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Making It Real: Intellectual Exchange, Virtual Space, and the Public Sphere Producing a discourse that is at once nuanced and yet broad in reach is a worthy goal for historians and other scholars alike. As academic historians, however, we address three rather different audiences: our colleagues, elite groups, and the general public. The challenges we have to meet in order to become more effective are similarly diverse. If we want to communicate better with colleagues from other fields, we have to start by reducing the number of highly specialized publications and activities. If we want to appeal to elites more successfully, we need to make more deliberate and focused efforts to gain media access to them. If we want to have greater influence on the general public, we must take a more positive attitude towards the visualization of history, i.e participate more actively in the production of historical documentaries, movies, and other visual resources. The latter two challenges pose a problem, however, since meeting them requires skills that are not part of our academic training. Moreover, let’s not forget academic realities: For the foreseeable future, professional success will be based on specialization and the publication of specialized monographs and essays. Finally, the tight job market puts enormous time pressure on junior scholars and leaves only little time for ventures that are not directly career-related. Hence, we have to set specific goals and rely on piecemeal engineering in attempting to raise the quality of our discourse. Most importantly, we will have to make such activities, in particular those in “public history,” count for academic careers. Unless the skills to address audiences outside of academia become an integral part of graduate and post-doc training, and unless additional resources are allocated to history departments for teaching and practicing them, we will not be able to take advantage of the strong general interest in history. Dirk Schumann, German Historical Institute Washington, D.C.
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