A History Hullabaloo

This morning the quiet Twitter account of the American Historical Association went into lockdown mode.

As they went under, they posted this brief explanatory tweet:

Whoa, what the heck happened?

The opening salvo

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 jackets¹ 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.”

Hunt goes on to say

Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards.

In all of this, Hunt was making the point that we need to study the past on its own terms, and to avoid, as much as we can, seeing it through our own era’s biases.

Professor Sweet argues that rather than listen to Hunt, today’s historians have become even more wrapped up in “presentism.” He offers statistics showing that there are now more historians getting degrees in “modern” (post-1800) history, and then makes the point (without stats) that the discussion of history, in general, is over-affected by present-day concerns.

Our interpretations of the recent past collapse into the familiar terms of contemporary debates, leaving little room for the innovative, counterintuitive interpretations.

And then Sweet hits the live wires of our current discourse. He suggests that seeing “the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism” is a mistake. As Hunt before him argued, this “ignores the values and mores of people in their own times” and turns them into a reflection of our own.

Bravely (or foolishly) he next takes aim at The 1619 Project.

The 1619 Project is a best-selling book that sits at the center of current controversies over how to teach American history. As journalism, the project is powerful and effective, but is it history?

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.

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 United States, also in the name of unity. These interpretations are two sides of the same coin. If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise

Sweet tries to be even-handed in his criticism of those who misuse the past. He spends paragraphs attacking Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s “cherrypicking” of historical data to support their decisions on gun control and overturning Roe v. Wade, finally concluding that what Thomas and Alito did “is not history; it is dilettantism.”

Trying to be fair by ripping into the conservative justices was not enough to protect Sweet’s article. He had criticized social justice and The 1619 Project and this put him in the culture war cross-hairs. He was hit by waves of angry tweets.

The apology

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.”

This was not as groveling as some of these apologies can be. Sweet expressed regret for his “ham-fisted attempt at provocation” and “clumsy efforts” but did not take back his central points. For this reason, of course, a number of the Twitter responses expressed dissatisfaction with his apology. For some of these folks, it seems, no apology could ever be sufficient.

To state the obvious: No actual harm was caused to colleagues, the AHA, or the study of history. Historians are going to go on writing monographs on “19-century peddlers and their connection to capitalist systems,"² the AHA will keep collecting dues, and people will keep studying history. The idea that a single tame article could somehow cause harm is ridiculous.

Part of the problem is too many historians (along with everyone else) spend too much time on Twitter. The “presentism” Sweet criticized makes a fairly tame discussion of history seem like a critical battle in our ongoing partisan bloodbath. From the POV of Sweet’s critics, you’re either with us or against us, and he most definitely hadn’t been with us.

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 reaction to Sweet’s apology was fierce. Some historians complained that it hadn’t gone far enough, a few defended him, but looking over the bulk of the replies in the locked-down thread, most seem to be from non-historians who were bringing their own culture war agendas to the AHA’s controversy.

Richard Hanania @RichardHanania

@AHAhistorians Your profession is a sick joke to everyone not in your cult.

I’m not surprised the AHA protected their account.

Was it good history?

And what about Sweet’s points? Are we too caught up in viewing the past through the lenses of the present?

I think we are.

If you come at history with a strong thesis—for example, if you wanted to show that America is the best country ever—you can easily cherrypick details that fit your argument. Even if your thesis were less heavy-handed than proving American exceptionalism, having an agenda focused on the present often distorts our understanding of the past.

A recent Substack piece “Activism isn’t for everyone,” by Ian Leslie, is a timely comment on this propensity to jam everything into the current big thing. Leslie argues that “academics and journalists shouldn't take sides” because this warps their central job of trying to figure out what happened. Activists, on the other hand, have the goal of trying to make something happen.

Activists band together to make change, which means they have to care more about getting along with their allies than about intellectual originality or nuance. We need people - activists and politicians - who are willing to do this, otherwise nothing would get done, but we also need people for whom opinions and ideas are not a method of relationship maintenance, or, indeed, ammunition.

The historians attacking Sweet had tossed out nuance and were busy using opinions as ammunition to win their battle.

This is, of course, not new. It’s human to want to see past people and events as relevant to our own time. It’s also not always wrong. Lynn Hunt concluded her 2002 essay by saying

it is possible to remind ourselves of the virtues of maintaining a fruitful tension between present concerns and respect for the past. Both are essential ingredients in good history.

It’s also not new to criticize our tendency to overemphasize the present. Sweet did it in 2022, Hunt did it in 2002, and in 1931, Herbert Butterfield wrote The Whig Interpretation of History, arguing that Whig historians (the Whigs were a British political party) warped history by portraying it as a glorious march from the wicked past towards the wonderful present.³

As a teacher, I regularly deal with the tension of balancing a focus on the past with making connections to the present. Am I part of the problem that Sweet was criticizing? I want to make history relevant to my 20-year-old students and so I often use issues in the past to cast light on the present, and vice versa. Done with restraint I think this is fine—Hunt calls it “a fruitful tension”—but Sweet’s essay is a healthy reminder that we can take it too far.

For some, the whole argument doesn’t make sense. What’s the point of history if it doesn’t tell us something about the present?

Claire Potter @TenuredRadical

And I find the commentary on presentism confused more than anything else. Isn't history supposed to provide insight to the present? What is the point otherwise?

I differ with Professor Potter. It’s fine to ask if the Romans were like us, but we should spend far more time analyzing what they were like on their own terms, ignoring as much as we can our own modern biases. “What is the point?” What is the point of reading Chaucer or watching Moonlight?

Dr. Erica Buchberger @EricaBuchberger

@TenuredRadical There's no point in learning about a period for its own sake? Because it's interesting? Because it helps you see other possibilities from the vastness of the human story? I think there's a LOT of point.

I agree with Professor Buchberger’s reply. Studying history is worthwhile because it tells us something about the human condition. It doesn’t have to shed light on the present (although if it does, that’s terrific too).

And perhaps Sweet and I are wrong. It’s fine for other historians to write their own counter-essays criticizing Sweet’s points. What is bad is when the pressure becomes so intense that a historian feels the need to issue an over-the-top apology for all the supposed harm he has caused.

Sweet concluded his apology with the standard “I’m listening and learning.” I think he’s learning to keep his fingers away from hot-button topics, which is unfortunate.

1. Full disclosure. I am a historian and I don’t own a tweed jacket. Most historians probably don’t. We really ought to, though. They would suit us.

2. I made up that article title, but now I’m thinking it sounds kinda interesting.

3. While the tendency Butterfield describes seems quite real, his thesis has received a lot of criticism, partly because it seems it was being unfair to Whig historians, who weren’t anywhere near as bad as he argued.