An Academic Historian's Effect on Public History

Abstract

THE FOUNDING FATHERS, whose shades still pace the historic buildings of this great park site, did not recognize the distinction between and historians, for the former did not exist in their generation. They felt that historians had a civic duty to posterity to dig up and narrate the true facts in that great drama in which the Founders had been central actors. Men like Peter Force, who were carrying out such a mandate, were the precursors of what we today would call the historian. Indeed, were George Bancroft or Francis Parkman at these meetings today they would be somewhat puzzled by the categories of history and historians. As gentlemen and scholars, they wrote for a large audience and exercised an enormous impact on shaping the public's image of the American past. Bancroft, I might add, was very much the man-active in politics, a Cabinet officer, a diplomat abroad-a breed of man that continued down to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Thus, the wall that is raised today between the readership of, say American Heritage or the Smithsonian on the one side, and The Journal ofAmerican History on the other, would not have been found standing in the previous century. That recent separation of roles of public and academic historian has, in my judgment, contributed to a decline in the American public's appetite for historical fare. The title of my paper was one chosen by the program arrangers, and hence if my remarks have an autobiographical cast, it is perhaps because the program committee felt that I had been able in a