My piece in yesterday’s Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. A taste:
Today the study of history is used as a cudgel in the culture wars. Activists on both the left and the right cherry-pick from the past to advance political agendas. The late historian Bernard Bailyn called this “indoctrination by historical example.”
Donald Trump, who recently revived his “1776 Commission,” weaponizes the past to consolidate power. His goal is “promote patriotic education” by teaching K-12 history students about “America’s greatness.”
The president’s recent executive order does not specify when America was “great.” Was it in 1776? The 19th century? The 1950s? “Great,” you see, is not a historical category, it is a moral one. Greatness for some might be weakness for others.
But if Trump and his friends would identify when America was “great,” an opportunity to think historically about the American past might open. Historians could enter the conversation on American greatness by providing a full and complex examination of such a time. What was life really like for all Americans in the 19th century or the 1950s? Do we want to go back?
Based on their training, historians could provide people with the knowledge to make a more informed or nuanced decision on the question of American greatness.
Those on the left are just as guilty of manipulating the past to serve present-day ends. These historians often offer flat and binary narratives that lack nuance and complexity. As the comedian Bill Maher said recently, they go back in a magic moral time machine “where you judge everybody against what you would have done in 1066 and you always win.”
In her introduction to Adolph Reed’s memoir “The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives,” historian Barbara Fields describes current scholarship and punditry on race in America as “toggling between a blurb and a melodrama.” She argues that the “difficulty stems, in part, from what historian E.P. Thompson called ‘the condescension of posterity.’” (The Christian writer C.S. Lewis called it “chronological snobbery.”)
Indeed, too many historians, no matter the subject, often lack what Fields calls the “analytics or imaginative wherewithal” to understand the past as a “daily lived experience.” To engage the past this way doesn’t mean that we ignore big categories such as “racism,” “patriarchy” or “Christian nationalism.”
Read the entire piece here.
