The Review

The debate among Democratic Party officials about whether President Biden should drop out of the race has invited much commentary from the cadre of public-facing liberal historians who made a name for themselves during the Trump administration. At Slate, William Hogeland, himself a historian, disapproves. In a polemical essay titled “Is the Age of the Resistance Historian Coming to an End?,” Hogeland takes aim at Heather Cox Richardson’s claim, in a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, that “in the whole picture of American history, if you change the presidential nominee at this point in the game, the candidate loses.”

This assertion, Hogeland writes — “so clear, so forceful, so authoritative” — is “totally invented.” In fact, “changing nominees at this point has literally never happened before — not even once.” You can’t infer a pattern from nonexistent data points.

Hogeland’s concern is less with Richardson and Biden per se than with the broader movement in which she figures especially prominently, that of “the historian-as-self-appointed-indispensable-public-adviser-on-current-politics” (“Resistance Historians” for short, due to their popularity with the online anti-Trump political movement sometimes hashtagged as "#TheResistance”). At its worst, Hogeland suggests, academic historians’ slide into punditry tempts them to lean on their academic authority to buttress what are in fact merely political preferences. Besides Richardson, he names Princeton’s Kevin Kruse and Sean Wilentz and Yale’s Timothy Snyder. Back in 2019, in our pages, Sam Fallon made a similar argument.

For his part, Kruse is treating this as an affair of honor. “If you call me a goddamn ‘resistance historian’ to my face,” he posted on Bluesky, a social-media app meant to replace Twitter, “I will fucking cut you.”

What Chronicle Staffers Are Reading This Summer

Sara Lipka, assistant managing editor: “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson, on the scientific and human drama of CRISPR research.”
Emma Pettit, senior reporter: “This summer, I am beginning to read my way through The Atlantic’s list of Great American novels. Completing the list will take much longer than one season. But so far, I’ve finished Toni Morrison’s Sula and Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica. I’ve just started Fran Ross’s Oreo. Up next is Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. (The order is determined by the D.C. public library’s hold lists.)”
Anais Strickland, copy editor: “I’m bouncing between two chunksters to distract me from the heat: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, an alt-history fantasy novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, and Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A. Corey, a sci-fi novel that inspired the TV show The Expanse.”
Claire Wallace, engagement editor: “My favorite summer read has been Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, where, in a dystopian U.S. future, prisoners are given the option for freedom … as long as they survive three years in a series of death matches against other prisoners, televised to the American public as ‘hard-action sports.’”
Stephanie Lee, senior writer: “I’m reading Cahokia Jazz, a hard-boiled noir set in an alternate America circa the 1920s. Imaginative and propulsive.”
Raphael Ukpelegbu, specialist, education programs: “I’m allowing anyone to give me recs, so it’s been fun reading classics from Camus and Dostoevsky, but I’ve really enjoyed other books like The Song of Achilles, Flowers for Algernon, and Paper Towns.”
Andrew Mytelka, assistant managing editor: “The Iliad and the Odyssey (Lattimore translations), and T.S.R. Boase’s biography of Giorgio Vasari (based on the 1971 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery).”

Recommended

• “As with the novel, Stephen complains, newspapers enjoy great political influence, without demonstrating the sort of responsibility and impartiality that might legitimize it.” In The New York Review of Books, Tim Parks writes about James Fitzjames Stephen’s literary and media criticism.
• “He grew to despise the Céret paintings. In later decades, he would hunt for them, buy them back from dealers, and rip them to shreds.” Also in The New York Review of Books, Celeste Marcus on the art and life of Chaïm Soutine.
• “The fascination of Harmonium, for me, is listening to the new poet testing his enormous acoustic range, adjusting inherited magnificence to a harsh new century.” In Liberties, Rosanna Warren wishes Wallace Stevens’s first book a happy hundredth birthday.
• “Slippery figures like Reubeni usually flit in and out of the historical record.” In the London Review of Books, Alexander Bevilacqua reviews Alan Verskin’s new book about David Reubeni, the false 16th-century Jewish messiah.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin