UCLA’s advice on thesis statements for history papers.

[Update, 1 April 2013: I have changed the handout to read "unstated agenda," not just agenda.]

First, they fit into one or more of what I think of as the six genres of popular history: war, crime, disaster, heroic science/technology/medicine, biography of an eminent person, or sports. To be sure, they may play with these genres, the way that David Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story complicates the heroic-medicine narrative by explaining why the scientific establishment never regarded Salk as highly as did the American public. But they still connects with a familiar genre.

Second, I think that with the exception of the Oxford series, all of the titles on my Guide to Audible.com were published in print by trade presses, such as Knopf or Norton. The pattern seemed to be that only if your book promised sales high enough to justify a trade-press contract might you get an audio version.

The Second Red Scare breaks both patterns. Yes, it does have a lot of biographical detail about such folks as Leon Keyserling and Mary Dublin Keyserling, which is one of the reasons it succeeds as an audiobook. But I wouldn’t call it a biography along the lines of Mellon: An American Life or The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century; there are too many characters, and none of them are as prominent at Mellon or Luce. And the print version comes not from a trade press, but from Princeton University Press, publisher of many of the finest monographs in twentieth-century U.S. political history.

I read books like this all the time, but rarely have the chance to listen to them. Will Princeton follow with audio versions of other titles in the same series, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America? Will Penn respond with audio versions of its series, Politics and Culture in Modern America? When will I be able to choose books for an entire graduate seminar by listening to them?

Another question is pricing. The Amazon page for the book shows just how weird book pricing has become:

Hardcover: $39.50
Audible Audio Edition: $21.95
Kindle Edition: $21.73
Audible Audio Edition, when you buy 24 credits at once: $9.56

In other words, if you can afford a device that can display Kindle books, you get a 50 percent discount off the print version, and if you can afford to spend $229.50 up front, the audio version costs you less than a quarter of what you would pay for the print book. Obviously the marginal costs of transmitting an electronic text or recording are much lower than those of producing, storing, and distributing a physical object. But as Joshua Kim pointed out in 2009, charging occasional listeners double what already committed listeners pay may not be the way to grow a market for these kinds of books, especially among the college students whom we hope to train to take scholarship seriously. Will Princeton sell audiobooks to university libraries?

So questions remain. For now, though, I want to thank Professor Storrs and Princeton University Press for letting me rethink the impact of anticommunism while I washed dishes.

the long arguments and narratives on which the best history writing has always depended require many pages—many screens—to be absorbed, understood, and appreciated. More important still, they require well-stocked minds with the patience and discipline to pay attention for many hours to complicated webs of actors and actions, causes and effects, events and contexts, ideas and meanings, without which we cannot hope to make sense of what happened in the past or why it mattered. Good history needs time and space to be grasped in all its richness. If journal articles aren’t long enough to do the job, then what are we to do if blogs and text messages and tweets are the media our audiences prefer to read? . . . If history as we know it is to survive, it is these we most need to resist as we practice and defend long, slow, thoughtful reading.

In his recent AHA presidential address, Cronon elaborated on this theme, telling the story of meeting a young man in Florida who lamented that he would never be able to read Cronon’s forthcoming work on Portage, Wisconsin–estimated to come in at around 500 pages–since he had never attempted to read something that long. (Start at minute 22 on the AHA videorecording of the talk.)

Cronon leaves the story there, but I think I might have had a different response to that young man. Have you tried an audiobook?

Amid all the talk of the digital humanities and digital history providing new avenues for scholarship, I haven’t, um, heard much about audiobooks. Though audiobooks predate the digital revolution, Audible.com—the industry leader—reports that “new technology has enabled the repositioning of audiobooks from a sleepy, under-marketed product, with limited selection and forbidding prices, to a habit embraced by millions.” And history is the fifth-most popular genre, interesting 35 percent of listeners. So could we please include audiobooks in the digital history revolution?

I confess that listening to a serious work of history, rather than reading it, sometimes feels like cheating. If scholars fetishize print over electronic text, we fetishize text over voice even more.

But the fact remains that audiobooks let me learn things while performing all kids of chores that would otherwise count as dead time, and they are especially good for long reads. Cronon is right that many folks lack the many hours it takes to read a book like Anna Karenina (which I read on my old Palm Tungsten, but never mind). But might not some of those folks have long commutes by car or transit, or long hours doing household chores? Listen an hour a day, and you’ll be done in just over a month!

Not that I would start Cronon’s semi-literate Floridian with Tolstoy. If I were trying to work him toward reading a long environmental history, I’d suggest 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (17 hrs and 51 mins). Or if so much nonfiction seems daunting, how about Lonesome Dove (36 hrs and 11 mins)? That story’s so gripping, it’s easier to finish than to abandon. And at the heart, it’s a story of some historical actors moving a species into a new ecosystem.

If Cronon’s Floridian finished one of those, he’d have gotten through the equivalent of 560 or 864 pages respectively. And then he might be ready to read a book that long, or at least lobby Cronon’s publisher for an audioversion of the Portage book.

I have no beef with those who argue that university historians could use outlets for works shorter than the typical book. But I agree with Cronon that it would be nice to be able to reach a broad public with stories that might take a couple hundred thousand words to tell in full.

The good news is that some university historians are already doing this. For those interested in their work, I offer A History Professor’s Guide to Audible.com.