Anthony Grafton: History Under Attack
[Anthony Grafton (Princeton Univ.) is president of the AHA.]
It’s not easy to think straight—not easy to think at all—when you are under attack. And we historians—like many other humanists—have been receiving more flak than flowers over the last few decades. From Allan Bloom to Mark Taylor, from Charles Sykes and Martin Anderson to Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, critics inside and outside the academy have leveled a rich and seemingly plausible indictment at us....
Most serious, from the standpoint of the American Historical Association, this barrage is aimed at us and our immediate neighbors in the humanities and the social sciences. Most critics don’t seriously maintain that the life sciences or engineering have become too technical. Like everyone else, they hope to benefit from the new medicines and technologies that are incubated in specialized labs and departments. Many of them clearly take an interest in the findings of economists and psychologists, demographers and political scientists—all those highly specialized articles without which there would be no readable books and articles by David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell....
For history has its own special place in these indictments. Critics rebuke historians for drawing politicized conclusions from their research—and even, in some notorious cases, for deliberately distorting or inventing the evidence to support their own left-wing views. They criticize authors of textbooks and public historians for subverting patriotism, claiming that they emphasize violence, inequality, and oppression in European and American life at the expense of more positive qualities, and by arguing that America has waged war not only to defend itself, but also to gain territory possessed by others—and that it has waged war with special ferocity against opponents who were not white. A set of canonical incidents, endlessly and inaccurately retold—the controversies over the National History Standards, the Enola Gay, and Arming America—are wielded as weapons. Meanwhile political actors of many stripes retell history to support their programs—and denounce the professionals for doing their best to obscure or conceal what they identify, sometimes wildly, as the truth....
Over the next year, I’ll be doing my best, as my predecessors have, to find ways of making these points publicly and effectively. I look forward to the advice, criticism, and commentary of AHA members—and, even more, to seeing other historians explore these problems and propose solutions everywhere from Perspectives on History to the blogosphere. We need to mobilize the formal collective intellect of our discipline, across institutions and generations, to defend and explain our enterprises. The process will be costly. It will involve arguments among ourselves, and time taken from research and teaching, and frustration of many kinds. But we need to try.
Read entire article at Perspectives (AHA)
It’s not easy to think straight—not easy to think at all—when you are under attack. And we historians—like many other humanists—have been receiving more flak than flowers over the last few decades. From Allan Bloom to Mark Taylor, from Charles Sykes and Martin Anderson to Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, critics inside and outside the academy have leveled a rich and seemingly plausible indictment at us....
Most serious, from the standpoint of the American Historical Association, this barrage is aimed at us and our immediate neighbors in the humanities and the social sciences. Most critics don’t seriously maintain that the life sciences or engineering have become too technical. Like everyone else, they hope to benefit from the new medicines and technologies that are incubated in specialized labs and departments. Many of them clearly take an interest in the findings of economists and psychologists, demographers and political scientists—all those highly specialized articles without which there would be no readable books and articles by David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell....
For history has its own special place in these indictments. Critics rebuke historians for drawing politicized conclusions from their research—and even, in some notorious cases, for deliberately distorting or inventing the evidence to support their own left-wing views. They criticize authors of textbooks and public historians for subverting patriotism, claiming that they emphasize violence, inequality, and oppression in European and American life at the expense of more positive qualities, and by arguing that America has waged war not only to defend itself, but also to gain territory possessed by others—and that it has waged war with special ferocity against opponents who were not white. A set of canonical incidents, endlessly and inaccurately retold—the controversies over the National History Standards, the Enola Gay, and Arming America—are wielded as weapons. Meanwhile political actors of many stripes retell history to support their programs—and denounce the professionals for doing their best to obscure or conceal what they identify, sometimes wildly, as the truth....
Over the next year, I’ll be doing my best, as my predecessors have, to find ways of making these points publicly and effectively. I look forward to the advice, criticism, and commentary of AHA members—and, even more, to seeing other historians explore these problems and propose solutions everywhere from Perspectives on History to the blogosphere. We need to mobilize the formal collective intellect of our discipline, across institutions and generations, to defend and explain our enterprises. The process will be costly. It will involve arguments among ourselves, and time taken from research and teaching, and frustration of many kinds. But we need to try.