On first consideration the controversy arising this month over an editorial published in Perspectives on History, the American Historical Association’s house magazine, by the group’s president, James H. Sweet, encapsulated everything most depressing about the academic humanities now. Against the backdrop of a probably irreversible decline in history majors and an almost nonexistent job market for new history Ph.D.s, Sweet’s attack on “presentism” — “history … as anachronistic data points” in support of contemporary political causes — might have seemed to locate the crisis on the wrong plane. And his criticisms of a history limited in its approach to the past by “contemporary social-justice issues — race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism” — gave an awkward culture-wars inflection to what was intended as a methodological intervention. Sweet’s essay was, as
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