Description: "Nick Witham investigates how widely popular history books have gotten written, promoted, and institutionalized. Not just a matter of writing style, popular accessibility is also a product of an author's frame of mind, the editor's skill, and the publisher's marketing acumen, among other factors. Witham has done extensive work not just in historians' archives but in publishers' files. His primary subjects are Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, and Howard Zinn-all popular historians who were explicitly concerned with the question of popularity. Collectively, they reveal the cross-influences of popular history writing and American popular culture"--
Brief description: Nick Witham is associate professor of United States history and head of department at the Institute of the Americas at University College London. He is the author of The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: U.S. Protest and Central American Revolution.
Review Quotes: "The argument of Witham's book is that the audience for popular historical nonfiction that explains America to itself has always been a diverse one, made up of various types of readers. The imagined past, when an idealised American reader relaxed by the fireside with a sturdy tome written by a credentialed academic, is, largely speaking, a fiction...The best parts of Popularizing the Past are the archival discoveries of letters from readers, and between editors and writers, showing the nitty-gritty of how this sausage got made - and eaten."-- "History Today"