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There is nothing wrong with popular history unless the facts are wrong. Let's agree on that at the outset. Any historian who can entertain while being accurate only does the current and coming generations a favor, by giving them a welcome and enjoyable resource that makes them want to engage a topic. Sometimes, though, even a respectable popular history can give one a creeping sensation of something not being quite right.
Call this an unease with narrative "framing." Let me try to give you an example.
John Kelly's The Great Mortality ought to entertain anyone. It's a smartly written book that seeks to give an epidemiological background to the Black Plague, an accurate estimate of its spread throughout Europe, how different political entities responded to it, how different social/urban/rural structures may have magnified or dissipated its effect and how those impacts shaped societies to come. Kelly could have written 300 pages on any single one of these topics and produced a dense scholarly work (as surely hundreds have), but he provides a very good general look at recent scholarship on the epidemic.
What's troublesome is how he sometimes frames it. A recurring theme of the book contrasts the bucolic or sumptuous lives pre-Plague and the devastation during and after. These pre-epidemic idylls are often very beautiful, nice snippets that put you, the reader, in a doomed society. Meanwhile, the plague bacillus, y. pestis, "lurks" outside the city. Kelly thus personifies The Plague as some kind of nemesis, a retributive force, or at least something connected to the city it's about to destroy.
Because of this framing device, one can't help but get the sense that maybe these people had it coming, that some hubristic element, some atavistic form to their lives, brought this vengeance on them, fresh from a Greek tragedy or one of Dante's Ironic Punishment Laboratories from Inferno.
This is a problem because dramatically it makes sense to play these forces off each other: Old Society + Agent of Change = Some New Dynamic. It makes the narrative fun for the lay reader, giving him or her a sense of narrative relationship. This how an author goes from good general history to successful popular history, and I strongly suspect that editors and publishers are a bit to blame for encouraging these sorts of dramatic relationships in mainstream history books.
There are probably better examples, but since I reviewed her book here, for the sake of argument I'll call this the Tuchmanization of history. Barbara Tuchman wrote an extremely successful book about the origins of the First World War, The Guns of August. It was not only a bestseller but a Pulitzer Prize winner. It was also popular across gender and generational lines. To be blunt, history is kind of one of those "Dad" genres; sometimes it seems like a biological alarm goes off in men at age 40, sending them to buy books on the Founding Fathers, the Civil War, WWII or Vietnam. I don't know why this happens. But Tuchman's lavish sense of pageantry struck a chord with women readers, while the air of foreboding brinksmanship she described resonated with younger readers questioning the precepts of the Cold War. Everyone who writes a popular history wants to appeal to this wide spectrum of potential readers.
Here's the important difference: in Tuchman's book, those literary flourishes and sense of the moment that appealed to other demographics worked perfectly within the confines of the thesis. Opening the book with the opulent parade celebrating Queen Victoria's Jubilee and luxuriating in descriptions of the crowned heads of Europe is a perfect serene counterpoint to the very real hubris they possessed.
Having made use of nationalist fervor in creating their empires (Russia, France, England) or in creating their countries (Germany, Italy) they then ignored the power they'd unleashed. They ignored the lessons of America's Civil War and the strength of political imperatives. At the same time — as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was crumbling due to the forces of Austrian, Hungarian, Bosnian, Polish, Czech, Romanian nationalisms — the crowned heads of Europe entered into a war they not only incorrectly imagined would be short but did so for non-national, territorial purposes. They fought a war with 20th century citizens inflamed by 19th and 20th century passions, but they did so with territorial aims best suited to 18th century dynastic wars, when land was still considered the possession of an aristocrat rather than part of a nation of people.
In that case, contrasting pomp and circumstance with the nightmares of the trenches not only makes for a riveting tale but also as a popular way of helping the reader approach a thoughtful interpretation of the war. That's using story and emotion — taking revulsion at the horrors of war and transferring it to the thoughtlessness of national leadership — to reify the terms of the discussion, rather than force them into a story structure.
With the Black Plague, though, this approach can't work. These people had no knowledge of germ theory, virtually no epidemiology, no microscopes, no concept of insects as vectors for disease. In this case, some of the hard words for disgusting insanitary conditions sound good but are misplaced. (The British government had a poor understanding of sanitation that led to thousands of deaths even as late as the mid-19th century, roughly 600 years later!)
This perhaps seems like pretty rough stuff, and it shouldn't. The Great Mortality is a well-researched book. It's also gripping: gruesome unfamiliar things happening to a world different from our own capture the imagination easily. It should give any reader a good basic grounding in the epidemiology of the plague, social and political structures, arcane medicine and how the plague wound up radically changing society.
That said, it's important to bear in mind that casting unsuspecting towns and lurking plague bacillus as dramatis personae in a fundamentally related conflict makes the narrative more accessible but not really more accurate. These poor people didn't have it coming and really couldn't see it coming. Even what they anticipated probably wasn't something they could have ever understood.
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Two great books on the Black Death are The Black Death and the Transformation of the West and The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History. Both are somewhat more indepth than just a popular history but they have a good balance of modern germ theory/public health and medieval philosophy. The Benedictow has some great maps and illustrations.
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