FROM HOFSTADTER TO LEPORE

NATIONAL HISTORY FOR THE AMERICAN PUBLIC

David A. Hollinger

History and Theory 65, no. 1 (2026)

Review of Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America, by Nick Witham (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America provides cogent and accurate accounts of the careers of five American academic historians of the post-World War II era who won large popular audiences for national narratives: Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner. Witham omits, without explanation, the highly relevant case of Oscar Handlin, author of the 1951 work The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made America. He also fails to engage the heavily Jewish ethnoreligious matrix of popular American historiography of the postwar era. In Popularizing the Past, Witham is directly concerned with today's challenges for writing popular national histories, and he argues that the very idea of a single, national audience has been rendered anachronistic by ideological polarization and media fragmentation. Whereas Witham insists that works resembling Jill Lepore's 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States should no longer be attempted, he upholds Ibram X. Kendi's 2016 volume, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, as an example of what is appropriate today: a narrative for a certain community of readers, and not for other readers. Witham's essentially sound account of major features of postwar American writings about history is marred by his jejune comments about the early twenty-first century. He leaves us with only a shadow of the witness that each of Witham's subject-historians bore with distinction to the mission of discovering and disseminating the truth about American history in the interests of a national community.