historiography

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. 

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."

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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?

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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."

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. 

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."

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. 

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. 

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. 

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."