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Hello Mr. Miller: I strongly disagree with the gentleman who wrote you and you posted @ NRO Corner that quote: ”I would point to another factor: professional historians are already familiar with the narrative that popular histories tell, at least in their given area of expertise” That is simply not true. I too am a graduate student working on a dissertion on a historical tpic. I may have a beter perspective that the other gentleman since there has been twenty years since I obtained a master’s degree and my current work on the Ph.D. The academy then and now are a world apart. You are correct that modern academia is not interested in popular works, and that is because they are largely driven by ideology. They do not know the American narrative. My committee does not even know the literature of their own field beyond the last ten years, and they are not interested in learning, except as far as to critique and deconstruct previous research in a facile way. In my area of military history, they have no clue as to the popularity of such studies now being written by non academic historians or academic historians at small liberal arts colleges who are there to teach and not become deans. Meanwhile, academic presses make their money on such popularly written works to a large audience, while the academic’s books sell only to libraries. The reason I am so passionate by this is that I have had to practically sell my intellectual soul to get my dissertation through a narrow-minded, post modern, arrogant group of people as you will ever see. I can’t change the committe because the whole department is in lock step.