I think academic historians need to learn that it takes a lot more than "endnotes rather than footnotes" and saying in the introduction that you are writing for a general audience, for a book to actually be written for a general audience.

(LPT: Not publishing with Brill, who charges $100-$300 per book, would be a good start.)

So here's my take on 'popular history'

There are four types of history 'works' out there. In order from most academic to least they are professional, popular, pop, pulp (or as some put it poop).

Professional: These are the academic books and journal articles produced by academics for academics. These are the peer reviewed journals by academic associations and the books published often in small numbers and geared toward university libraries (and usually cost a small fortune). These books are usually dense, heavily use citations and footnotes, and require an intimate familiarity with not only the subject matter, but of theory as well. I would say 95% of everyone who reads history books will never read these.

Popular The name might fool you into thinking these are low grade books, but they aren't. In fact, the majority of the AskHistorians recommended reading list falls into this category. These are books written by historians/journalists/expert amatures that use extensive references including primary source materials. These books are informative, well written, but not unapprochable to lay readers. These books actually can have great influence in academic history (and are often reviewed in academic journals), as they 'create buzz'. For example, David McCullough's biography of Truman created a lot of renewed interest in both academia and the public in President Truman's life and legacy and changed a lot of perceptions of him from a failure to a relatively good president (at least in Public perception). These are the books that help shape the way a society talks about their history and their place in the world and are a forum for academics to share their ideas to a broad audience (think 1491's influence on the perception of Native Americans in the pre-Columbian era, or Howard Zinn's 'A People's History'). The book that the popular musical Hamilton falls into this category.

Pop These are the 'fun reads' of history. The "12 Things Your Teacher Never Told You", the coffee table photo histories with lots of cool maps and factoids. These are usually light on real historical analysis, often wrong, cite disproven theories, popular myths, etc. These aren't good history books to learn things from. Think of them as the Wikipedia of history works, and are where a lot of the bad answers that get deleted from the sub come from. Avoid unless you just want a cool picture book of tanks or cars or 1920's Paris or something.

Pulp(Poop) These are the garbage books. These are the 1421's/Ancient Aliens/Jesus had kids and started a bistro in Marselle type books. These are garbage history. The only purpose they serve for real historians, is that it gives them a chance to make some money writing books that debunk this garbage, get on talk shows debunking this garbage, and to have a good laugh at.

So arguably, "Popular History" is the most dominant form of history in our culture and is something that academic historians should be involved in. It helps shape our historical and cultural memory about where we came from, who we are, and where we are going as a society. Any historian who want's to just hang out in duty stacks and shun any book you can find in a Barnes & Noble is actually doing the entire field of history and society a disservice.

Historian by training but not by trade. My take is that anything that encourages public interest in history is a good thing these days.

History IMO is all about continually adding nuance and context to build a more complete narrative of the world. But in order to effectively do that, you first need to build a base, the high level initial narrative to paint details on.

This is what pop history is great for. They establish that high level narrative, with some juicy stories to engage readers.

I think of it like a Bob Ross painting - you get your mountains in, and then add in the peaks and trees. Pop history makes those broad and coarse mountains, which are much better than no mountains at all.

I can generally enjoy them, as long as they aren't in my subject matter interest.

In pulp studies/Lovecraft studies in particular, there's a very fine line between fan scholar and general enthusiast, so lots of "amateur scholasticism" happens, and a lot of the books are non-academic - with the odd case that some of the more wonkish academic books are out of lunch and less useful or accurate than some of the fan publications.

Does popular history provide more benefit than hurt?

In this context, "pop history" books on the pulps or authors like Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard are valued to the degree that they correctly inform the public - which usually runs up hard against sensationalistic efforts by writers and publishers, and bad scholarship. This isn't necessarily a huge problem when you get some slick, glossy-paper, full-color coffee table book on pulp publishing - those are candy; they may not add anything new to the understanding of the field, but they don't hurt either. On the other side of things... over the last couple of years, for example, there's been a spate of bad "pop biographies" of H. P. Lovecraft. They're generally rubbish, with the writers voicing opinions and stressing any outlandish stories or elements of Lovecraft's life and works, sometimes to the point of making stuff up. Those are bad, because they do little more than misinform the public and perpetuate false myths...and they're a lot more accessible than the properly-researched-and-cited biographies, sadly.

How is it viewed in academic circles?

In pulp studies, I think, most of the actual academics that pay any attention to Lovecraft are literature majors that do so as an outgrowth of whatever writer or period or genre they're actually interested in; as such, you get some howlers - graduate students submitting papers based off of versions of the stories they read online, citing outdated biographies, general ignorance of the body of secondary critical literature (which, to be fair, is often obscure and not available in the local university library). So sometimes you have academics perpetuating more pop history nonsense than amateur scholars, which is a bit of the shoe being on the other foot compared to other disciplines, as I understand it.

What role do you think it should play in our society and the pursuit of historical knowledge?

It is good to make information not just available, but accessible to the public. Folks don't always need footnotes; a narrative history can capture the public interest and spark an enthusiasm that lasts a lifetime - I've yet to meet a working paleontologist that didn't start out as a bright-eyed kid that loved dinosaurs. At the same time, however, I think the books need to be as generally accurate as possible within the confines of those limits.

I struggle with this a lot, actually.

Much of my initial exposure to history and historians was via pop history (probably not that uncommon), but by the time I reached college I realized the "historians" I had befriended in my teen years were just a bunch of lawyers and accountants with time on their hands and friends in publishing. They weren't especially well-versed in historical methods or the historiography outside of their very specific areas. Then I realized that a lot of the most famous "historians," the ones who "represent" us on talk shows, aren't historians at all, and their very popular books are widely criticized within the academic community (Doris Kearns Goodwin is a great example of this).

My training as an undergraduate and now as a graduate student has pretty much embittered me towards pop history every step of the way. A lot of the time, these people are making money and getting famous on sub-par work. Occasionally you have someone like Jill Lepore, a great historian, who takes a turn toward popular audiences. While that is much more favorable because you know the quality is still there, there's still a lot of judgement within the academy. I'm told I can't use some of her books in historiography papers, for example, because they aren't "real."

This had led to a sort of professional identity crisis for me as I explore my options going forward. I have a book I want to write and I feel like I cannot write it until I have a PhD and a faculty appointment or other high-status position. If I don't get the PhD, or if I fail to become high-status enough, I feel like I'll be just another pretender like the hobby historians I judge so harshly if I write the book I want to write. I want my work to be accepted by the academic history community, and that feels much more important to me than money/fame.

Of course, that's stupid and elitist. Accurate popular histories have value. They educate and introduce history to new audiences. They shape cultural understandings of the past and the present.

So I am left asking myself the question: is it worth it to write for a general audience if I decide not to get the PhD, or if I cannot get a faculty position? Is telling the story you want to tell the most important thing? Or is having the respect of the professional community crucial? Academic elitism is a very real thing and I'm still trying to figure out if I should work within it or learn to ignore it.

Just a quick question, but what is "popular history"?

Is it anything aimed towards a wider audiance?

Or does it have to contain (or not contain.) certain qualities?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer on this; it depends on the class I'm teaching, and on the book.

There are a handful of great 'crossover' books, that are both accessible and impressive scholarly histories. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Midwife's Tale is one of these. Or Cohen's History in Three Keys on the Boxer uprising. Or Allen's Nazi Seizure of Power. But they are few and far between--and also tend to be older, because it is increasingly difficult to hit that 'sweet spot' of accessibility and solid research today. In part, because the research bar is so much higher now... a researcher on any topic needs to grapple with such a denser historiography, and with research that has far more sophisticated framings.... so to still remain accessible to a broad public, you need to 'dumb it down'... which in turn will alienate your academic readers. History is a specialized discipline--and just like physics, you now need years or even a decade of training just to learn the "language" to understand what is going on at the cutting-edge.

So, sometimes I do assign strictly "popular histories" for classes I teach. Examples would be Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, or Larson's Devil in the White City, just to give the students something engaging to read. To let them know history is fun. But it's tougher to work with these popular histories in a classroom situation (i.e. discuss their thesis, have students write papers evaluating the strength of their argument) because popular histories are so tightly built around narrative that they hide how the book "works" (i.e. what the book is arguing against, what evidence the author are using or not using, etc.) And I'm trying to get them to learn how to look for how a book 'works.'

On a tangential note, depressingly, I find that students more and more can't make it through a whole book, period. It's very different than ten years ago, even; the Facebook-style or even Reddit-style of reading--i.e. short snippets--has, over the last decade, had enormous costs in terms of attention span for the broader student body. No one has the stamina to read 250 pages anymore. I keep trying anyway, assigning books, cajoling and threatening to get them to read them... but in my intro classes, they just go online to find papers and notes and brief summaries and plagiarize like mad--students will do anything to avoid actually reading the book. Drives me crazy, but I just hand out a lot of "Cs", and deal with the whining on my end-of-term evaluations. ("THE PORFESSOR ASSIGNED WAY TOO MUCH READING. WE HAD TO READ A WHOLE BOOOK THIS IS AN INTRO CLASS! (etc.)" (sigh.) But that's a tangential matter.

In my upper-level history classes it's tougher, because most academic history is still out of reach for the vast majority of them. (I'm at a state university, not an Ivy.)
Not because of "bad writing" of academics, but because of specialized language and density of historiography required to understand what the academic book is actually 'doing.' So, I often assign older (and hence, out-of-date) academic books, that use less specialized language and have simpler arguments. Like Headrick's Tools of Empire or the aforementioned Allen's Nazi Seizure of Power. Because if you assign something like Peukert's Weimar Republic or Catherine Hall's Civilizing Subjects, even the seniors are just not going to follow what is going on.

On the other hand, I hate assigning popular history in upper-level classes, because the real problem with much popular history is that if it is successful (commercially), then it is successful probably because it is not challenging, critical or even useful.

For instance, the endless parade of paeans to the Founding Fathers is not only exhausting to keep track of, but most of it regurgitates massively outdated conceptions, resurrects discredited arguments, and generally caters to what people already know (or think they 'know'), rather than actually bringing them up to date. And don't get me started on the junk like Killing Patton, Killing Reagan, etc. That stuff is so crappy as to be unethical.

Increasingly, we need 'translators' of academic writing.
One academic historian who has written a popular history that digests--and more importantly, translates-- a tremendous amount of material is Dane Kennedy's A Highly Civilized Man. It's hugely successful book to teach. Brings students up to speed on the historiography of imperialism (post-Orientalism, etc.) , but is still readable.

But take a look at the Amazon reviews of it, where people attack him for his "jargon" or because the Richard Burton that emerges in his pages doesn't look exactly like the Burton the Great White Hero of the Empire still seen in popular literature.

In short, it's tough. A constant struggle to find the right mix of readable history and higher-level critically-minded history. And it's only going to get tougher as reading skills continue to deteriorate.

I'm not strictly a historian -- I'm nearly finished with my master's in public humanities -- but that's where my academic studies/scholarship has primarily been. My degree in public humanities probably gives this away, but I love and absolutely believe in the value of pop history books. Sure, there's an abundance of poorly done popular history books, but that's an issue of lazy writers+editors, not a problem inherent to the concept of pop history. At its best, pop history can engage with people who would otherwise never encounter solid scholarship on a given topic, and engender a curiosity for the subject that, hopefully, they will follow up on. My thoughts naturally go to Mary Beard as an example here. She not only writes books that straddle the academic/pop history boundaries (I consider her works like SPQR to be pop history, and to be honest I've never heard a rebuttal that wasn't something along the lines of "it's too good to be pop history"... which is obviously absurd) but also TV shows and the like -- how many ordinary people has Mary Beard inspired to learn more about Ancient Rome? I can't even imagine. As for how it's viewed in academic circles, I've found that that varies wildly, as one might expect. The overarching attitude I've most come across with professors/scholars is sort of "when it's good, it's great, and when it's bad, it's very bad" sort of thing, which I quite agree with. I think the people who actually took hardest stance against it were some history MA students who, if I'm being totally honest, were just rather sensitive to the idea that somebody outside the ivory tower might be interested in and capable of understanding (or doing themselves!) the type of historical scholarship that they were going to such pains to learn. I'm probably biased in my reaction (I have Strong Opinions about ivory tower nonsense, hence why I went from history + classics undergrad to public humanities grad), to be fair.

I think they are fine as long as they are written by trained academics (as in, they have actual recognised degrees and completed PhDs in the field they write about). 'Historical' books written by journalists with an agenda and a sensationalists approach are not credible and should be ignored.

Where do books about recent events fit into the "pop history/academic history" divide?

I'm talking about books like The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright and Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. The authors are not historians, but are deeply familiar with the context and material, and rely heavily on primary sources.

This is a really interesting thread.

Popular history is valuable in its ability to reach a wider audience - I'm a public historian, I think the best way of doing history is to be, if not aimed at, at least appropriate for laypeople rather than only a highly-educated few. The problem with popular history is not that it's inherently bad to try to be accessible, but that the lower standards in the publishing process (no peer review; focus on narrative and entertaining prose) mean that incorrect facts and bad interpretations are very often allowed to slip into the text - where they'll then go on to be cited in other popular histories, or by amateur/hobby historians outside of publication.

People learn from their entertainment. It doesn't matter if you're just vaguely interested in a topic and don't plan on using it as a source in a paper - you're probably going to assume the facts that are interpreted to fit together so smoothly are accurate, because nothing stands out to you as wrong. (People learn from fiction - do you know how many times I've seen Gone with the Wind used on the internet and in conversations as an example of Real Historical Tightlacing?) And then you'll pass it along as a factoid, or use it as an example in conversation, and that gives it currency. That's the problem.

It's not always just a bit of massaging to make the facts fit better into the narrative. Several years ago, I read The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson, and it all seemed great until I hit a spot that I quoted here in my blog about the influence of Gabrielle Chanel on 1920s fashion. It probably reads like a great aside to the average reader, but it's actually a huge mess that's clearly (to my eyes) not based on a solid use of primary sources or even any good secondary sources. I mean, she must have pulled the quotes from somewhere, but it's basically like she read a memoir by Chanel in the 1970s and went, "There's no reason to second-guess any of Chanel's conclusions or representations of the events. It seems that she was just the best designer." And while I got a good ten blog posts out of correcting it, way more people read the book than read my blog posts.

Pre-colonial African history doesn't get much attention in 'popular history' publications, I don't think.

Specifically talking about ancient Ghana, Mali and Songhai, I often see books like Royal Kingdoms of West Africa, Empires of Medieval West Africa or Ancient West African Kingdoms. All of those books are juvenile non-fiction, and are aimed at elementary-middle school students and teachers trying to teach a more multi-cultural curriculum. Given the intended young audience, these books often leave out or downplay challenging or troubling aspects of those kingdoms' history (e.g. slavery).

Of course, when people on AskHistorians ask me for book recommendations for Ghana, Mali or Songhai, I won't recommend juvenile non-fiction to adults. For adults, I will usually recommend books like Medieval Africa by Roland Oliver, or African Civilizations: an Archaeological Approach by Graham Connah. Neither of those really qualify as popular history, since they are written by Africanist scholars with PhD's, published by Oxford University Press, and are really intended as undergraduate level textbooks.

I'm not aware of any recent popular history works that are geared to an adult audience which covers pre-colonial West African history. People like Basil Davidson were involved in that genre in the 1960s-80s, though he has his problems as /u/Khosikulu has pointed out.

Then of course, there are also books from the Afrocentrist press. Books like they came before columbus by Ivan van Sertima which popularized the myth that West Africans created Olmec civilization in Mexico. Or Molefi Kete Asante's many books which among other things claim Africa was the mother of philosophy, mathematics, science, art, and Western civilization; and that Europeans have deliberately obscured this legacy.

Those Afrocentrist works qualify as popular history, but fail to meet norms of scholarly evidence, and instead peddle conspiracy theories and pseudo-history that is way outside of the scholarly consensus.

Kinda like most professors, I see 3 kinds of history; primary, secondary, and pop.

Since I'm into engineering and the likes, primary is the hard numbers. This vehicle could do this under this circumstance and couldn't do this.

Secondary is a combination of primary sources and real world uses. This plane was capable of this and proved itself in this situation. This car could go this fast as shown in this race.

Pop is the people stuff. The "well in this autobiography" or the "well my grandpa said...". By no means should we discredit them, but they should be taken with a grain of salt because obviously people can have warped views on something where some hard numbers never change over time.

What I really hate with the pop history is that it's based in sensationalism facts. "Did you known THIS thing from 1937 is so good it could beat this thing we made 3 years ago in a dogfight!" Or the people who take a true fact such as "X is better than Y in C situation" and turn it into "X is better than Y". It's simply not true and is an exaggeration that leads to more misconceptions.