The Review

In the last few months, two rich essays have appeared looking back at a series of flare-ups, since 2019 or so, in the perennial debate over the politics of historical study. In July, Past & Present published the Northwestern University historian Sarah Maza’s “Presentism and the Politics of History: Revisiting the 2022 James Sweet Affair.” And earlier this month, Liberties published the Rutgers University at Camden historian Katherine C. Epstein’s “Historians Killing History.” Between them, the two essays suggest a way to move beyond the stultifying binaries that have sometimes organized debates over ideology and the study of the past.

The James Sweet affair, as most will have already forgotten, involved a fierce dispute over a Perspectives on History editorial written by Sweet, at the time president of the American Historical Association. That editorial accused the profession of mining the study of the past to score cheap political points about the present, especially where matters of race are concerned. (In our pages, Joan W. Scott and David A. Bell each weighed in.) Most controversially, Sweet criticized the historical-tourism industry associated with Elmina Castle, in Ghana, a former slaving hub. According to Sweet, tour guides — courting the patronage of Americans and especially African Americans — understated the role of Africans in the slave trade and misleadingly implied that Elmina played a much bigger role in North American slavery than it did (in fact, most of Elmina’s victims ended up in South America and the Caribbean).

The response was withering. “All hell broke loose,” as Maza writes. She quotes Stanford University’s Priya Satia, who, invited to respond to Sweet’s essay, expressed her “exhaustion at having to explain the harm of Sweet’s condescending portrayal of African Americans’ understanding of history and of his attempt, from his influential office, to delegitimize scholarship on essential topics like race, gender, and capitalism.” At its worst, the debate could risk pitting what Scott described as “the right’s conflation of criticism with dogmatism” against “identitarian purists’ attacks on what they take to be distortions of their experiential truth” — both poles ideologically calcified and morally domineering.

Taking a cue from Scott, Maza argues that the dichotomies structuring the debates obscure the truth about what actually makes good history writing good. “What gets lost in the ideology-versus-accuracy formulation,” Maza writes, “is the idea of history as an intellectually creative discipline.” It’s true that “political conviction can lead to simplification.” It’s also true that “the scrupulous accumulation of information” is not in itself “sufficient to produce really good history.” If you are trapped by the terms of the history wars — presentism versus respect for the past; accuracy versus ideology; political conviction versus evenhanded objectivity — you will never come close to describing the mysterious admixture of archival diligence and argumentative innovation that makes good history good.

In her Liberties essay, Epstein likewise describes the way that the study of history has been sharply dichotomized:

On the one hand, there are traditional military and diplomatic historians. Broadly speaking, they see themselves, and are seen by others, as continuing to study old topics (hard power, high politics, dead white men, and so on) using old methods of archival research. On the other hand, there are nontraditional historians of race, gender, and sexuality, who see themselves, and are seen by others, as studying new topics (knowledge production, the personal as political, historically marginalized groups, and so on) using new methods of critical theory. The methodological commitments of the two types are understood to imply corresponding ideological commitments, and vice versa: “Traditional” history is coded as conservative or politically right-of-center (for its defenders: hard, manly, substantial, tangible), while “woke” history is coded as progressive or politically left-of-center (for its critics: soft, effete, flimsy, intangible). Of course this dichotomy is an oversimplification, but it is one that I think many historians would recognize, however grudgingly.

But she argues that any association of one of these tendencies with quality and rigor and the other with amateurishness is misleading. In fact, she says, a lapse in scholarly standards afflicts both sides: “Call it the horseshoe of scholarly incompetence.”

Like Maza, who points out that some of the best history has been overtly stimulated by political conviction — she names E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class, motivated both by general left-wing investments and by a revisionist attitude toward conventional Marxist accounts — Epstein holds no brief for the idea that political commitment necessarily makes bad history. “If historians’ left-wing ideological commitments lead to better scholarship than that produced by historians with right-wing views — as was the case with so much women’s, African American, and working-class history in the 1950s and 1960s — then great. If historians’ right-wing commitments lead to better scholarship than that produced by historians with left-wing commitments, then great.”

But ideological polarization along lines of topic and method, Epstein suggests, means that whichever side one is on, evidentiary and argumentative standards deteriorate as like-minded peers rubber-stamp their allies’ work. And that, she says, is not just a problem of the academic left. “Where an identitarian historian seeks contemporary relevance by reducing the complexity of the past into a tale of white supremacy, a diplomatic historian seeks the same relevance by reading the past backwards through today’s foreign-policy categories — and both twist the historical evidence to conform to their present-day agenda … If you think that diplomatic and military historians do not plagiarize, fake their footnotes, and wave their buddies’ lousy work through peer review, then I have an exciting time-share opportunity on a river in Egypt that I’d like to discuss with you.”

Read Sarah Maza’s “Presentism and the Politics of History” and Katherine C. Epstein’s “Historians Killing History.”

Recommended

• “Throughout its long history, the abbey had always guarded both its resources and its separation, even as Reichenau abbots were sent off as agents of empire.” In The New York Review of Books, Beatrice Radden Keefe writes about book history, art history, and Benedictine monasticism by way of “the happy island of psalters and cucumbers.”
• “In that sleek space, we were brushed with a cool vertigo, having been sold one thing and met with another.” In The Point, Becky Zhang visits New York’s first Din Tai Fung.

• “This is the kind of violence that you can’t make up.” In the London Review of Books, Ange Mlinko reviews Greek Lessons by Han Kang, who has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. (From 2023)

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

Yours,

Len Gutkin