Abstract
Why are history essays so po-faced? Standard agendas for history essays summon advanced-level students to account for some past something in particularly sober, grounded and disinterested ways. This history essay about the odd history of the history essay explores how this model arose, and its consequences. My focus is on how the history essay’s unusual insistence on disinterested forays into things of interest erects forms of academic power that narrow student self-expression. Essays emerged, evolved and thrived in four Augustan-patrician worlds: in Imperial Rome, in the Northern Renaissance, in Enlightenment coffeehouses and salons, and, for the last century and half, on serried wobbly tables in exams. The genteel equanimities of the history essay may now rebuff other immersive possibilities to perform learning in this mass-participation era of higher education. If the history essay is still to thrive among emerging forms and e-platforms of student expression, academic historians and history educators, like the Scholastics and Sophists of yore, must also teach the rhetorics of the unusual essay genre they (and I) are perverse enough still to cherish.
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