Abstract

The dissemination of accurate accounts of the history of science to a wider public is a crucial enterprise. Both professional historians of science and popular writers have key contributions to make in this endeavor, and they can learn valuable lessons from each other. The need to provide correct, up‐to‐date, and well‐documented and well‐attributed narratives is equally incumbent on both groups. Popular texts can be both engagingly written and truthful about history and its methods, and professional historians should be encouraged to try their hand at this genre on occasion, borrowing what is useful from popular writers and enriching it with their own firsthand experience of historical research. Finally, the intelligence of the reading public should not be underestimated, and it would be injudicious for historians to miss the opportunity of presenting our enterprise and its results directly to that public