Until the summer of last year, Niall Ferguson was my favorite historian. Then came War of the World which had the potential to be an amazing book. In details, actually, it is, but the arc is goes wrongly: the trees are amazing, the forest looks grossly distorted. (Note to me: It's okay to rant about substance.) A good summary of the book is this lecture given at my former university; available as video and MP3.
During my time of deep appreciation of Ferguson came along the review of Alan Bennett's play The History Boys in the NY Times when the play just moved from London to NY. It cleverly contrasts history as the pursuit of plain, objective facts with history as the personal engagement with the past, toying with it and reinterpreting everything; more poetry and art than science. The play also stresses the virtues and vices of contrarianism. A third tier school's headmaster hires a slick, clever history teacher who is to teach the boys to be unconventional and contrarian. The goal is to get the boys into Oxford even though they lack the privileged upbringing of others. These boys cannot compete in terms of knowledge, but they can be interesting. Playwright Alan Bennett credits Niall Ferguson with having inspired him for the portrait of the newly hired teacher.
Via Bookforum comes Niall Ferguson's personal response on this. It's just as interesting as the play itself. The movie was entertaining as well.
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I have three of Niall Ferguson's books, and I have appreciated each one of them. When people review books (and academic articles), I have noticed that they tend to judge a book or an article by what it does not do. Dorris Kearn Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" is an excellent example of this. "Team of Rivals" got panned because it didn't "add anything new" to the knowledge of Lincoln. It's unusual method of multiple biographies surrounding the political climate of the 1860 presidential election was a cheap parlour trick, it was said, designed to get us to not notice that she doesn't advance anything new. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't enjoyable to read.
Contrarianism is just another label, and I think that it mostly undermines the intentions of the person being contrary. Is the contrarian person one who is contrary because they like being contrary, or is it because that's the only way they can find work? A few years back, the trend was to get yourself a Ph.D. in history from some B-school and then write yourself a popular history book that claims that some prominent figure was gay.
Here's the academic's usual preference ordering:
1. rankings
2. nomenclature
3. conferences
4. labels
5. happy hours
6. name-dropping
It's all bullshit.
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