So I found this article a few days ago, a brief essay by Gordon Wood describing the “choices” made by historians about writing analytic vs. narrative histories. And it got under my skin a bit…he writes:

“Instead, most (new historians) have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history.”

While I have great respect for Professor Wood’s work, he’s not really being fair here. There are many graduate students and scholars who would love the opportunity to chose to write narrative history. But those sorts of books will not get you tenure at many, if not most, places. The initial choices made by “new” historians are those that will best serve them if they want to remain university based historians. He’s also fails to acknowledge the historians who can do both — write a book within an analytic framework that still offers a compelling narrative. Two recent books, Lisa Levenstein’s A Movement without Marches and Hilary Moss’s Schooling Citizens, manage this quite well. And both books are written beautifully.

Either way, why isn’t there at least a paragraph on the ways in which scholarship is evaluated in the university? And why isn’t there a paragraph asking why senior historians, who have tenure, don’t chose to write larger narratives? Or why those that do are not always successful?