The Next End of History?

As Americans face another year of politics as a spectator sport, historians are reflecting not on the past, but on fear of being dragged into debates about the present. Expect more of them to be forced to take sides in the culture wars, rather than give us windows into the past to chart our path to a better tomorrow.“At the annual meeting of the American Historical Association,” the New York Times reports, “the raging battle over how to write about the past — and why — was uncomfortably front and center.” The Times says that a column the AHA’s president, James H. Sweet, wrote in August loomed large over the meeting.“When we foreshorten or shape history to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions,” he said, “we not only undermine the discipline but threaten its very integrity,” and he questioned the 1619 project, which seeks to redefine America’s founding date as the arrival of enslaved Africans.“As a historian of Africa and the African diaspora,” Mr. Sweet wrote, “I am troubled by the historical erasures and narrow politics that these narratives convey. Less than one percent of the Africans passing through Elmina,” one of the main slave ports, “arrived in North America. The vast majority went to Brazil and the Caribbean.”Mr. Sweet said, “As journalism, the project is powerful and effective, but is it history?” Questions like these are the foundation of learning, yet some of Mr. Sweet’s colleagues objected. That he apologized for the column only highlights the problem.Can we no longer kick the tires of historical events with an even hand that refuses to define them by a single narrative and trust readers to reach their own conclusions? Must we cower in bubbles of groupthink where our brains remain idle?I interview historians all the time for the “History Author Show,” and my approach is patterned on that of the founder of C-Span, Brian Lamb: I don’t give my opinion on current events. I invite authors to reflect on the past, which means not asking for speculation on what President Lincoln might think of a current political figure or topic. There is quite enough putting words in the mouths of the dead in our contemporary media universe. It’s a sure way for historians to get booked by political media outlets, with no one stopping to ask just how it is that a given famous figure somehow always agrees with their contemporary points of view. Consider, by contrast, the late David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of President John Adams. A park ranger at the Adams National Historical Park at Quincy, Massachusetts, told me that anyone who claimed Adams was their favorite commander-in-chief prior to the book was lying. The book rescued Adams from being a one-term afterthought sandwiched between Washington and Jefferson, in part because he and his son, President John Quincy Adams, were the only commanders-in-chiefs among the first 12 who rejected slavery. Contemporary citizens found a new way to identify with their legacies. Choose any president and you’ll find historians who have dedicated their lives to promoting or pillorying his legacy. For example, Americans in the 1970s latched onto President Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental legacy, but for much of the preceding half century he was regarded as something of a warmongering buffoon. The Civil or Revolutionary wars or might draw a lot of interest in America at a given time, but there were always some scholars shifting our focus to other conflicts, other stories, other people. “The only thing new in the world,” as President Truman said, “is the history you don’t know.”Today, “History” is often referred to as if it’s the name of some infallible oracle, with partisans placing themselves on its “right side” and opponents on its wrong one, setting opinions in stone and freezing out the revision that’s key to gaining greater insight.The truth is, we can’t know how the events of our times will be recorded. We read and write history as a roadmap to the path ahead, helping guide our steps. It’s our loss if we keep our heads down, reducing voices of the past to just another source of talking point.

The Next End of History?

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