Academic history suffers from being insulated but that's not the fault of the public or the academic, it's a problem of secondary education.

As a certified secondary social studies teacher, I have to reconcile my personal need to always go deeper, the academic need to understand at a deeper level compared to the requirements of my state government which as a socializing agenda. I am required by law to educate students in the Exceptional experience of America, something a proper academic would never do and the layman ingests due to curriculum requirements. So right away we have an issue how secondary education fails both the layman and the academic to indoctrinate the students on a certain topic.

As such, I arrive to this conclusion, it doesn't matter. Due to the requirements of secondary education, unless the layman goes into a 300 level history class, they will not be exposed to historiography and conversely many academics don't realize how the system is set against their "ivory tower academics".

Do academics have the right to tell a layman that they should care? In theory yes, of course, but conversely the layman is bombarded with things they should care about, from their immediately family and career to the guilt tripping commercials from the ASPCA. We should ask them to care but we shouldn't expect them to.

As a result, Ask Historians does a great job in bridging the two. Many of us are either looking at graduate school, in graduate school, or do higher level history than expected of a standard undergrad. As such we are ambassadors of our subject, begging people to hear with the arcane specialties and minutia that the layman might not care for. But with some guidance they may come to learn from us.

Conversely also, Ask Historians gives perspective to us. We have our arcane subjects by not everyone will care about it. People interested in the Napoleonic Era might not care about the level of social engineering Napoleon did within France. This makes us realize that our special, snowflake topic isn't for everyone and that we should learn to accept and grow from it.

As such, AH is good and important for we fill a hole left by secondary education.

Most non-sensationalizing history is suffering from a disconnect with the public. As a collections manager/curator, I read a lot of think pieces and blog posts about improving museum attendance and connecting with a public that doesn't want static, didactic exhibits anymore. I wouldn't say that the overall message is that quality of scholarship is irrelevant, but there is a feeling that you should pull back on the detail and educate in a more engaging and participatory way ... which is similar to many criticisms of academic history texts. I would actually say that ideas like historical memory, subalterneity, and the cultural turn are hot right now, just not expressed in those terms - you need/are supposed to interact with these theoretical frameworks to present history in a relevant way to the general public.

Outreach is a difficult topic. AH is a good model - my experience at doing similar outreach in other social media outlets (ie, answering questions on Facebook) is that you very much need the framework we have here, with the expectation of mutual respect and of writing longer answers, otherwise you end up with a glut of half-relevant answers drowning out the rest, and/or offense taken and given back again when a bad answer is disagreed with. That's really the key thing for any outreach model.

I am a fan of this subreddit as it provides accurate and relevant answers to my questions unlike rest of Reddit. My question is that would it be alright to comment here in the subreddit as I have only studied history upto high school but I am very passionate in reading up on many historical topics.

Are the subjects that are " hot " right now truly irrelevant? Or should laymen care about ideas like historical memory, subalternaeity, and the cultural turn? Do academics have a right to tell the public that they should care?

If academic historians want the public to care about these things they need to write about them clearly, cleanly, and without jargon. If they can make the stakes important to the public without the obfuscation that surrounds many of these subjects, and make the case that they are important, then, yes, the public might give a damn. They might not. It's a question of making the case, and not taking for granted that the public ought to care just because academics do.

I have yet to find the concept in either the humanities or the sciences that could not be rendered perfectly intelligible to an average member of the public if the author was actually trying to communicate it to them. Too often academics are not actually trying to do that, for whatever reason. If academics want to use jargon to talk amongst themselves, I leave them to it. It clearly plays a clarifying role in the sciences; I am not convinced of its clarifying role in the humanities but I know others often disagree with me on this. Either way, there is a difference between the language you use to talk about something complex with other experts, and the language you use to talk to non-experts. It is just about wanting to communicate well.

Can we look forward to greater efforts at outreach from history departments, or are faculty too preoccupied with getting published?

I don't blame the faculty. If the reward system is about talking to other academics, then academics will primarily do that. If the reward system is more flexible, then you get more flexible output. It is not entirely on "the department" either — things like tenure are decided at various levels at various institutions, and there are also things like what kinds of project grant agencies support and other complex things relating to funding, time, and other resources.

I don't think we will see greater efforts at outreach at an institutional level. What I do think we will see, and already are seeing, is greater opportunity for individuals who are willing to take advantage of the distributive power of the Internet to amplify their work and voices. And I do think we are seeing a gradual but palpable acceptance of that as some form of scholarship by the profession. So that's something.

I asked a question here about communication of history research and got a really good reply from /u/restricteddata

I don't know where else to ask this on this sub but I'm looking for a book or two about medieval Knights/combat and village/town life.

Doesn't a need to reach the public provide a good outlet for a preoccupation with getting published? Seems to me that a writer like David McCullough (or Deborah Blum, among many other popular historians) offers a great model for engaging general readers and publishing plenty.