I watched a great Zoom talk this week, host­ed by Haver­ford Col­lege and fea­tur­ing Ben Pink Dan­de­lion and Robynne Rogers Healey. The top­ic was “The New His­to­ry of Quak­erism” and its focus was on the shifts hap­pen­ing in Quak­er aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ries since the 1990s. Dan­de­lion did a fan­tas­tic job putting the last 150 years of Quak­er his­to­ri­og­ra­phy in con­text and lay­ing out the pos­i­tives of more recent devel­op­ments: more aca­d­e­m­ic rig­or, a wider diver­si­ty of voic­es, chang­ing foci of top­ics, and strong inter­est by aca­d­e­m­ic publishers.

Healey iden­ti­fied three major fields in which the new his­to­ries are chal­leng­ing what are often com­fort­ing apolo­get­ics of pre­vi­ous Quak­er stud­ies: the equal­i­ty of women, slav­ery and indige­nous rela­tions, and paci­fism. All these are much more com­pli­cat­ed than the sto­ries we tell. She then list­ed three trends: decen­ter­ing Lon­don and Philadel­phia, reeval­u­at­ing the so-called qui­etist peri­od, and includ­ing aca­d­e­mics and his­to­ries of the Glob­al South.

Dan­de­lion said these changes were “all for the bet­ter,” and while I agree whole­heart­ed­ly with him in regards to con­tent, there’s one way in which the new pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties are fail­ing us: to be blunt, price. 

Take the Penn State Uni­ver­si­ty Press series, “The New His­to­ry of Quak­erism,” that both pan­elists have writ­ten for. The Cre­ation of Mod­ern Quak­er Diver­si­ty, 1830 – 1937 edit­ed by Stephen W. Angell, Dan­de­lion, and David Har­ring­ton Watt is $125. Quak­erism in the Atlantic World, 1690 – 1830 edit­ed by Healey is $90. Quak­er Women, 1800 – 1920, edit­ed by Healey and Car­ole Dale Spencer is $125.

Both Healey and Dan­de­lion acknowl­edged the prob­lem of inac­ces­si­ble prices in their talk. Dan­de­lion sug­gest­ed that meet­ing libraries might be able to pur­chase these books but I think that’s more hope­ful than real­is­tic. My small meet­ing cer­tain­ly could­n’t. I went to the Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing Library and they would­n’t let me check out The Quak­er World (FJ review), the 2022 col­lec­tion edit­ed by my friends C. Wess Daniels and Rhi­an­non Grant. It’s got a lot of great authors and I hearti­ly rec­om­mend it, but only in absen­tia because at $250 I’m nev­er going to read it. 

As an ama­teur Quak­er his­to­ry lover, these are all vol­umes I would love to read, but I’m not writ­ing this because of my own per­son­al anguish (real as it is!) but because the prices are break­ing what has been an essen­tial trans­mis­sion sys­tem for new his­to­ries. In the late 1980s, Thomas Hamm pub­lished The Trans­for­ma­tion of Amer­i­can Quak­erism, 1800 – 1907 with Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Press. It was $25 and I splurged. It became an impor­tant source in my under­stand­ing of Quak­er divi­sions and nineteenth-century qui­etism. Still, decades lat­er, when I write blog posts, or teach Quak­erism 101, or answer an online ques­tion, I’m often regur­gi­tat­ing per­spec­tives I learned from Hamm. 

Go to Face­book, go to Red­dit, and peo­ple aren’t shar­ing these ground­break­ing his­to­ries. Just now, ran­dom­ly open­ing Face­book, there’s a post by some­one ask­ing about James Nayler, with some­one answer­ing it by ref­er­enc­ing Hugh Bar­bour’s mid-1960s his­to­ry. I love Bar­bour but he had his own fil­ters and we’ve learned a lot since then.

Every meet­ing I’ve been a part of had a small num­ber of his­to­ry nerds in res­i­dence who led the Quak­erism 101 class­es or host­ed book groups or Bible study, and they brought their nerdi­ness to their meet­ing tasks. To use Healey’s list, many Quak­ers in the bench­es still think of Friends’ race rela­tions in terms of abo­li­tion­ism, still con­sid­er ear­ly Friends as unal­loyed fem­i­nists, and rarely give a thought to Friends in the Glob­al South. I recent­ly read a new arti­cle about a local meet­ing that was found­ed by one of the largest slave­hold­ing fam­i­lies in the area and the only men­tion of slav­ery was its much-later anti-slavery soci­ety; I real­ly want these kinds of sto­ries to be too embar­rass­ing to pub­lish. Quak­ers in the bench­es need the per­spec­tives of these new his­to­ri­ans to under­stand ourselves. 

Are there ways that aca­d­e­mics can repur­pose their inac­ces­si­ble work so that it can trick­le down to a gen­er­al audi­ence? I’m glad this Zoom talk was open to the pub­lic and well pub­li­cized: at least some of us could watch it and know the out­lines of the chang­ing his­to­ri­og­ra­phy. But how else can we work to bridge the gap? Blog posts, arti­cles in gen­er­al pub­li­ca­tions, pod­casts, Pen­dle Hill pam­phlets? What are we doing and what more could we do? I’m in Quak­er pub­lish­ing, obvi­ous­ly, and so part of the prob­lem if there’s a break­down in trans­mis­sion. We review the books and Quak­er­S­peak often dives into his­to­ry. My friend Jon Watts’s Thee Quak­er pod­cast has some won­der­ful­ly nerdy episodes. But all these feel like snip­pets: ten min­utes here, 2000 words there. When I go to learn more, I’m stuck by the lim­i­ta­tions of the open inter­net, caught in JSTOR arti­cles I can’t access, or his­to­ries only avail­able in print for $100-plus.

I’m not blam­ing any­one here. I under­stand we’re all caught in these cap­i­tal­ist and aca­d­e­m­ic sys­tems. I just won­der what we can do.

Also, spe­cial shoutout to Rhi­an­non Grant, who is the only Quak­er aca­d­e­m­ic I know of who is seem­ing­ly every­where: Blog, arti­cles in FJ, install­ments in the “Quak­er Quicks” series, pod­cast seg­ments on the BBC and Thee Quak­er (she even guest­ed on one of my FJ author chats!). Plus she’s on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tik­Tok and has her own welcome-to-Quakers page. I don’t think this ubiq­ui­tous approach is at all replic­a­ble for oth­er aca­d­e­mics. Even I’m not a pro­po­nent of social media ubiq­ui­ty, pre­fer­ring to focus on a few platforms.