"Historians in Public will immediately become an indispensable record of the discipline and practice of history in the United States. By uncovering a vast range of early initiatives that historians undertook to deal with issues that included the very practice of scholarship, the appropriateness of utilizing new mass media opportunities, state funding and support, political ideology, and 'the objectivity question, ' Ian Tyrrell has created a useful new history from which historians can think and act more creatively in the present."--David Thelen, Indiana University

"To historians this book will be revelatory, and the larger American audience for history will be fascinated by this rich study of the profession's activities devoted to reaching a larger public--the schools, the media, the government, museums, book clubs, the national park system, and more. By digging in the archives and long forgotten publications, Ian Tyrrell has gotten behind the screen of generational jeremiads to give us a fair-minded and enormously illuminating history of professional history's place in American public life. It is an indispensable book. From now on, no one can speak with authority about the public side of the history profession ­or the humanities and social sciences professions more generally ­unless they have read this book."--Thomas Bender, New York University