Lewis Lapham to History Professors: Send Me Your Stuff! Ex-Harper's Editor Planning Blog

"People love animals," said Jennifer Schuessler on Friday afternoon, explaining to a room full of historians why The New York Times Book Review, where she is an editor, had recently published a piece on a rigorous and esoteric scholarly volume by a professor from Penn on the use of horses in industrial age America.

This was during a panel discussion held at the Hilton New York over the weekend as part of the 123rd annual meeting of the Association of American Historians. The 80 or so people gathered in the stuffy room in front of Ms. Schuessler were there because they wanted to know how to get their work noticed by readers who don’t have PhDs.

On stage with Ms. Schuessler—who, all joking about animals aside, actually made a sound case for why the book on horses deserved space in The Times—were three professional academics who had succeeded in publishing their work in trade and getting it into non-specialized hands: NYU race scholar Martha Hodes, author of The Sea Captain’s Wife, University of Southern California science historian Deborah Harkness, author of The Jewel Thief, and the University of Georgia’s economic historian Stephen A. Mihm, author of A Nation of Counterfeiters.

Former Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham, who is spending his 70s editing an eponymous quarterly journal and hosting a Sunday radio show that aims to put current events in historical context, was also on this panel.

The suggestions offered by the three people on stage who were there to give firsthand advice was pretty much what you'd expect. Mainly: learn how to write readable sentences, create vivid characters, worry more about story than argument, and hide all your footnotes and historiography stuff in the back where they won’t distract your less sophisticated readers. Also, resist the temptation to put everything in the conditional ("Jimmy would have had to walk 10 miles in the snow to reach the freshman dorms") and try to cloak in the folds of your prose all the hedging you must do as a righteous historian.

Mr. Lapham, who attended Yale as an undergraduate and studied medieval British history at Cambridge before figuring out he wanted to be a journalist instead of a professor, warned the scholars in the audience against compromising their interests and simplifying their ideas for the sake of expanding readership.

"I wouldn’t worry about finding audiences," Mr. Lapham said. "They will come to you in time."

Mr. Lapham said happily that Lapham's Quarterly, the 224-page journal he founded after leaving Harper’s in 2006, had reached a circulation "close to 25,000." He and his staff of young editors had achieved this, he said, despite being "utterly ignored by the New York media" and the fact that each issue of the magazine is themed around heavy, broad topics like "States of War," "Money," and "Ways of Learning." 


"One of the reasons I quit [Harper’s], among other things, was that I had lost faith in most journalism," Mr. Lapham said. "Journalism in my mind over the last 30-odd years has descended into largely ignorant polemic."

He added that if a publication like Lapham’s Quarterly—which is composed primarily of reliably difficult primary source texts extracted from various archives—can do as well as it's doing, there must be an audience for serious history in the United States, even if it is not in plain sight.

"I'm here to say the future is before you," said Mr. Lapham, noting that he is always looking for books to feature on his radio show, and that while 80% of each issue of the Quarterly is reserved for archival texts, there is space in the back for a number of newly commissioned essays written by working historians.

"If anybody in this room wants to write for Lapham’s Quarterly," Mr. Lapham said, "by all means let me know." The next three issues he's taking submissions for, he said (when someone asked), are "Crime and Punishment," "Travel," and "Medicine."

Later, when the internet came up during the Q&A portion of the panel, Mr. Lapham said he will soon give up his "Notebook" column in Harper’s and start a blog instead.