AHA president James H. Sweet’s September column for Perspectives on History, “Is History History? Identity Politics and the Teleologies of the Present,” generated controversy and discussion in venues ranging from social media to the op-ed pages of major newspapers and the academic press. Perspectives has invited two critics of the piece, Malcolm Foley and Priya Satia, to respond.
My email to the AHA about president James H. Sweet’s damaging column elicited an invitation to respond. I felt it a duty to accept, as someone in a secure position and author of a recent history of the discipline’s political engagement. But rather than honored, I felt 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 (in a manner that has now drawn the approval of white supremacists).
Sitting down to write, I found relief in T. J. Tallie’s (Univ. of San Diego) protest, upon being asked to respond to Sweet, against the constant demand that marginalized peoples offer up free labor to defend their own humanity. The appropriate course, he explains, was a retraction and apology. Here, in solidarity, I offer my free labor amplifying Tallie’s demand. [As I’ve finished drafting this, I’ve learned that Sweet has issued an apology (albeit reaffirming his complaint about “presentism”) and that I will receive Perspectives’ standard $100 honorarium for this essay.]
Retraction is appropriate because the essay’s flaws are pervasive and obvious. It chastises the discipline for producing scholarship that fails to respect the “values and mores of people in their own times” without offering a single piece of evidence. Who are these historians who have betrayed their disciplinary duty? In a column subject to normal vetting, editors would immediately have cried “straw man.”
Who are these historians who have betrayed their disciplinary duty?
The essay blames historians’ increasing focus on the very recent past on a culture of “presentism,” though we know (partly through the AHA) that the decimation of programs and jobs in premodern periods is shaped by structural factors. The devaluation of the humanities—partly because marginalized people are more visible among them as subjects and practitioners—and the corporate values that hold American higher education hostage render history programs and scholars precarious throughout the academy.
Lynn Hunt’s 2002 complaint to which Sweet tethers his own was about a different problem—the feeling of moral superiority over earlier times that had led to a fetishization of “modernity,” undermining our openness to possible futures. As Hunt recognized, such presentism (a slippery term) is integral to “modern Western historical consciousness.” Indeed, it was at the core of “the Whig interpretation of history,” rooted in the Enlightenment understanding of history as a source of moral lessons for the elites who presumed to make history in the present. “History is the school of statesmanship,” J. R. Seeley declared. Such unapologetic presentism—applied as much to the study of ancient as recent history—gave historians outsize influence in the making of Western empire.
Hunt’s warning came as whiggish narratives of Western empire were again legitimizing American and British invasions. It echoed social historians’ earlier admonishments about the “enormous condescension” of the progress narrative of history. E. P. Thompson and other New Left scholars had turned to history from below hoping that “lost causes” of the past might yield insights for their time. This was a different kind of presentism, rooted in an awareness of how earlier historians had served elite political agendas and of how the (contingently produced) past lives on in the present, so that the way we study and memorialize it makes different kinds of futures possible.
Sweet’s insistence that “history is not a heuristic tool for the articulation of an ideal imagined future” negates this understanding of history’s purpose; in exhorting us not to project “today’s” antiracism on the past, he adopts the moral superiority toward the past that Hunt cautions against. New Left scholarship challenging the liberal status quo was disparaged as presentist by old-guard historians in the grip of (presentist) Cold War anxieties, as Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has explained. Sweet renews a pattern of worry recurring in AHA publications since the 1930s—even as historians are also accused of abdicating their responsibility to the public.
Sweet attacks scholarly work on “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism” as driven by “contemporary social justice issues.” The mind boggles at having to remind a fellow historian that gender and sexuality existed in the ancient world; race was a concept in the early modern world; when John Stuart Mill said different government styles suited different races, and Indian rebels in 1857 spelled out their fury at the everyday humiliation of British racism, race was their contemporary social justice issue.
When we listen only to the voices of the powerful in the past, it appears more of a foreign country than it was. That foreignness was partly a response to resistance by the less powerful, whose values and mores were at times more akin to ours in the very eras whose radical alterity we are asked to respect. The resonance of their values is not the result of scholars’ presentism but evidence of the common humanity that is the necessary premise of historical study. If there is change over time, there is also continuity and loss. People of the past were like us and not like us. As Dipesh Chakrabarty explains, humans from any period “are always in some sense our contemporaries,” else they would seem unintelligible to us. Writing history “must implicitly assume . . . a disjuncture of the present with itself.” Studying race or gender is not an effort to make the past look like the present in a way that forecloses future change, but an effort to recover values that have been silenced or realities that have been whitewashed so that we might envision alternative futures.
When has American history not been political?
To Sweet, The 1619 Project, the only “presentist” book he names, fails as history because it views the past “through the prism of contemporary racial identity.” It is baffling that a journalistic effort stands in for historical scholarship here. Moreover, this kind of popular history is hardly new. What’s new is its pushback against entrenched narratives about the founding fathers and the place of slavery in American history. Why is a popular history that empowers historically marginalized people and centers slavery a more concerning betrayal of the discipline than the whitewashed nationalist myths (propped up by earlier historians) that marginalized them? Would we be better off without such contestation? When has American history, popular and scholarly, not been political?
Sweet is “troubled” about African Americans making pilgrimages to a slave-trading port that mostly sent slaves to the Caribbean and Brazil, not North America. Sure, we should not lose sight of the trade’s broader Atlantic dimensions, but when have popular historical pilgrimages been about accuracy rather than belonging and connection? Why is such inaccuracy an urgent problem when committed by Black Americans, but not by Americans who visit places like Ellis Island and Plymouth without any personal connection to them? Did I make a historical faux pas when, as a child of immigrants, I found meaning at Ellis Island, though my parents actually landed in Chicago? As Trouillot reminds us, professional historians’ work flows into a vast lake of historical production to which politicians, “popular historians,” museums, novels, TV, films, activists, and innumerable members of the public contribute. Much of that lake is what we would call bad history. As custodians of the past, we must challenge it but cannot presume to control it. But for Sweet, we are damned either way. Historians engaged in The 1619 Project on all sides (as Sweet himself is) but thus wrongly lent it “historical legitimacy.”
The other example of presentism Sweet invokes is conservative Supreme Court justices’ recent abuse of history in rulings on gun control and abortion. It is a mystery why their bad history reflects on the discipline—Sweet knows that professional historians (including me) filed briefs countering it. We even warned that history is a red herring in these cases. As David Whitford comments online below Sweet’s essay, “The criticism . . . of the SC’s misuse of history is . . . to somehow chastise the very historians who have amply demonstrated [that] misuse. . . . Sweet claims with no evidence that this is the result of ‘presentism’ among historians.” Sweet disturbingly equates the “presentism” of Black Americans inspired by The 1619 Project and that of conservatives seeking “power to . . . harm others,” Tallie explains.
As historians, we endeavor to understand the past on its own terms and we may find our work relevant to political questions. Some historians speak more about their work’s contemporary relevance than others, but all their work is shaped by their place and time, as future students of history will discern in their historiography papers—a foundational exercise premised on our awareness that the present inevitably shapes our questions, who gets to ask them, the sources available, and the interpretations we offer.
Sweet has contributed to public denigration of the discipline in a time of rampant, politically motivated questioning of humanistic expertise and resource crisis for the discipline. His complaint about a preoccupation with “contemporary social justice issues” offers fuel to attacks on the teaching of crucial subjects like race and slavery. To this injury he adds the insult of leaping into a serious subject without regard for the important work so many have done, in syllabi, essays, and books (including the AHA’s carefully considered advocacy and the AHR’s excellent History Unclassified series), on the relationship between scholarly history and the present. The president of the AHA should model the value of careful study over a hot take.
Priya Satia is professor of history and Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University. Her most recent book is Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap Press, 2020).
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