I often hear it mentioned that common misconceptions include, 'history education is the rote memorization of names and dates,' or the polar opposite assertion that history is too subjective and un-empirical to merit the same prestige accorded to economics or the 'hard' sciences. But I find that most people have some respect for the discipline and understand that those stereotypes aren't really true.

What I notice most is the disconnect between the interests of 'popular' history and 'academic' history. Walk into any bookstore (or scroll through any history subreddit) and look at where people's interests lie. Military history dominates everything--question after question and book after book on the second world war. If a book isn't military history, it's often about high politics or a biography of some political or military figure. Look at the books published by academic presses, and you see that the academy has a much wider scope. They're interested in society, gender, sexuality, culture, the environment--the list is almost endless, taking in all of the products of the human past in a tremendously wide arc. And so, when I tell people I study history, they always strike up conversations about generals or a grandfathers' experience in war, because that's what history is to most people.

That's all fine, those are probably going to remain perennial interests. But I also think that we're missing out and impoverishing our collective understanding of the past and of the world if the general history readership remains so heavily focused on generals and leaders. But that's hardly their fault; academics could probably do a better job of writing more accessible histories.