There are a number of ways to interpret this.
I'm emphasizing James Bradley and
Ron Pauser as people who are not holders of academic posts.
Not working within academic institutions people who have to sell books,
that's not decrying academia, but
you will both appreciate that within your own respective fields.
You're writing papers and through PhDs putting books together
that may have an audience in the tens, if not hundreds across the entire globe.
So writing history for
an academic audience to prove your credentials in the field.
And that you have also shown respect for
the discipline, can be constraining as much as it can be informing.
Now I feel that Flags of our Fathers as a discussion of the events from someone
who is perhaps free to a degree from those type of constraints.
It's refreshing.
It gives a different perspective and it also means that there's someone who's
having to convince their audience, not only that they have a valid point but
it's worth investing their hard earned, hard earned cash in buying these books.
You will know that many academic monographs now, hard copies.
Are 75-85 pounds a shot.
Because it's known that the audience is going to be the institutional market.
It's the libraries who are buying them.
Now, to say something is popularist is not necessarily an endorsement.
Yet I think this is one of the best, books written on the subject, and
certainly appealed to me, from that personal dimension.
Also the degree of division that we have between military history and
academic history.
Military history is academic, can be academic, yet it's not
always the case that you find an military historian, even a very broadly based.
Academic department.
>> It's also a little bit of family history, don't you think?
>> Oh, very much so, but, when we're talking about public history and
the immediacy of, of what history is and, and something I I'd like to talk a little
bit more in, in the next topic who owns what the description of history is?
So, the fact there is a family history there,
there is again, in the context of reminiscences or
at least investigations, the, the journey I keep calling the term, the journey.
I, I think the book has much scholarly merit to it.
Certainly it's thorough research.
But it's a personal account.