Juan Cole makes case for current affairs history at AHA

CHICAGO -- Analysis of current events is too important for historians to ignore, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on the Middle East argued last week at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, spoke on a panel titled “Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting It Right,” one of several sessions at this year’s conference devoted to the interplay of history and journalism. Other sessions included discussions on the American biography and the Cold War, publishing and the American century, and American intervention.

Cole, who writes a widely read blog on the Middle East, history and religion called Informed Comment and who once made news for being rejected for a post in Middle Eastern history at Yale University following conservative criticism of his opinions, is no critic of journalism or Luddite who fails to appreciate the information immediacy that characterized the Arab Spring. But the "first draft" of history in which journalists engaged in reporting on the uprisings was skewed, he and other panelists said.

One example is the proliferation of reports stressing the importance of Twitter and Facebook during the revolutions. Very few people in Tunisia are wired, and the percentage of the population using Twitter in Egypt might barely reach 1 percent, Cole said. “Gossip will do the trick if people are determined,” Cole said. Though he did not deny that technology was important, he said there was too much emphasis on it. Wired journalists from the Western world might have been looking for wired people in the Middle East to write about, Cole said....