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Kevin Mattson wrote this for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas:

... And where are the professional historians who are trained to understand the past and could scrutinize such claims? They’re in academia, churning out esoteric articles that move fast onto resumes but rarely into public debate. Go to recent issues of the American Historical Review and you’ll find articles like "Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France," "Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics," and "The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914—1920"–and those are just the titles. If you make it through them, you’ll face the back of the journal where there are reviewed, literally, hundreds of books with similarly arcane titles, all of which give a sense of the overwhelming amount of scholarship out there on topics that few people know exist, let alone care about.

It wasn’t always this way. In the postwar era, there was a generation of historians–like C. Vann Woodward, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, and Schlesinger himself–who were consummate professionals and engaged in the important matters of the day. These historians benefited from the stringent demands of professional objectivity, a tradition that had solidified during the early years of the twentieth century with the growth of the modern university as well as the founding of numerous graduate programs in history and professional associations like the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Yet historians like Woodward, Commager, and Hofstadter did not believe that objectivity and professionalism required locking themselves up in an ivory tower–just the opposite. Objectivity and the broad perspective that a training in history provided made these intellectuals’ engagement in public life an imperative. Now, as professionalization and objectivity–and the cruel realities of limited academic jobs for young historians–exert more pressures than before, we are forgetting the balancing act carried out by a previous generation. Fewer and fewer historians have the skills or ambition–let alone incentives–to make history speak to a wider public world. This leaves public engagement to those who are willing to cheapen the historian’s craft and play political football with the past. Both our understanding of history and our public discussion are the worse for it. ...

Here is my response:

You only listed six or seven public historians from the supposed golden age of public intellectuals.

Such declinism and nostalgia is ahistorical and simply wrong. Your evidence that historians fail to engage with the public comes only from some choice titles of journal articles. That does not cut it.

Just for a lark, here is a list of current academic historians -- some quite young -- who engage with the public through books, magazine articles, and media interviews on matters of history and public interest:

• Gary Nash
• Eric Rauchway
• Niall Ferguson
• Jonathan Zimmerman
• Tony Judt
• Sean Wilentz
• Patricia Nelson Limerick
• Ed Morgan
• Eric Foner
• Susan Douglas
• Richard Pells
• Juan Cole
• Robert Dallek

I could go on. It took me about 45 seconds to come up with that list.

So what's the problem? Publishers still want good writers. Publishers still publish good and well-written history books. Historians still show up on talk shows and NPR. People have always misused history and they always will. Most academics have always and will always decline or fail to engage with the public.

What, exactly, as changed?