"Who Killed History? An Academic Autopsy" by William Craig Rice, in The Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn 1995), One West Range, Charlottesville, Va. 22903.

If America is becoming "a nation of historical illiterates," as independent historian David McCullough and others fear, then academic historians deserve much of the blame. So argues Rice, who teaches expository writing at Harvard University.

"Academic historians have followed the trajectory of professionalization so far," he maintains, "that, like poets in creative writing workshops, they now produce more writers than readers, a veritable literature without an audience." Very few of the roughly 2,000 books annually "noted" by the American Historical Review, the journal of the 18,000-member American Historical Association, are aimed at the general reader, Rice points out. The tomes tend to be "extraordinarily arcane," "politically trendy," or both (e.g., Fleeting Opportunities: Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver during World War 11).

The books also tend to be poorly written, Rice observes. Academic writing's "flattened verbs, incessant abstractions, disregard for rhythm and sentence balance, expert-orient- ed asides, and occasional political tenden- tiousness all serve to drive away a general audience just as surely as they identify the author as one of the elect." Worst of all, he says, most academic historians have aban- doned the narrative tradition that runs from Herodotus to Shelby Foote.

In the hundreds of college and university history departments across the land, Rice points out, "a talent for writing for a broad audience is considered secondary at best, a mark of intellectual deficiency at worst." Many academic historians sneer at writers such as David McCullough, William Manchester, and Barbara Tuchman as "nonprofessionals" and mere "popularizers."

The decline of history, Rice contends, is a result of "an unfree intellectual economy within academia, an economy which binds the feet of talented scholars even as it con- fers advanced degrees, lifelong employment, and subsidized publication." On politically sensitive subjects, the young academics "may be shackled by New Left notions of acceptable lines of inquiry." And in the "closed shop" of academic history, they "are cut off from 'nonprofessionals,' 'amateurs,' and 'journalist-historians.' " It is time, Rice the educated public, to become freely func- believes, to open up that shop, and to tioning intellectual citizens, [and] to be encourage academic historians "to write for teachers in [an] expansive sense."