NYT Book Editor contrasts "last public historian" Schlesinger with today's author/historians

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: History, Written in the Present Tense
By SAM TANENHAUS
Published: March 4, 2007


(Michael Evans/The New York Times, 1968)
A PUBLIC HISTORIAN Arthur Schlesinger Jr., shown outside New York’s Biltmore Hotel, used history to speak of present-day problems.

With the death last week of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at 89, America lost its last great public historian. The notion may sound strange, given the appetite, as voracious as at any time in recent memory, for serious works of history, and in particular the vogue for lengthy, often massively detailed biographies of the founders and of presidents.

But Mr. Schlesinger performed a different function. He stood at the forefront of a remarkable generation of academic historians. Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970, and C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999, were its other towering figures. All three, reciprocal admirers, wrote classic works that reanimated the past even as they rummaged in it for clues to understanding, if not solving, the most pressing political questions of the present. As a result, new books by these historians often generated excitement and conveyed an urgency felt not only by other scholars but also by the broader population of informed readers....

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....(David) McCullough and others as talented, or nearly so, don’t command the broad cultural authority that Mr. Schlesinger and his contemporaries did. Nor, for that matter, do academic historians like Gordon S. Wood and James M. McPherson, though their books resonate beyond the university.

The problem is not one of seriousness, intelligence or skill. It is rather one of reach. Mr. Wood’s “Radicalism of the American Revolution” is a major contribution to our understanding of its subject, and Mr. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” enthralled readers. But neither work can be said to have affected how many of us think about current issues.

This is even truer of the many popular books on America’s founding founders, from Washington and Adams to Jefferson and Hamilton....These are books that, for all their merits, seem not only about the past but also, to some extent, mired in it. They are archival. And that may be the problem. Mr. Schlesinger’s accounts of midcentury American politics have the pageantry, texture and depth we normally find in books about long-vanished eras in that they were written by a historian convinced he was living in a period no less than rich than those earlier ones....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/weekinreview/04tanenhaus.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview&oref=slogin