The Making of a New Histor Y of Wales; Professor Huw Bowen Explains Why the History Research Wales Historians Were Excited to Be Involved in Our Series, Where Welsh Myths Are Re-Examined

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IN his passionate, powerful, and personal article Dai Smith has made a compelling case for history as the 'most scared civic knowledge we can possess'.

But at the same time Professor Smith also sounds a loud alarm bell by warning of some serious dangers that confront academic historians in Wales.

He writes of historians retreating into a world of scholarship in which they talk only to one another; and he despairs of a socioeducational climate in which history is packaged in a bland, non-challenging way and then served up as 'info-tainment' for public audiences.

In other words, historians and the history they write are becoming marginalised or considered irrelevant in modern Wales.

Many will take issue with some, or perhaps even all, of this diagnosis of the ills that are held to afflict the nation's history and its academic practitioners.

But Dai Smith is surely right to be deeply concerned about 'the lifeblood of historical enquiry' being frozen …