Departments

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Presentism

  • 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: 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: Chronicle of Higher Education
    8/24/2022

    History is Always About Politics

    by Joan W. Scott

    The tradition of the discipline has cast politics as an object of study, but deliberately ignored the way that writing history is tangled up with who wields power and how.

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    8/23/2022

    Two Cheers for Presentism

    by David A. Bell

    Now that the dust has settled over the AHA President's controversial essay, it's time to consider more carefully how the present informs the work of historians, and how to do "presentism" right.