Create a hero. Use suspense. Set scenes. That was the advice offered by renowned food politics author Michael Pollan to a room of professional historians who struggle to sell their books to a wide audience and still rely on a model of doing history created at the profession’s birth more than 100 years ago. They were gathered to watch the plenary session, entitled “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age,” at the American Historical Association’s 127^th meeting, which met in New Orleans from 3–6 January. Another panelist, Richmond University President Ed Ayers, mused that historians missed the pre-modern movement, the modern movement, as well as the post-modern movement, implying that we might miss the digital movement, too, if we’re not careful. Case in point: American Historical Association President Bill Cronon (University of Wisconsin) noted that no other discipline still publishes (and reveres) books as history does. Yet this remains the only way to obtain tenure at most research universities. The overarching question of the session became: How does—and should—the practice of history change in light of the vastly different technology and platforms of expression that exist today? Continue reading →