Whither Now, Historians?
The second election of Donald Trump means professional historians lost the 2024 election. The results were apparent to many, but the loss of all seven battleground states, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the popular vote is a crippling referendum on the Biden administration’s chosen successor. Historians overwhelmingly supported President Biden and reviled former President-turned-President-elect Trump. This is not where an occupation concerned with the past should be caught. Not only did historians support Biden, and later Harris over Trump. They also claimed expert knowledge in prognostication to claim that Trump, if elected, would enact a fascist takeover of the United States government. Now that their warnings have not been heeded, and worse their predictions will not come to pass, whither shall historians ply their trade?
History today holds a strange place in our society. Progressive liberals claim to be “on the right side of history” (while ironically standing far to the left on the political spectrum). History is often invoked as a force of nature, one that is dark and heinous in the past yet bright and utopian in the future. How did we come to think of history in these terms? Academic history consists of two main approaches: history and historiography. History, in essence, answers the question “What happened?” History is the presentation of events and key figures who enacted important changes throughout humanity’s past. Historiography is somewhat more complex.
Historiography is the study of historians themselves. Historiography answers the question “How can we trust what was written?” It is a much more cynical approach to the past, one that applies healthy skepticism to the grand narratives that take shape within each successive generation of historians. To understand history we must understand the past itself, in its own context. To understand historiography we must understand the historians who wrote about the past, as well as how the times in which they lived affected their conception of the original history. Both schools complement each other, but increasingly historians have abandoned historical for purely historiographic thinking.
This failure is the root cause of the awkward predicament academic historians find themselves in today. Historians, energized by an overreliance on historiography, have themselves decided to become openly political actors in the present. After supporting Kamala Harris for president and abandoning all evidence against her as an apologia for tyranny, historians have further eroded their reputation in our society. In fact, such endorsements have no place in the academy. Historical study is an exercise in building wisdom, but historiographic study has become an obsession with exploiting personal foibles to bolster liberals’ opinions. The purpose of studying the past is not to find the repeating motifs with which we can attempt to predict the future. The past is a wealth of human experience, toil, joy, tension, and victory. When we study the past, we gain appreciation for our own lives. We do not study the past to invoke Adolf Hitler against everyone with whom we disagree. And this finer point is why historians as a profession lost the presidential election in 2024. They were too busy grafting their own opinions over the events of the past in an attempt to influence the present.
For months now, prominent academic historians have written articles upon articles about how Trump resembles any number of historical tyrants. This is not why anyone should study the past. We should not fold complex historical facts into simplistic fortune telling tailor made to prove our own political opinions. The point of education is to enrich our lives, not to endanger the wealth of material at our disposal. Increasingly the dictates of progressive ideology have done nothing but endanger historical knowledge and gaslight people into believing that non-progressives are “banning books” and “erasing voices.” Such a cynical reading of the past feeds fiction into the annals of an otherwise serious body of literature.
Increasingly, award-winning history books trumpet one singular message. Tell me if this sounds familiar. Throughout all human history certain minority and undesirable groups have been oppressed by white, Christian, European men. If you did not fit into all three of these categories, then historically you were likely forced into chattel slavery, pseudo-slavery in the form of housework and childbearing, or into some other despicable relationship with the ruler class. Such an assumption is wrong, an oversimplification of many different times and places in which humans have lived. In fact, the past is a panoply of experiences, only one of which is oppression. To believe all women or people of any modern racial group have been oppressed by white men for all human history is a bold assumption that undergirds much of academic history for the past few decades.
The people who won these prestigious history prizes wrote about topics like the oppression of immigration reform, prison systems, racial regimes dreamed up by modern historians, and of course the patriarchal control of women. Oppression is a tired narrative that attempts to garner popular appeal to non-white, non-male readers. Increasingly its target audience is indifferent because the conceit of oppression historiography is that all literature is to be distrusted. Such histories have and will force consumers away from academic histories and into the arms of junk history podcasts and other infinitely available hokum. The title “Professor of History” has become a red flag for many. The overreliance on historiography in our current profession is a poison that will continue to erode the effect of serious historical research on many individuals.
If you truly believe Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler, intent on a revival of the oppressive forces from the past, then the last place you want to be is alienated from the voting public because you have delivered bombastic warning after bombastic warning. Broadcasting our opinions onto the face of history is a cheap gambit to use the past’s legacy to our own ends. It is time to correct course, hence whither now, historians? If we don’t change our ways, then the current study of history will end as we know it without our consent. Historical literacy is at an ebb, and the only answer is to focus on the wonders and intricacies of the past and cease dwelling on the peripheral oppression that has come to represent most of the research in our field. Whither now? And if no course correction is adopted, then wither now. Today’s academics will be one footnote in the larger historiographic map of failed historians.
