Horwitz was refreshingly candid about his own fears that he’s oversimplifying history in his efforts to tell a story that will “hook” readers and make them want to read more. While he’s an undeniably good storyteller, I do find him a little too willing to emphasize the colorful at the expense of the truly complex; his characterizations of Civil War reenactors in his best-known work, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, sensationalize a complex community in ways that I’ve always found troubling. Both journalism and scholarly writing have their own straitjackets that can keep us from finding more original paths through a subject as we write about it, and while I think Horwitz is right to note that scholars can’t usually bust out of their constraints, he also still seems bound by his own—the “lead, “hook,” “kicker” pattern that becomes second nature in journalistic writing. It was good to hear him talk about the importance of communicating “the strangeness of the past,” but that strangeness sometimes demands forms that are themselves strange and new—a challenge to all of us who labor with words and stories.
