Facsimiles in a Popular Historical Magazine

Abstract

REALISM and candor compel me to confess that the optimism implicit in the subject at this session is at least mildly discomforting. Circulation statistics scarcely justify the phrase Popularizing History and Documentary Sources. The participle popularizing should be considered a challenge, not a boast. History is not so generally popular as to be salable in obviously respectable quantities. Let us look at some comparative figures. I once heard an address by a representative of the publishing firm that issued Douglas Southall Freeman's four-volume Pulitzer-prizewinning biography of Robert E. Lee. With disarming frankness this spokesman admitted the firm's unbelieving astonishment that it could sell tens of thousands of copies of a footnoted, scholarly work about even so important a hero. Yet these amazing sales brought that distinguished success only to the level of one copy for approximately every 3,000 people in the United States. What seems at first thought to be a much better record was achieved by a historical novel that appeared also in the 1930's, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. In round figures, 1 copy of that book was sold for every 200 men, women, and children in our nation; and perhaps 1 in every 5 or 10 paid their money to see the much-ballyhooed, supercolossal based on the novel. But who would be so naive as to contend that the popularity of either the book or the is attributable primarily to the historical background or content in the story? Did their success not stem chiefly from the appeal of basic human relations and emotions among fictional characters whose tangled web, plus high-powered publicity, would have made a best seller and the movie of the year even without the backdrop of Civil War and Reconstruction?