When History Broke

The old saw is that the reason academic politics are so vicious is that the stakes are so small. But if George Santayana had anything on the ball, then his point that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is worth remembering even if it’s a little less snarky. History matters, or at least it did until historians broke it.

It began on August 17, when James Sweet, the president of the AHA, posted a mildly provocative article in the association’s house journal, Perspectives on History:

“IS HISTORY HISTORY?
Identity politics and Teleologies of the Present”

The title doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping but the article was intended to get historians’ tweed jackets a little rumpled.

Sweet starts by deploring the “presentism” of current historians. He references a well-known 2002 article by past AHA president (and fine historian) Lynn Hunt, who defined presentism as

(1) the tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms; and (2) the shift of general historical interest toward the contemporary period and away from the more distant past.

In other words, historians were trying to look at the past through the eyes of the present, seeing the past as “just stepping stones to the ‘modern’ present we know.”

Sweet took aim at some sacred cows as examples, first the 1619 Project and then Viola Davis.

He also said that the forthcoming film The Woman King, starring Viola Davis, seems to suggest “that Dahomey’s female warriors and King Ghezo fought the European slave trade. In fact, they promoted it. Historically accurate rendering of Asante or Dahomean greed and enslavement apparently contradict modern-day political imperatives.”

Ultimately, Sweet argued that “the erasure of slave-trading African empires in the name of political unity is uncomfortably like right-wing conservative attempts to erase slavery from school curricula in the U.S., also in the name of unity. These interpretations are two sides of the same coin.”

Sweet’s critique of “presentism,” the reinvention of history through the lens of present day ideology, was the start of a deep and thoughtful, if impassioned, argument over how history should be viewed. Hah, only kidding.

There were some more thoughtful reactions than Sweet’s defenestration.

Other common critiques of Sweet’s essay, as evidenced on social media and a flurry of response essays: presentism is hardly the field’s most pressing issue; Sweet didn’t fully understand presentism as a concept; some degree of presentism is inescapable, given that no one is practicing history in a time machine; and Sweet, a white man, was arguing against the elevation of historically suppressed voices and perspectives from his elite perch as head of the AHA.

Of course, this is reminiscent of those who argue that because journalists can never be perfectly impartial, they should stop trying and be as biased as they wanna be. And it’s just as logically sound.

In one example, historian Kevin Gannon, director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence at Grand View University, wrote in a response piece,

Look, it’s like this: all history is presentism. This was true when Lynn Hunt wrote the first iteration of “against presentism” a couple decades ago, and it remains true now. We are historians, in the present, who are selecting some (certainly not all) “historical facts” from the past in order to narrate, analyze, interpret, and contextualize. At best, we are mapping, or representing, the past; we are certainly not reproducing the past in any exact way.

Were people right or wrong, good or evil, moral or immoral, in the context of their time? Who cares? We’re here now and we win because they’re dead and we’re not. Joan of Arc was transgender and no Africans captured and sold other Africans into slavery.

Sweet is arguing that politicizing the past in order to get ammunition for the present leads to bad history.

as a historian of Africa and the African diaspora, I am troubled by the historical erasures and narrow politics that these narratives convey.

History needs to examine the past on its own terms, warts and all. This means discussing the horrible and long-lasting impact of slavery in the Americas but also describing the ways in which European slave traders worked with African rulers to kidnap their victims.

A fair and reasonable view, even if it contradicts the views of a cadre of history academics for whom history serves ideology and facts are squishy, malleable things to be reshaped to their most facile use. So Sweet’s essay shamed the disingenuous little shits into submission? If you thought so, you’re not paying attention.

Two days later, Sweet issued an apology for his piece (it’s now at the beginning of the article itself, placed as a kind of academic trigger warning). He apologized “for the harm that it has caused” and “causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association” and concluded by saying “Once again, I apologize for the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA.”

Even if one disagrees with Sweet, did his challenge of the blight of presentism cause “harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association”? Perhaps they were traumatized, felt compelled to ball up in a corner and sob uncontrollably. Maybe they engaged in self harm after their association president questioned the efficacy of approach to their discipline. Or maybe this is ritualistic apology to those for whom neither facts nor accuracy matter when it comes to teaching that we’ve always been at war with eastasia.

One historian’s tweet was both representative and pretty funny: “This abysmally poor historical writing from the president of the historical association is what has scandalized his fellow historians.” Calling Sweet’s piece “abysmally poor historical writing” is nonsense. Has she read some of the awful history books out there? Sweet wrote clear cogent paragraphs advancing an argument. Bad writing was not the problem. Almost certainly what had scandalized the tweeter (was she truly scandalized?) was that she felt Sweet had taken the wrong side in the culture wars.

The battle to prevent history from being distorted, whether by the victor or the zealot, so that we, and future generations, will know what actually happened and why rather than what we would like to believe happened will continue. Sadly, not a lot of historians will be fighting on the side of truth in this battle, and those who do will almost certainly be coerced into a tepid apology lest they be ousted from the faculty tea.