Founded in the Fall of 2007, Historians are Writers! is a group of students and faculty based in the history department at Cornell University. We take as our founding assumption that “academic” need not be a synonym for “dry,” that learning to write history well means not just getting the historiography straight, and making the argument convincing, but that good books rest on our skill as writers. At our very first meeting, we all affirmed that we found conventional history important, engaging, and sometimes exciting, but we also each mentioned that much of what we read seems to lack a certain spark. Each of us collects rooms full of once-read history books, but how often do we feel the deep-seated urge to go back, pull an old familiar off the shelf, and read again? We are a group dedicated to rigorous history and to good writing, and see no reason why one should suffer at the hands of the other.
