Both academic and popular historians make a considerable contribution to the development of people’s interest in history. However, the approaches employed by each of the two groups of researchers are quite dissimilar. Academic authors investigating and writing about historical events need to base their works on certain practices and conventions. Meanwhile, popular writers of history can employ quite different methods when preparing their works. The debate between the two ways of presenting historical facts and figures is so intense that its acclaim is increasing, resulting in discussions at various levels and circles.
Both academic and popular historians undertake the process of writing books or articles in peculiar ways. It is of utmost importance for academicians to present facts, figures, and statistics with the highest precision. Since the accuracy of the data reflected is crucial, academic books may look too unamusing or even boring to the general public. As a result, some people tend to get acquainted with prominent historical events and persons by reading non-academic literature. According to David Greenberg, the problem with popular writing that academics consider the greatest is that it does not offer any critique of intellectual dilemmas. Also, popular books do not inspire readers to raise questions or initiate debates over the events depicted in them.
Non-academic historical books are created to entertain the audience rather than inform them. Popular writers tend to narrate about the lives of outstanding leaders or other figures whose contribution to the evolution of certain countries was large. While such books perform an important function of encouraging more and more people to read about history, data reflected in them cannot be viewed as complete or entirely reliable. On the contrary, “dry, analytical” information presented in academic papers is always contingent on primary sources, boosting its reliability. For instance, someone investigating the roots of the Civil War in America may either resort to popular books or academic sources, such as The Valley of the Shadow website. The information gained from these two types of resources will be radically different. In a popular book, one will likely find narrations about people’s lives in the North and the South before the war presented in an appealing form, which would make them interesting to read. Instead, the web archive offers factual data and statistics on critical events of the period.
I agree with Greenberg’s critique because studying history is already subjective to a great extent since no one can travel back in time and check the authenticity of the recordings that historians operate. Thus, simplifying facts by presenting them in an amusing form is another, yet deeper, dimension of subjectivity. Some approaches may be employed to strike a balance between the literary style of popular history and the standards and conventions of academic history. For instance, it is necessary to include more reliable facts in popular books, even if in the form of appendices in the end. However, I am not sure that academic books may become more ‘amusing’ to readers. The only way to make them less ‘dry’ is adapting scholars’ language, by they certainly cannot alter their means of writing altogether.