Wednesday, January 30, 2013  "Why History Doesn't Matter"  This
will apparently be the title of Professor Grumpy's new book. 
His recent post at Historian on the Edge explores the difference
between a trained historian and someone with basic literacy
skills who writes and tells stories about the past.  Here is a
taste of a post he calls "The Siege":  ... [W]hile the
discipline has been bogged down in post-empiricist soul-
searching, history itself has been, to a considerable degree,
taken over by non-specialists.  It is a platitude that ‘the
past’ has become public and that academic historians do not have
sole access to or control over it.  Most of the volumes shelved
in the history sections of bookshops are not written by what I
consider to be historians.  The history that appears on
television is similarly dominated by non-specialists.  Usually
styling themselves ‘writer and historian’, ‘journalist and
historian’, ‘broadcaster and historian’ or whatever … ‘and
historian’, they are in most cases, in fact, wri