I completely disagree, I think the academic historians and the intellectual writers are the ones pushing the field forward. I know a lot of people see it as playing with your self intellectually. Most of those people (in my experiences) just don't understand it. The "coolness" of history is okay for middle schoolers, but history is also about gaining critical reasoning skills, analytical skills, and problem solving skills. Academic history provides this. Studying the nuts and bolts of history--the battles, the dates, the figures--is fine and dandy, but there are some of us who want to draw larger conclusions from these events. Also, if you know your historiography well enough, you'd know that public history is itself a born from a very long tradition of academic history. My point here is that some historians (myself included) enjoy pondering, thinking, and hypothesizing about the abstract. This is how we perceive the world. This is how we view history as well. As I said before, the nuts and bolts of history is fine for those whose appetite is satiated by that sort of thing, but there are many of us who desire to move beyond that :) Also, a historian that does not know the context of the subject he/she is writing about is simply a bad historian, not an academic one. An academic historian should provide an in depth analysis and also be able to weave in the context in which the specific occurs.