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stripped them of their culture. Aboriginal leaders have talked of “cultural genocide,” and a former United Church clergyman has claimed, so far with little solid proof, to have uncovered evidence of murders, illegal medical experiments, and pedophile rings. The Canadian government has offered compensation to each former student and has set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which will spend five years gathering information and writing its report. Already the chair of the commission is talking of possible criminal charges. Of course, Canadian society must deal with the charges, but it sadly shows little willingness to expend the same resources on dealing with the ghastly conditions on many reserves today. Leon Wieseltier, the distinguished Jewish-American man of letters, warns that the message minority groups too often get from such a focus on the past is: “Don’t be fooled … there is only repression.” Dwelling on past horrors such as the Holocaust or slavery can leave people without the resources to deal with problems in the here and now.

It is particularly unfortunate that just as history is becoming more important in our public discussions, professional historians have largely been abandoning the field to amateurs. The historical profession has turned inward in the last couple of decades, with the result that much historical study today is self-referential. It asks questions about how we, the professional historians, create the past. Which theories do we use or misuse? I remember, while reading applications for graduate school a few years ago, coming across one from what sounded like a bright student who said she wanted to go into a particular field in history because it was “undertheorized.”
    Perhaps because historians long to sound like their peers in the sciences or the social sciences, they have increasingly gone in for specialized language and long and complex sentences. Much of the writing is difficult, often needlessly so. Andrew Colin Gow, a historian at the University of Alberta, offers a curious defense of obscurantism. We should not, he said severely, expect historians to be entertaining or to tell interesting stories: “Do we need professional history that entertains us—especiallywhen public money pays for so much of what we historians do? Do we need physics that entertains us?”
    Historians, however, are not scientists, and if they do not make what they are doing intelligible to the public, then others will rush in to fill the void. Political and other leaders too often get away with misusing or abusing history for their own ends because the rest of us do not know enough to challenge them. Already much of the history that the public reads and enjoys is written by amateur historians. Some of it is very good, but much is not. Bad history tells only part of complex stories. It claims knowledge that it could not possibly have, as when, for example, it purports to give the unspoken thoughts of its characters. Sigmund Freud did his own reputation no good when he teamed up with the American diplomat William Bullitt to write a biography of Woodrow Wilson. Freud never met Wilson, never read his intimate diaries, because Wilson did not keep them, yet he talked confidently of Wilson’s obsession with his father and his feelings of failure. Bad history can demand too much of its protagonists, as when it expects them to have had insights or made decisions that they could not possibly have done. Should Europe’s statesmen in 1914 have foreseen the stalemate of the western front when virtually all their generals assured them that the war would be over quickly?
    Bad history also makes sweeping generalizations for which there is not adequate evidence and ignores awkward facts that do not fit. It used to be thought, for example, that the Treaty of Versailles, made between the Allies and Germany at the end of World War I, was so foolish and vindictive that it led inevitably to World War II. It was a