"As Refreshing as a Half-Full Glass of Water"

"Though historians—of all people—should know better, we sometimes still talk, and write, as if there is a single national audience for popular history. There wasn't and isn't, at least not any more than there is for a novel or a play. By illustrating the strategies and the successes of these five historians, Witham takes down the heated if not hysterical tone of both historians and pundits about presentism and the politicization of history."

At Boston Review, David Waldstreicher reviews Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America.