Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 Presidential election is only part of a broader rightwing attack on reality, facts, and history. Texas’ “Texas, Our Texas 1836” indoctrinates students with myths about the state’s past. While it acknowledges that Texas history is “far from perfect,” it insists that all Texans share a “common story” that is “full of optimism, energy, grit and gumption” and is a “bold example for the rest of the nation and the world.”
In Florida, Ron DeSantis, a leading Republican Party Presidential candidate, recently claimed in an interview “No one had questioned it [slavery] before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights and that we are all created equal.” Apparently DeSantis was unaware of resistance to slavery by enslaved Africans, opposition to slavery by Quakers and other religious groups, and campaigns in Great Britain to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He also seemed to be unaware that three of the first four United States Presidents, including the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and two participants in the Constitutional Convention were major slaveholders.
A number of “blue states” with Democratic Party controlled legislatures are trying to pass new laws that would require social media sites to remove patently false, hateful, and extremist postings. Washington State Governor Jay Inslee calls the threat of social media disinformation a “nuclear weapon” threatening the democratic foundations of the United States. Meanwhile legislatures in a number of rightwing Republican “red states” want to prevent the banning of claims, no matter how unfounded or ridiculous, that attacks their enemies and supports their agenda.
When our son was young, my wife and I sang a song with him by Robert Clairmont called “The Answers.” In this song, a child questions a lamb, a goat, a cow, a hog, a duck, a goose, and a hen about the origin of the world and records their responses: quack, honk, oink, and moo. The idea of copying down responses from barnyard animals seemed so ridiculous that we all used to laugh. Unfortunately, writing down meaningless answers to what are potentially such wonderful questions goes on too often in classrooms across the United States. Equally meaningless and definitely more dangerous answers seem to be regularly spouted on rightwing talk radio and by followers of like QAnon.
As a witness during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune in July, 1919, Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “History is more or less bunk.” Ford’s statement was probably just part of an effort to collect from the newspaper. But possibly, he also understood the power of history if it got into the wrong hands; the hands of the automobile workers in his factories, ordinary citizens, or people who disagreed with his economic and political views. History gives us both the information and the means for understanding our world. History is the past, and it is the human effort to study, understand, and utilize the past to help us make choices about, and to shape, the future. History is neither bunk nor moo, despite what Henry Ford or the cow might have said.
Recently there has been a debate in the history profession over what is frequently derided as “presentism.” Writing in the organization’s newsletter, James Sweet, President of the American Historical Association and a Professor at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) dismissed “presentism,” using questions generated by contemporary issues to explore and explain the past, as a deviation from the true path of historical scholarship. Sweet was concerned that political points of view were distorting historical understanding as “This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times” and was especially critical of the New York Times’ 1619 Project on racism in American society. In a response to Sweet, David Bell a professor of history at Princeton University argued that “most historians would nonetheless agree that, inescapably, they write from a present-day perspective. Their experience, world view, conceptual resources, and political concerns all contribute, in both conscious and unconscious ways, to the questions they pose, and to what they find salient and interesting in the past.” Bell concluded that “history written with an eye to the present serves the common good. It illuminates how elements of our own world came into being, exposing the development of key political, social, and economic structures, tracing the effects of past choices, and offering insight into how change can take place.”
Joan W. Scott, emerita professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, responded to both Sweet and Bell in an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Scott argued that the traditional orthodoxy as presented by Sweet, that historical research and writing are “dispassionate, neutral, the antithesis of politics,” is false because history is always political in a historian’s choice of topic and interpretation. Scott is much more concerned about the political power of rightwing government officials to censor the teaching of history than she is about possible “presentist” misinterpretations that can be addressed in open and honest discourse.
I agree with Scott and often cite the book What is History? (1961) by British historian E.H. Carr. Carr introduced me to the idea of thinking about the past and present as part of a continuum that stretches into the future. He believed that concern with the future is what really motivates the study of the past. According to Carr, a frequent assumption is that an “historian divides his (sic) work into two sharply distinguishable phases or periods. First, he spends a long preliminary period reading his sources and filling his notebooks with facts: then, when this is over, he puts away his sources, takes out his notebooks, and writes his book from beginning to end” (32-33). When described his own research, he explained that data gathering and analysis “go on simultaneously. The writing is added to, subtracted from, re-shaped, canceled as I go on reading. The reading is guided and directed and made more fruitful by the writing: the more I write, the more I know what I am looking for, the better I understand the significance and relevance of what I find . . . I am convinced that . . . the two processes . . . are, in practice, parts of a single process.” Historians are engaged in a “continuous process of molding facts to interpretation and of interpretation to the facts . . . The historian without facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless” (32-35). Or in other words, the facts historians consider important are never really separated from the theories they employ or their points of view.
Defining history is complicated because it refers to a number of different but related concepts. History is the past, the study of the past, and explanations about the past. It includes:
(1) Events from the past—“facts;”
(2) The process of gathering and organizing information from the past—historical research;
(3) Explanations about the relationships between specific historical events;
(4) Broader explanations or “theories” about how and why change takes place.
A local New York Long Island newspaper recently asked me to answer four questions about the difficulty of understanding history. These are the questions and my answers.
1. What are the difficulties faced by historians in making accurate interpretations of history from historical resources and evidence, especially if they are not written sources?
The historical record by its very nature is incomplete and slanted. Surviving written documents usually reflect the ideas of the educated male elite. We have writings from ancient Athens, but they don’t reflect the views or experiences of women or of the more than fifty percent of the population that was enslaved. They also usually present the perspective of colonial powers rather than the colonized.
2. Why do historians often present differing historical views on the same topic or on the same piece of evidence, and are these disagreements necessarily a bad thing?
Examining conflicting views and interpretations is a major part of the process of studying history. Historians don’t have laboratories that allow for controlled experiments and we can’t run the past back to see if events play out differently. By examining different views and different applications of evidence, historians explore which explanations are best supported by the evidence and are strongest.
3. How can the average reader better critically examine a historian's account of past events?
I recommend being an active rather than a passive reader and having a conversation with the text. Where is the evidence to support this assertion? Is the evidence sufficient to support the conclusion? Can the evidence be understood in a different light? I tell students don’t be afraid to reach your own conclusions, even if they are tentative. I also use this approach to understand contemporary political debate.
4. What is the purpose of history and is it to arrive at "truth"?
I don’t think the study of history has just one purpose or always even has a purpose. There are historians who study a period, person, or event out of interest without a conscious or stated purpose. There are historians who are focused narrowly and other historians who have a much more sweeping perspective and search for underlying patterns from the past that give clues to have societies develop and change. In my work I go back and forth between the past and present. I use questions about the present to better understand the past and my understanding of the past to better explain the present. Historians, like social scientists and natural and physical scientists question the idea of an absolute “truth.” We accept the validity of strongly supported theories and explanations, but recognize that new discoveries will require that we rethink our views and potentially have to change them.
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