Academics vs. Knowlton

When I published my biography of Dr. Charles Knowlton, I posted a notice about Infidel Body-Snatcher on C19, a 19th-century Americanists academic newsgroup. A PhD candidate from the University of Chicago Divinity School responded and asked for a review copy. He asked me for my thoughts on self-publishing and particularly for how I thought it related to my opportunities in the academy. I emailed the following:  

Regarding self-publishing: I noticed bestselling author Sam Harris was tweeting his frustration that his next book is due at the publisher in June, but then will take eleven months going through the process. Eleven months! I don't understand why anyone who already has a platform and a following goes the traditional route anymore, unless their writing is really so atrocious that they need both a general editor and a line editor to collaborate with. (I do think this is the reason some people do it, but if you're tossing off a first draft and then having the publisher massage it into a book, they probably deserve some of the "writer" credit on the jacket. Unless the author is a fiction, like Steven Colbert's name on the books his staff writes).

Regarding popular history: I think it's the only thing that really matters. As I went through the academic process (especially reading for comps!), it really struck me that the world does not need another book debating the fine details of a topic like the market transition (important only to historians) and adding a small brick to the wall of American History. I'm happy to have some training (and credibility) as a historian, and to understand historiography. But I think it's a shame that academic historians have retreated to Mt. Olympus and left popular history to journalists or people with a political ax to grind. I don't think it's impossible for professionals to write lucid prose -- if quantum physicists like Brian Greene can do it, historians ought to be able to! And it's not true that postmodernists can't write an understandable sentence -- they've just gotta be encouraged to talk to someone outside the club! ;)

But seriously, I like what Carl Becker said in his 1958 essays in Detachment. History informs the present and helps people make sense of the world around them. Historians have shirked their responsibility to society too long.

Regarding my future in the academy: I don't really think I have one. Not because of ability, because I'm fairly confident I could swim in any pond I found myself in. But this is a second career for me; I'm as old as my committee chair, and I don't have twenty-five years to invest, to get to her level. And there aren't a lot of jobs in places I'd like to live. But even if there were, the math is against the academy. With a little luck, An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy may reach 20,000 people. How long would it take me to see 20,000 faces in the classroom? And that's just one book! If I can put out one or two a year for the next decade or so, I can have an impact I'd never get anywhere NEAR in the classroom.

Will self-publishing make it impossible for me to put my ideas in front of any academic readers? Possibly. I hope not. I think the onus is on me, both to write stuff that ought to be taken seriously by professional historians, and to market it effectively so they're aware it exists (that's the real issue with self-publishing. It's not editing, it's marketing you miss!).  Infidel Body-Snatcher, besides being a great story I hope regular people will find interesting, is the first-ever biography of the guy who was jailed for writing America's first birth control book. Linda Gordon and Janet Farrell Brodie both mentioned him in their classics on contraception, but no one has ever told the story of his life before. Hopefully some Women's Historians and Americanists will find it interesting (I sent a postcard to Dr. Brodie yesterday -- so who knows...). 

My dissertation, unfortunately, is not on Knowlton, or the history of medicine, or even nineteenth-century transatlantic freethought. It's on rural family business, and while it makes a contribution to the market transition debate and challenges the center-focused nature of commodity-based environmental history and the history of western banking and finance -- and tells an interesting story -- I don't think it's the type of thing lots of people are going to be reading after I'm dead. My advisors were actually nervous that I was moving too fast on it, so taking the detour into the Knowlton story hasn't caused problems yet. If I go to Britain and write the followup biography (of Charles Bradlaugh, the British secularist who was prosecuted in 1877 for reprinting Knowlton's book), I might have some 'splainin' to do. On the other hand, grad student health insurance is costing me half of what I'd be paying to keep my family on Blue Cross, so...

The review on The Junto blog appears here. The reviewer concluded that through my "popular intent, devotion to a subject, and the freedom of self-publishing," I lost my critical perspective and wrote a biography of Knowlton that "flirts with hagiography." Overall, not a review designed to drive a lot more readers to my book. However, the results of a piece are not always the same as the intent. And he did spell my name right.

I responded to the review's perspective on the gatekeeper function of publishers, rather than on the reviewer's opinion of the book. I think he raised interesting points — we just happened to be looking at them from completely different directions:

Thanks for reviewing my book. I think you make an interesting point about the ability of publishers to “force change on the author” because they’re “backed by a press” and able to put “conditions on publication.” Since you say the copy was clean and the writing fluid and accessible, I suspect the editorial contribution you were advocating was directed more toward the “thin analysis.” And there’s the rub.

I was able to write Knowlton’s story because he left a fairly big chunk of writing behind him, which I thought presented a quirky, but important and seldom-seen view of his times and the issues he faced. The people he was directly involved with did not. As a result, I would have needed to oppose Knowlton’s point of view with the voices of much more elite characters, and I didn’t want to do that. Although I do think there’s a story waiting to be told about early medicine in America that would pit characters like Amos Twitchell and Nathan Smith against the opponents of medical education, I didn’t choose to insert long (and previously published) passages from Timothy Dwight in a story focused on a non-elite perspective.   

The most likely “analytical” change an editor with gate-keeper power would have tried to force on me would probably have been a more sympathetic treatment of religion. This would have resulted in the book never seeing the light of day. The whole point of writing from a position very close to Knowlton’s own skin was to try to show what it felt like to be a free inquirer in a hostile, orthodox world. This doesn’t produce a balanced view of the situations Knowlton found himself in, of course. But once again, the other side of the argument has been so thoroughly covered, and the arguments  of the other side have been so universally taken for fact, that I thought a little bit of upset (and just a touch of hagiography) was required to start balancing the scales.

Criminals do sometimes act as their own lawyers. Knowlton did, when the judge in Taunton told him he could not use the attorney he had paid to defend him. So in my defense I’ll say that I agree with you to a degree that history should engage in analysis and in a dialog with previous analysts (biography slightly less so). Doing critical analysis in popular history presents dangers — readers are generally looking for a whole lot less of that than we historians — but I think that critical perspective will be useful in helping general readers understand the degree to which the dominant narrative has operated to mold the stories they’ve been told, especially in American religious history. There’s a reason, after all, that William Ellery Channing and not Charles Knowlton has a statue at the entrance to the Boston Public Garden.