing that they are written by a journalist who gets everything wrong. We can write well researched, correct, intellectually stimulating and popular history if we want. Why don't we? The AHA needs to get a book series going, something like a book or two a year and vigourously (sp?) promote the damn thing and make sure it's readable. This will get people interested in history again. We also need to start getting on TV shows like Hardball, O'reilly, etc. They also bring up these asinine historical comparisons (Saddam/Stalin, Iraq/Post WWII Europe). We need to be on those shows dammit, not some ahistorical twit of a senator commenting on how the situations are so similar and we can learn so much from history. We can learn from history, but these shows always get everything wrong. Basically, we need to come out of Ivory Towers and f-ck sh-t up!

"We can write well researched, correct, intellectually stimulating and popular history if we want. Why don't we?"

Perhaps historians don't want to? Or perhaps the norms and expectations of academic history make it difficult to cross over?

Every few years, it seems, someone makes a plea for a "revival of narrative." Most recently, e.g., Simon Schama, who does write intellectually stimulating popular history. But lots of historians snark at Schama for publishing outside his own specialization.

While this entry is obviously tongue in cheek, I do think more historians should try to reach broader audiences outside the academy. I think the book series is a good idea. I'd also like to see more magazines like the UK's History Today.

you think this is tongue in cheek? when i am driving around in a souped-up Delorean thanks to the profits flooding in from the Cliometrics (TM) playstation game and my historically-themed tote bags, then i'll laugh at all of the people who doubted these ways of popularizing history.

africanists like myself have been under fire for not producing works for general audiences, and i think the critics have a very good point. when works do get attention, like "King Leopold's Ghost" did recently, it is often journalists who use historical works as references who reach a large audience. will people be tenured for putting out popular works, though? at some places, certainly, but not all.

Incidentally, joking aside, I did get a book contract for a book on Genghis Khan. It's clear that I'm supposed to write for the well-informed general reader and not write (for example) ten pages on the provenance, textual problems, and dating of the sources. I'm a bit apprehensive as to how it will be treated by the best men in the field, all of whom know more than I do, probably none of whom is willing to write such a book, and some of whom have the normal PhD resentments.

My estimate is that if the book sells well, I'l net $20-40,000 over the course of 3-4 years, after spending about a year fulltime writing. That's the high end. So writing popular books is not going to solve all of the profession's problems.

Zizka,
Congrats on the book contract!

Yes, congratulations, that's great news.

And let me offer you some advice. Three words should guide your writing: "Genghis Khan" and "screenplay."

There are two novelized versions of Genghis Khan's work out, one by a Lister and one by the pulp novelist Taylor Caldwell. John Wayne also played Genghis Khan in a movie I haven't seen.

How about:

"As he watched his men stacking the enemy heads, Genghis felt strangely empty. And he knew that, beautiful though they were, his 800 wives would not be able to lift his spirits. Somehow, he needed more than this".

In the biz, BTW, you don't stress the bloodiness of the conquests.

"As he watched his men stacking the enemy heads, Genghis felt strangely empty. And he knew that, beautiful though they were, his 800 wives would not be able to lift his spirits. Somehow, he needed more than this".

Cue to beautiful woman with windswept hair, riding a horse (Lucy Liu? Catherine Zeta-Jones?). He conquered the lands of China. Will she conquer his heart?

"All his life he'd been a good boy -- murdering, plundering, and raping as his parents expected. But in the process he had forgotten about his own needs. You can't live your life for others, he said to himself. What is "success", after all, really?

Suddenly [Catherine Zeta-Jones] swept past on her fine black stallion. 'I must have her" he said to himself, giving orders to have her husband killed. He had always been a sucker for puffy-faced women, of whom he had married over a hundred."

Zizka, you're the campiest straight middle-aged white dude ever.

Based on DeLong's and my calculations, I would say that 4000 pounds at the end of the 18th century should be taken as being worth between $250,000 and $400,000. Your figure is in that range.

On to history. Before I quit graduate school I reread Herodotus. I had spent a couple of years reading monographs and reviews so dull that they made me weep. Herodotus knew that he was writing a STORY and that it had to be interesting as such.

And that is the guts of the problem. The academic social science approach to history is absolutley guaranteed to produce unreadable glub.

History should be fun and interesting. History is, after all, about life. But the academic program is to encrust it with so much methodology and so many footnotes and qualifications that life is smothered.

Zizka, you have a chance. I hope you are very sucessful in your endeavor. The Great Kahn was one of history great figures and a facinating story in his own right. Orphaned, his tribe destroyed, he puts together a great army and conquers the greatest nation in the world. How about "The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Kahn" as a working title?

Zizka,

As long as this thread is all about you, I have a question. On your site, you spell Genghis "Chinggis." Nifty, because in Farsi, it's pronounced as something like "Changeez," which is great, because "chang" means "claw." Thoughts?

Chinggis is the correct Mongol. Genghis is mediated by some other language, possible medieval Farsi but maybe Armenian, Latin, Turkish, etc. (There's an answer but I can't remember.) Incidentally, his given name, "Temujin" means "Smith" and he had a Christian decendant named "George." No joke.

Robert, enough is known about Chinggis Qan that such a book could be written. Short answer: Machiavelli could have taught him nothing, and his army was organized on rational, non-traditional, non-kinship lines. He killed all his enemies and all of his inconvenient friends.

I read Herodotus in HS and then as a freshman in college. My fellow students were bored -- they wanted to read Herman Hesse or Tolkein. SOme of the best anecdotes in the world, but they didn't care. "Gyges and his wife" was hilarious.

Whooooo baked his loaves in a cold oven?

I want to read the stirring, possibly revisionist history of Chinggis' mother, who IIRC had to have been one smart tough cookie.

"History should be fun and interesting. History is, after all, about life. But the academic program is to encrust it with so much methodology and so many footnotes and qualifications that life is smothered."

I agree, and I think there should be more history written with a broader audience in mind.

On the other hand: there's a lot of careful, detailed, specialized, heavily footnoted work behind the nifty little tools at the Current Value of Old Money website. The tools are fun to use, but the research behind them isn't: ie, that work probably wouldn't meet most people's definition of interesting and engaging. But without the research that would strike most people as deadly dull (detailed analyses of price and wage series, etc), you don't get the nifty little tools.

Of course, someone could take that research and write a lively, engaging work on changes in standard of living over the centuries. But that person would have to rely on highly specialized research, translated and somewhat simplified for a non-specialist audience.

All of which is to say: I agree there should be more narrative, but I also believe the more "social scientific" approaches provide empirical grounding (on demographics, economics, and so on) that we would otherwise lack.

From a narrative point of view, literally a thousand pages of research can be summed up sometimes in one line.

Sample: "The Hans might have been distantly descended from the Hsiung-nu, though it probably will never be possible to be sure. Their language is likewise unknown (as is the language of the Hsiung-nu); if it was not some form of Turkish, it was probably a member of the very loosely-defined and almost extinct "paleo-Siberian" family."

Di Cosmo gave that eight pages. A thorough treatment of the subject would take several hundred pages, and certainly over a thousand pages has been written on it.