I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The huge, turgid work of history, sinking under the weight of its own 'politically correct' thesis and its foot- and source notes, is not the British way of writing history, and never has been.
History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.
The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.
American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.
We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.
What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.
Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.
I do belong to the club which doesn't see a distinction between academic history and popular history.
It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.