I've recently been contacted by a television show requesting some help on an historical subject. If anything comes of it, I'll be sure to write about it here. In any event, it reminded me of an earlier opportunity I did not handle well.
It was about ten years ago when the History Channel contacted me about appearing as one of the academic experts on a show of several minutes duration they were planning on Oregon. Their goal was to cover all fifty states in a relatively short amount of time.
I had some broad themes in mind: the libertarian tradition in Oregon (low taxes, weak public institutions) and a long history of racial exclusion, for example. But their principal interest was this: why couldn't you pump your own gas in Oregon?
I didn't think that was a very important question, so I didn't research it and had little to say about it. And when I checked on the content of the show, years later, I found that they had used none of the material from the academic historians they had interviewed and instead found someone willing to talk about why you couldn't pump your own gas in Oregon.
At the time, I felt a sort of pride in taking the high ground. In retrospect, though, I wish that I had researched the history of why one couldn't pump one's own gas in Oregon, then linked that history to some broader themes.
My unwillingness to adjust more fully to the History Channel's expectations is illustrative, I think, of a tendency among academic historians to discount popular history, to look down our noses at widespread interest in subjects such as local history and family history. If we instead embraced these subjects and then related them to the broader, more interpretive subjects that we most care about, would we not be more widely read and listened to and influential--even more informed?
Yes, you would be :-)
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