I couldn't agree with you more, Lydia. I just got my lowest ever mark on an assignment I wrote for my MA, and the criticism was that I used three works of popular history (written by public historians with History PhDs!) as case studies. Clearly that is very frowned-upon in my History dept (but nobody told me, and one of our lecturers used a popular history as an example in a lecture, so I thought it was OK).
Like you I'm convinced that history is everyone's history, and it should be accessible to everyone. What's the point of academics having theory-laden conversations with each other if none of it filters through to the general public? And then academics get all snobby about amateur history lovers who "get it wrong" or "don't understand". They get things wrong because they can't access the latest scholarship, because it's behind a journal paywall, or in a book that costs £100, or discussed at an academic conference that costs £xxx to attend.
Oof, sorry - your post touched a nerve :) Anyway, I am 100% behind you on this.
Oh, and this is a recent book that I think walks the line between academic scholarship and popular history/archaeology really well: https://fortrenn.substack.com/p/review-picts-scourge-of-rome-rulers
I couldn't agree with you more, Lydia. I just got my lowest ever mark on an assignment I wrote for my MA, and the criticism was that I used three works of popular history (written by public historians with History PhDs!) as case studies. Clearly that is very frowned-upon in my History dept (but nobody told me, and one of our lecturers used a popular history as an example in a lecture, so I thought it was OK).
Like you I'm convinced that history is everyone's history, and it should be accessible to everyone. What's the point of academics having theory-laden conversations with each other if none of it filters through to the general public? And then academics get all snobby about amateur history lovers who "get it wrong" or "don't understand". They get things wrong because they can't access the latest scholarship, because it's behind a journal paywall, or in a book that costs £100, or discussed at an academic conference that costs £xxx to attend.
Oof, sorry - your post touched a nerve :) Anyway, I am 100% behind you on this.