Sitting in the lobby of the Philadelphia Marriott at the 2023 annual convention of the American Historical Association, one would never know the guild had been rocked by a controversy that forced the AHA to temporarily suspend its Twitter account as AHA President James H. Sweet’s essay “Is History History?” in Perspectives on History, the association’s newsletter, was taken up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic. What happened to Sweet’s fevered denunciation of “presentism,” which, he claimed, threatened to undermine the discipline of history, its integrity, and its very existence? Or the calls for Sweet’s resignation that followed in response? The discrepancy between what David Frum labeled the “New History Wars” in October 2022 and the business-as-usual tone of the conference in January 2023 makes one feel as though the whole controversy was some sort of fever dream. Some see this de-escalation as indicative of controversies in the age of Twitter and social media, where tempers flare but engagement ends quickly. That may be true in general but elides a more likely explanation. Guild historians retreated to the past in search of cover from the present. In this light, Sweet’s target of “presentism” was a red herring to begin with because, for the most part, Sweet, his defenders, and his critics all agree on the fundamentals of what disciplinary history should be. The controversy was never about the way the guild “does” history but about which histories should be done in this way and who should be allowed to do them. The emphasis on presentism was low-hanging fruit that missed a more serious problem facing not only historians, be it Sweet or his critics, but all those who work on the past. The discipline of history has become misaligned with the task of historical representation in the public sphere. Its mode of argumentation is no longer convincing to the greater public and perhaps even to its proponents. In the sessions of the AHA meeting, among sympathetic fellow travelers in an echo chamber of homogenous methodological agreement, historians retreated into the past (recent or distant), constructing a firewall between them and the present. The reality of an atrophying discipline was deferred.

It is telling that none of the examples of “presentism” marshaled by Sweet are the work of disciplinary historians. The 1619 Project, developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, is a long-form journalism project first published in the New York Times Magazine that reframes the history of the United States by “placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative” (Hannah-Jones et al. 2021).[1] Sweet’s negative experience in Elmina, Ghana, was with a narrative of the Atlantic slave trade presented by tour guides and designed to cater to the American tourists visiting the site. The other example of what Sweet considered the misuse of history was by the conservative justices of the US Supreme Court in the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. For better or for worse, these are examples where writers from outside of the discipline have had a more significant impact on the use of history than the professional scholars by connecting the past to the present. It is precisely the danger that these interlopers might drag history into the present that Sweet finds so disturbing. This fear is not new, and Sweet presents his own intervention as the successor to Lynn Hunt’s concern, published twenty years ago in Perspectives  when she was president of the AHA. Hunt worried that presentism “threatens to put us out of business as historians.” Sweet sees this threat as coming to fruition because “the discipline [of history] did not heed Hunt’s warning.” For Sweet and like-minded historians, the survival of history requires that we leave the past in the past protected by the watchful eyes of trained disciplinary historians. Others, such as David A. Bell in a response piece, seek to explain the ways that a focus on the present ultimately serves the common good; in Bell’s words, “‘presentism’ is to be accepted and even applauded, not denounced—at least to a certain extent.” Bell’s argument is actually much closer to Hunt’s nuanced engagement with the intractable problem of presentism, advocating as it does for a balance between our concern for the present and respect for the past. Bell’s caveat is that, as for Sweet and Hunt, the disciplinary historian must remain the guardian who maintains the distance between past and present and thus the sanctity of the relation.

Mainstream disciplinary historians—Hunt, Sweet, and Bell included—retain a belief about the fixed nature of the past, or at least its temporal placement, that is out of alignment with the increasingly plural accounts of that past. This is why Sweet sees the current emphasis on “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism” as ignoring the “values and mores of people in their own times,” and which Sweet, quoting Hunt, decries as “identity politics.” It should not be lost on us that Sweet is a historian of African history and thus representative of a field that, like many of those he singles out, has only recently been afforded the resources and prominence previously reserved for historians of “Western Civ.” The discipline of history has become increasingly diverse and heterogeneous over the last fifty years, and there is no doubt that this expansion is for the better. It is also the case, however, that the very positive expansion of subjects and areas deemed worthy of historical investigation is undercut by the way these challenges to prior historical narratives continue to rely on the established and accepted methods of historical discourse. In this way, these new histories replicate the historical conceits of the narratives and fields they purport to engage with or replace (Kleinberg 2021).

I take issue not with the increasingly heterogeneous subjects of historical analysis but with the strikingly homogenous understanding and methods into which the histories of these subjects are incorporated. As the types of historical topics and narratives have increased, the collective fantasy of a “final historical account” securing the firewall between past and present has been fractured by a proliferation of histories each running on the now-outdated assumption that its account of the past correlates to that past on a one-to-one ratio. Innovations in, and expansion of, subjects and types of evidence have led to what Joan Scott describes as a “crisis for orthodox history by multiplying not only stories but subjects, and by insisting that histories are written from fundamentally different—indeed irreconcilable—perspectives or standpoints, none of which is complete or completely ‘true’” (Scott 2005, 201). Each relies on the view that its account is a correction that presents the event as it happened. Another way of saying this is that the variants of history Sweet condemns actually follow the same historical logic as the ones he champions. This is equally true of the nondisciplinary accounts Sweet highlights. Here we have a clue as to why the public would find these nondisciplinary accounts as compelling as those sanctioned by the historical discipline. Especially when the stories they tell coincide with an audience’s preexisting beliefs or values and the narrative way in which they are presented.

Sweet takes issue with what he considers to be the presentism of the increasingly heterogeneous subjects of historical analysis arguing that “we suffer from an overabundance of history, not as method or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for the articulation of competing politics.” In taking aim at the presentist nature of this overabundance of history as anachronistic, I think he is missing the point (as are many of his critics). The problem is not the “presentist politics” of this overabundance of history (as Joan Scott clearly demonstrates in her response to Sweet and Bell) but the strikingly homogenous understanding and methods by which the histories of these subjects are recounted (Scott 2022). If the criterion is mimetic representation of the past as it really happened, either only one account can be true or somehow all must be true. This emphasis on mimetic representations of past events as they “really happened” has cultural and political ramifications as well. In the hands of pundits and politicians, this has provided cover for the pick-your-own-truth culture, exemplified by Donald Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” or Richard Spencer’s defense of Sweet’s piece as “Rankean history.” The “post-truthers” operate in decidedly bad faith and do their scholarship poorly in regard to the rules of the guild, but the one-to-one correlation they assert between the evidence they present and the facts or truths they claim is the same as that of many conventional scholars: alternative but equivalent. The contextualist argument of Samuel Alito is a perverse mirror of the Cambridge school of intellectual history.

Conventional historians argue that their understanding and use of perspectivalism can account for the many and oftentimes conflicting historical narratives, but such nuance has been crowded out by the pick-your-own-truth variant of history. This virulent strain caters to an audience increasingly inclined to believe the historical narrative that aligns with their preconceived notion of what they want the past to be. Then again, is this so different from debates within the discipline about interpretative preference? The controversy over the historiography of the bombing of Hiroshima provided two plausible historical accounts of the event (Kort 2007, 8–13). In one the bombing was considered justified because it brought the war to a quicker resolution and in so doing saved “countless American lives.” The other posited the bombing as “atomic diplomacy,” a preemptive warning to the Soviet Union callously dropped on innocent civilians with no regard for human life. These competing accounts, each bolstered by accepted historical evidence, came to a head with the proposed Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian in 1994, where narrative preference fell along ideological lines (Hogan 1996). Proponents of the “just war” narrative found support from conservative thinkers such as Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich. Those arguing that the bombing was an unwarranted and unnecessary act of military aggression found support from pacifists and the left. The point is not about the merits of the exhibit itself but about the ways that the work of disciplinary historians was drawn into a controversy in the present where two narratives each provided “data points for the articulation of competing politics” (Sweet 2022). The preferred narrative emplotment of each camp coincided with preexisting beliefs and values.

One could draw similar conclusions about the competing narratives at work in The 1619 Project and the account by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz in his book No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. Wilentz gives pride of place to the Constitution as the mechanism to “hasten slavery’s demise” and, presumably, establish equal rights among all “men” in the United States of America (Wilentz 2018, xii). The same historical logic, however, could be applied to the fateful day in August 1619 when a slave ship arrived in Port Comfort near the English colony of Virginia carrying “more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists” (Hannah-Jones et al. 2019). For Sweet, however, the difference between the two is that in The 1619 Project “history was a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of contemporary racial identity. It was not an analysis of people’s ideas in their own time, nor a process of change over time.” The conclusion to be drawn is that accounts such as Wilentz’s pass Sweet’s criteria for history while The 1619 Project does not. Sweet never considers the possibility that the prefigurations one brings into the construction of a historical narrative might lead to varying interpretations of people’s ideas in their own times or that the construction of racial identity should be the very process of change to be tracked. When starting from 1776 with an eye toward progress, the events unfold quite differently than from a starting point of 1619 with an eye toward repetition. If one begins with the assumption that the framers of the Constitution were working to solve the problem of slavery, then the evidence falls into place in alignment with Wilentz. If one begins from the assumption that 1619 shades later actions and is determinative of contemporary racial identity, it can be interpreted another way. The historical narrative can focus on the intent of the framers or on the evidence of implementation in a longer history of enslavement and racial injustice. If we turn things around, however, it becomes apparent that the contributors to The 1619 Project are equally beholden to a unified and singular grand narrative (grand récit) albeit one with a different emphasis. This is also what I mean when I say that the expansion of subjects and areas deemed worthy of historical investigation replicates the historical conceits of the narratives and fields they seek to challenge, engage with, or replace. The 1619 Project is an important and necessary challenge to the dominant narrative but still operates using the logic of what I call one-dimensional history (Kleinberg 2021).

Sweet’s critique of The 1619 Project is that it “isn’t history” because it is used in the service of presentist politics. The implication is that history must maintain neutrality to be valid and this can only be done by keeping the past away from the present. This is the role that Sweet and Bell assign to the disciplinary historian and at this level their emphasis is on restricting who is sanctioned to access—and protect—the past. The result is that Sweet’s concerns and alarm are misplaced. The issue is not competing historical narratives or interpretations of facts. It is whether those representing the past are acting in good faith or willfully manipulating evidence for political or other gain. The danger comes from bad faith actors “politicizing” the past for their own ends. In this climate of multiple historical accounts, and the perspectivalism that results from them, disciplinary historians pointing at their piles of “facts” and “truths” and then becoming apoplectic when they aren’t believed, are ill-equipped to defend their accounts against those operating in bad faith. In this light, the most surprising aspect of the Organization of American Historians–American Historical Association joint statement on the Dobbs v. Jackson decision is their “dismay that the Court declined to take seriously the historical claims of our [amicus curiae] brief.” If historians want to confront the sort of bad-faith history espoused by right-wing nationalists or Supreme Court justices, then they need to recognize what they are combating and the ways that their own epistemological commitments actually aid and abet these misleading narratives.

What’s worse, and as Sweet and others make clear, rather than marshal their forces to take action against those acting in bad faith, these defenders of history spend equal time attacking figures working in good faith such as the authors of The 1619 Project. Rather than constructing barriers between historians and nonhistorians, the discipline of history should be asking itself what other scholars working on the past are doing to gain attention, traction, and engagement in academia and beyond. Why and how is it that scholars like Saidiya Hartman or Lisa Lowe, to name just two important examples, are able to construct engagements with the past—histories—that connect with students and scholars in ways that more conventional historians cannot? Hartman’s work is especially pertinent, as Lose Your Mother tracks her own time in Elmina, Ghana. Where Sweet seeks to keep “the values and mores of people in their own times,” Hartman confronts the ways that the past haunts our present and vice versa. In Hartman’s more dynamic temporal model, the past is not something to simply be uncovered like a pot of earth in a nineteenth-century archaeological dig but a complex engagement between presence and absence. Here we see how the values we hold, or would like to hold, become an essential part of the scholarly endeavor. It is certainly the case that these values are extrahistorical in the sense that our commitments to them are not predicated on the methods or stated goals of disciplinary history. But they are predicated on our pasts and they do give scholarly engagement with the past a force, energy, and relevance that the discipline of history has lost. It is not interest in history itself that has waned, as the results of a 2020 survey conducted by the AHA and Fairleigh Dickinson University make clear: “The results were encouraging: 84 percent felt history was just as valuable as the professional programs. Moreover, those results held nearly constant across age groups, genders, education levels, races and ethnicities, political-party affiliations, and regions of the country” (Burkholder and Schaffer 2021).[2] No, it is that the discipline of history has become misaligned to the task of historical representation in the public sphere. It cannot tell friend from foe, and its means of argument has become ineffective, as evidenced by the Dobbs v. Jackson amicus curiae brief. This, not presentism, is what threatens to put “historians” out of business.

Sweet’s attempt to save “history” from presentism and Bell’s attempt to keep presentism from running roughshod over it each serve to prop up the importance and necessity of disciplinary history, but this says more about the precarity of the historical discipline than about the relation of past, present, and future. Bell’s argument is certainly more amenable to the connections and comparisons between these temporal registers; nevertheless, his concession to the present is one in which the past remains “a foreign country” and everything “weird, wonderful, and strange” is confined to its domain. This seemingly neutral move normalizes the present in distinction from the strange and foreign past, thus drawing our attention away from the strangeness of our own practices and traditions in the present (cultural, political, ethical) as well as their entanglement with the past and future. In both cases the past ends up serving as a refuge from the present. But the lines between past, present, and future are not so clean. History is ostensibly about the past, but it is the present in which this history occurs, both in the way it is constructed in our present and the way the past event travels forward in time so as to be of the moment in which it is taken up.

In the end, the emphasis on presentism simply exposes the ways that history is built and deployed in the present, the ways that histories are made and not found. This is not to say that the past never happened or certain events did not exist, but instead to point out that ultimately it is more important to convince others that such events happened in such a way than to portray them as they really happened or even that they happened at all. This is the argumentative game of history, and if one is successful then such a past does exist for us and appropriates all the ontological properties we commonly afford to any commensurate happening in the present. This is also what makes it a dangerous game. The “political” or “ethical” entailments from the historical account that prevails may not be the ones that you or I would hope for.

For professional disciplinary historians, it is certainly the goal to make the account of the past coincide with the evidence of what occurred as best one can. This is the professional virtue of the historian, but this, too, is a strategy to foster belief and confidence in the guild historian’s, which is to say the expert’s, particular account. Our moment is an interesting and dangerous one because the authority of the expert has waned such that the epistemic fabric that held our conception of truths and facts firm in relation to the authority of science has become loose, perhaps even undone. This also structured the ordering of time as an account of past, present, and future that sanctioned the disciplinary historian as guardian of the past. But it was faith in the authority of the expert that allowed the disciplinary historian to serve this role and as this faith has waned so has the authority of the discipline of history. The OAH-AHA statement in response to Dobbs v. Jackson  is illuminating in this regard: “The OAH and AHA consider it imperative that historical evidence and argument be presented according to high standards of historical scholarship. The Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson does not meet those standards, and has therefore established a flawed and troubling precedent.” By mimicking the epistemological commitments and manipulating the methodological ones, the conservative justices wrested authority from the disciplinary historians. If “high standards of historical evidence” references the stockpile of “facts” kept safely in the past, then it is no wonder this objection and their arguments were ignored. The problem isn’t what the facts say; the problem is how interpretations are putting the facts together in ways that allow abhorrent moral claims to go uncontested. We need to have arguments about morality, and the “past” should be the stage for this moral contestation.

We can talk all we want about the crisis of presentism or systemic devaluation of the humanities, but the reality is that “history” must change to again become relevant. To quote Stewy from the HBO show Succession, “IT DOES NOT WORK FOR US.” The retreat to the past and fear of a specious present on display at the AHA convention is disciplinary history’s tomb. It is time for historians and those who work on the past to embrace the anachronism and temporal anarchy that Sweet and Bell seek to exorcise from the discipline, to tear down the firewall between past and present and embrace radically different approaches, whether it be the alternative narrative framing of The 1619 Project or the more audacious critical fabulations of Saidiya Hartman. This is what I have called a multidimensional or polyphonic theory of history, which aligns with our increasingly plural understanding of what the past can be and the ways it can be represented (Kleinberg 2021). Like it or not, the histories we produce about the past double as a questioning of the present and historians need to own that responsibility. The past can no longer serve as a refuge from the present.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the editors of History of the Present for their careful reading and generative suggestions and Peter Gordon for his counsel, advice, and most important disagreement on the status of the past.

Notes

[1] The 1619 Project was also published as a book in 2021 by Oneworld. Citations to the project refer to the online New York Times version.

[2] For another version of this report and its underlying survey data, see “History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey,” American Historical Association, https://www.historians.org/history-culture-survey (accessed May 19, 2023).

Works Cited

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Burkholder, Peter, and Dana Schaffer. “A Snapshot of the Public’s Views on History.” Perspectives on History, August 30, 2021. https://www.historians.org/research-and -publications/perspectives-on-history/september-2021/a-snapshot-of-the-publics-views-on-history-national-poll-offers-valuable-insights-for-historians-and-advocates

Frum, David. “The New History Wars.” Atlantic, October 30, 2022. https://www.theatlantic .com/ideas/archive/2022/10/american-historical-association-james-sweet/671853/

Hannah-Jones, Nikole, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein, eds. The 1619 Project. New York: Oneworld, 2021. 

Hannah-Jones, Nikole, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein, eds. The 1619 Project. New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14 /magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 

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Kort, Michael. The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 

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Wilentz, Sean. No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.