historiography

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  6/1/2023
  

  British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"

  Historian Nicolas Bell-Romero found that influential Cambridge backers were happy to learn of the links between the university and famous abolitionists, but not on the university's historical links to an imperial elite that benefitted from the slave trade, part of a broad battle about the politics of British history. 

• 
• 5/28/2023
  

  What We Can Learn From—and Through—Historical Fiction

  by Carol K. Kammen

  "I have written this to praise historical fiction when it respects the line between our times and the past, when it adheres to the known-truth and does not pervert it for excitement—or for book sales."

• 
• 4/30/2023
  

  Can We Learn from Previous Generations of Historians Negotiating Between Past and Present?

  by Bruce W. Dearstyne

  A leading historian shook up the field with his insistence that historians engage with public concerns and research topics that shed light on the most pressing issues of contemporary society. The year was 1911. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  4/3/2023
  

  Historians Should Follow C. Vann Woodward: Write for a Broad Public and Show Why the Discipline Matters

  by James C. Cobb

  One historian suggests that the unheeded advice of C. Vann Woodward is the reason for the discipline's decline and risk of extinction. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  3/8/2023
  

  George Packer: Historians Need to Stop with the Fatalism

  The writer argues that historians are feeding a view of static, unchanging oppression that borders on the metaphysical and defeats the discipline's purpose of evaluating change over time and the political imperative to imagine alternatives to the present. 

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  2/2/2023
  

  Native Wikipedians Fight Back against Erasure of Indigenous History

  by Kyle Keeler

  While the internet is often seen as a hotbed of revisionism and "political correctness," Wikipedia editors who seek the inclusion of indigenous perspectives on American history often are stymied by resistant editors and the platform's rules, which discount the reliability of new, critical scholarship. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/5/2023
  

  Lizabeth Cohen Reviews "Myth America"

  Although it was inspired by the battles over history encouraged by the Trump administration and the MAGA movement, a new book of essays on historical mythmaking actually shows that spinning the past to serve a present agenda is nothing new. For historians, the task isn't just fact-finding, but offering compelling interpretations. 

• 
• SOURCE: Vanity Fair
  1/10/2023
  

  Kruse and Zelizer: History is a Battleground

  Is it reasonable for historians to "stick to the facts" and hope the truth will win out when political partisans are cherry-picking the past for justification of radical agendas in the present?

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/8/2023
  

  The History Wars Were Front and Center at the AHA Meeting

  Questions raised by a controversial op-ed by AHA President James Sweet inevitably hung over the annual meeting as scholars met amid political attacks from without and debates within the profession. 

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  1/9/2023
  

  New Anthology Mistakes the Roots of the Problem as "Misinformation" Rather than Power

  by Paul M. Renfro and Matthew E. Stanley

  The new "Myth America" offers insight into some recurrent myths about history from some excellent scholars, but it hews too closely to the idea that historical lies are a Trumpian phenomenon, rather than a broader aspect of the pursuit and consolidation of power for MAGA and New Democrats alike. 

• 
• SOURCE: American Conservative
  12/31/2022
  

  The End of (Academic) History

  by Sumantra Maitra

  A former academic historian argues that the discipline has killed itself in the marketplace of ideas by broadening its subjects of study and should return to being an emotionally detached pursuit of nonprofessional elites unconcerned with the relationship of past and present.

• 
• SOURCE: WNYC
  1/3/2022
  

  Myths About the Past Can Shape the Future

  Editors Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer discuss the team effort by historians to attack persistent and consequential myths about the American past. 

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  10/2/2022
  

  The Decline of Intellectual History is a Problem

  by Steven Mintz

  Ideas matter, and the eclipse of the field of intellectual history puts an understanding of important ones in jeopardy. Even as intellectual history broadens and diversifies, it is still associated with the thoughts of elites. 

• 
• SOURCE: Quillette
  9/13/2022
  

  James Sweet Shouldn't Have Apologized for the Truth

  by Jeffrey Herf

  "Those who repress inconvenient facts or produce fictitious evidence to nourish a politically convenient story are simply not historians—they are activists or propagandists."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/20/2022
  

  A Finnish Historian's Ambitious Rethinking of Native American History Draws Praise and Criticism

  Pekka Hamalainen describes a four-centuries long continental war between settlers and indigenous Americans during which the indigenous frequently won. Critics, including Native historians, contend he doesn't reckon with the ultimate consolidation of conquest. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  9/9/2022
  

  Black Historians Know There Has Never Been Objectivity in Writing the Past

  by Keisha N. Blain

  "Black historians have long recognized the role of the present in shaping our narratives of the past. We have never had the luxury of writing about the past as though it were divorced from present concerns."

• 
• SOURCE: TIME
  9/15/2022
  

  The Promise and Peril of the "Third Reconstruction"

  by Peniel E. Joseph

  At a time when the nation is balanced precariously between advocates for multiracial democracy and white nationalists, it is important to understand the history and the incompleteness of the expansion of freedom and democracy during Reconstruction. 

• 
• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  9/13/2022
  

  Historicizing the Legitimacy of LGBTQ History

  by Marc Stein

  The AHA's newsletters reveal a protracted and frequently bitter debate about the boundaries of the discipline as scholars in the early 1970s worked to establish gay and lesbian people and communities as subjects of study. 

• 
• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  9/7/2022
  

  History as Love and The Presentist Trap: Responses to James Sweet

  by Malcolm Foley and Priya Satia

  Two historians respond to the AHA president's essay by reflecting on the politics of historical research and of speaking publicly about the past. 

• 
• SOURCE: Humanities
  9/5/2022
  

  All History is Revisionist

  by James M. Banner Jr.

  "The collective noun for a group of historians is an “argumentation,” and for good reason. At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past, attacking each other."