I've had a few inbound links from forums in the last few days, including this one. It's nice to be linked to, but in this case one of the participants, kyt, has a bit of a rant about my snobbishness:
The blogger does seem to have a certain, for want of a better word, snobbishness. He keeps saying academics this and academics that. For example, in his section on Unwritten books he writes about books that academics haven't written. The areas that he is concerned with cover ones where there are lots of books. OK, so they aren't written by university lecturers, but are these people the only ones who can validate a subject? What about the plethora of books written by enthusiasists? People who have devoted there lives on researching and writing on subjects, on top of holding down a day job? My shelves are full of books written by these sort of people, and they are excellent.
And I have read books by "accredited" academics which are dry, boring and so turgid that they fail to convey any true sense of the subject.
Well, I'd have to say I'm mostly guilty as charged -- but I don't see what's so wrong with that! The reference is to my post on books which historians have neglected to write. Yes, I did say academic historians, but then I'm an academic in training (whether or not I ever become one), so of course my orientation is going to be towards academic works.
But more than that, on the whole I do think academic histories are better than non-academic histories. If I didn't think there was some value in thinking and writing like an academic historian, presumably I wouldn't be doing a PhD in history. In general, books written by academic historians are better contextualised, less narrow in their focus than those written by non-academics. They usually better referenced -- I have a very low tolerance for books with no endnotes, or with only a half-page of further reading!
Which is not to say that I just reject histories written by non-academics out of hand -- after all, they are often interested in subjects that the academics don't seem to be, and that's a good thing. I can think of a number which I have praised on this very blog, such as Waiting for Hitler by Midge Gillies, a journalist. Another one which at least one regular here rates very highly is The Paladins by John James, a psychologist. I think The Paladins shows some of the advantages and disadvantages of an outsider's perspective. One of James' big points is that you can use the monthly Air Force Lists (which show the rank of every officer, the location of all commands, the distribution of squadrons, etc) to chart the growth of the RAF between the wars, in a way which is independent of the usual minute analysis of CID meetings and the Ten Year Rule and so on. And he criticises academic historians for neglecting this source, quite fairly. But on the way James makes some blunders of his own. So averse to any form of archival research is he that he is reduced to guessing things that he could easily find out, such as the function of various squadrons. That's the sort of mistake that an academic training in history would (should!) teach one to avoid.
I guess the upshot of all that is that for me, it's not so much a question of whether a history is actually written by an academic, but of how closely the book itself conforms to the academic model of research and writing. If that makes me a snob then so be it!