History Manifesto continuing to stir debate

History is in a state of crisis, losing readers and public influence, historians David Armitage of Harvard and Jo Guldi of Brown argue in their controversial book The History Manifesto. The main reason, the authors argue, is “short-termism,” historians’ emphasis on focused studies of short time periods. They believe that what is needed instead is a “return to the longue durée,” to studies that offer larger narratives to help the public and policy makers make sense of society’s biggest questions.

Both claims have been questioned in the recent AHR Exchange. At a seminar in Washington, DC, last week, co-sponsored by the AHA’s National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson Center, Armitage and Guldi made clear that their aspiration was less to condemn than to encourage historians to do more. They described themselves as boosters for the profession, but critical ones, worried about how to make the discipline relevant at a time when undergraduate students and the broader public are questioning the value of the liberal arts. They believe that the public is, as Professor Armitage put it, “genuinely hungry” for the kind of knowledge historians offer.

Armitage and Guldi are, of course, not the only people worried about the waning public influence—and relevance—of historians. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff famously recently wrote that the public desperately needs professors to share their knowledge, but “that PhD programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” Professor Guldi’s colleague Gordon Wood, reflecting on his own field of early American history, recently concluded that historians “have become obsessed with inequality and white privilege” to the point that “the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation’s past has had to turn to history books written by nonacademics who have no PhDs and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars.”

All of these concerns were in the background of the conversation at the Wilson Center, and all three respondents focused less on Armitage and Guldi’s data than the broader question of how and why historians might be more involved with public conversations.

The most critical assessment came from George Washington University’s Eric Arnesen, who claimed that Armitage and Guldi underestimated historians’ effort to engage the public. He spoke of the many historians who work in government. He praised historians’ efforts to produce websites. He noted that historians are found regularly in the media. As co-chair of the Washington History Seminar, he has been involved in bringing historians and policy makers together. It is not for want of trying that historians have not had more influence, Arnesen believes, but instead “broader changes in our culture”—in publishing, reading habits, etc. We must acknowledge what historians “are up against.” ...