Just Do It: Academic Historians and the General Public

There has been some chatter recently on academic historians’ blogs about how Americans view history and historians as well as the academic historian’s role as public intellectual and educator.  I’d love to share with you one of the online essays that started this all, but (how delightfully ironic) it is behind a paywall, limiting its exposure to dues-paying members of the American Historical Association.  Several responses are more readily available: I direct you here and here (which follows here, so you can get some idea of the content of the original remarks).