News Topic

Members Making News

“Donald Trump might be disastrous for most Americans,” writes Moshik Temkin, AHA member and professor of history at Harvard University, “but he has been a boon to historians.” In an op-ed published in the New York Times, Temkin warns against the increasing trend of presenting history in “30-second blasts on cable news,” often by way of analogies with similar historical figures. “This is not what historians should be doing. We teach our students to be wary of analogies, which are popular with politicians and policy makers (who choose them to serve their agendas) but often distort both the past and the present.”