This isn’t just an esoteric history problem. Knowing how to evaluate and criticise things is a useful skill when dealing with politicians and the media.

Very true.

I’m a lot less enthusiastic about amateurs since I got flamed at the Great War Forum for insisting that recording references to your sources is not optional!

I find that a bit surprising, since as I recall there are a lot of genealogists on there, and the value of recording sources should be pretty apparent to them, whether it's from your own notes or trying to incorporate somebody else's research. Past a few generations back, the records are just too patchy to take dates on faith!

I don't think pushing for higher standards is elitist as long as it applies to everyone - an elite is only an elite if it's better than some other group.

I also think readers need to take more responsibility in this area. Authors and publishers will give their target audience what it wants. If more readers demanded footnotes, there'd be more footnotes. Unfortunately too many people are prepared to believe anything they read just because it's in a book so it must be true. This isn't just an esoteric history problem. Knowing how to evaluate and criticise things is a useful skill when dealing with politicians and the media.

Isn't the latest one 2008: The Year Gavin Menzies Discovered How to Write a Lucrative Sequel?

I think that's a good point about snobbery vs. elitism. There are some things that we should be elitist about, and this is one of them!

As a professional aviation writer, I come at the inter war aviation story from different direction to Brett (we are both rivet-free, I trust) to some mutual benefit I find (and hope). Generally I have greater freedom to choose and develop a narrative and less obligation to provide citations for it - I could if I had to, but that's no more part of the job than choosing attention-grabbing cover-designs is for a thesis.

We should both be aware of what we leave out, the exceptions and caveats to our sagas etc. Editing articles and books, I will challenge our authors to substantiate their claims - with sometimes interesting results. The principle guidelines are academic disciplines and methods, even though we are not academic publishers (we prefer to earn some money).

As to the charge of 'snobbery', that's a classic case of using a prejudicial term for implied insult. The issue is actually being an elitist - a charge I'd gladly accept. I'm no snob, as that's pretty weak on merit-selection of peers or interests, while being an elitist in many fields makes sense. My time's to short to waste on reading 500+ pages of 1421 bilge, so I'm certainly an 'elitist' reader. Not a snob, though, because it's got lots of doorstop and anti-academic snob points...

I'm not sure I totally agree with kyt's argument that it is enthusiasts, rather than academics, who best write the people into histories of war. Take my colleague Catherine Merridale's fantastic Ivan's War, for example: an excellent, human centred account of the Red Army in the Second World War, written by an academic. The problem with many non-academic texts in this field is that personal histories - like any source - can be highly problematic, and that they are not always treated with the rigour they deserve in a market where publication is relatively easy and peer-reviewing non-existent.
In the end, there is good history and bad history. We pretty much all know the difference when we read it. Both academics and enthusiasts write both sorts.

Speaking of the good sort, I will make an advance plug here for Charles Kirke's Red Coat to Green Machine - a sociological study of the British army from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, coming out in the near future in Continuum's Birmingham War Studies series. It does the human without any loss of academic rigour or personal understanding.

Note that kyt (who has a PhD in sociology and is familiar with academia) has posted a response to my post and the comments, here. He clarifies his objection: it's that academics are mostly writing for other academics, both by intention and in practice (true enough, that's one reason why I blog) and that he's not interested in 'rivet counting' but rather:

My interest is in the human aspects of the war. In this area I again reiterate my point that books written by non-academics are far superior to those written by academics. Academic historians have almost all completelky failed to contribute to this area in any form that I would find interesting and informative, Those written by sociologists and psychologists take a macro level approach snd try to then extrapolate some sort of meaning on war experiences. Yes, useful to a point.

But the enthusiasts go out and actually talk to the people who were there, the families, the comrades etc They don't just rely on the original documents. They are the ones who, more often than not, allow the voices to come through.

So he likes oral history (which, btw, academic historians do also). That's fine, but it's hardly an unproblematic window into the past as he seems to imply. And it can only illuminate some aspects of history, and by definition, only those within living memory. (How many oral histories of the Italian Renaissance are there? My starting point is 1908, I'm not going to find too many people who can remember that year.) If that's what interests kyt then again, that's fine, but all it comes down to in the end is that it's his preference. One might even say it's snobbery ...