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In this second volume in the Hoover Centennial Seminars series, seven scholars reexamine a major segment of Herbert Hoover's public career and in doing so offer fresh perspectives on the political, administrative, and diplomatic history of the 1920s. Drawing upon new materials and new insights, they reconstruct Hoover's transformation of the Commerce secretariat, explore his thinking and action in a variety of policy areas, and explode conventional depictions of Hoover's political conservatism. These essays show a resourceful and creative mind wrestling with the central problems of twentieth-century America and projecting solutions remarkably similar to current proposals for public use of the private sector.

From lagging book sales and shrinking job prospects to concerns over the discipline's "narrowness," myriad factors have been cited by historians as evidence that their profession is in decline in America. Ian Tyrrell's Historians in Public shows that this perceived threat to history is recurrent, exaggerated, and often misunderstood. In fact, history has adapted to and influenced the American public more than people—and often historians—realize.

Tyrrell's elegant history of the practice of American history traces debates, beginning shortly after the profession's emergence in American academia, about history's role in school curricula. He also examines the use of historians in and by the government and whether historians should utilize mass media such as film and radio to influence the general public. As Historians in Public shows, the utility of history is a distinctive theme throughout the history of the discipline, as is the attempt to be responsive to public issues among pressure groups.

A superb examination of the practice of American history since the turn of the century, Historians in Public uncovers the often tangled ways history-makers make history-both as artisans and as actors.