I'm pretty much on this guy's side here. When historians qua historians comment on contemporary politics, they're spending credibility accrued not only by themselves, but by other historians. It's not just bad for the field, it's almost certainly bad for everybody.
Historians are not just observers. They are themselves the target of political action. I'm married to a history professor and therefore an unusual number of my friends are history professors.
I have friends who are regularly harassed by TPUSA students who write hate speech in protected course materials. I have a friend who is a Russianist who cannot do any more archival research because of the tense relationship between the US and Russia. Legislation in states like Florida explicitly targets History education both at the college level and in ordinary public school. As one of the final acts of the administration, Trump released the 1776 Project - an effort to remodel history education in the US around conservative propaganda, which had no actual historians involved in its production.
This piece is weird. It seems to set up a wild strawman that no criticism of The 1619 Project is warranted or that Sweet has somehow been made a pariah - but this isn't the case. There has been ample criticism from the academics that would be described by DeSantis as woke propagandists. Sweet's faux-pas AHA was criticized as tone-deaf - and it was. The concern with the piece was not criticism of the 1619 Project. Oodles of academics have criticized that. That's pretty much what academics do when they get together, they shit talk a lot of work.
Like, I really don't think the article is being honest about the actual thing that happened to Sweet. It seems to speak about everything he did other than the specific portions of the article that people were concerned about and instead cast the field as critical of the broader elements of his article that were utterly uncontroversial.
Again, criticising racial activism is exactly what historians were upset about here. More specifically, Sweet was openly asking historians to pump the brakes on the performative wokeism that's taken ahold across almost all of academia. He didn't want to see history desecrated and sacrificed to the religion of wokeism; he wanted fellow historians to put their religion aside and be objective.
Instead of heeding his advice he was called a heretic and nearly excommunicated.
My OP in this thread:
>Sweet's faux-pas AHA was criticized as tone-deaf - and it was
No it absolutely wasn't. It was a refreshing call to reason in the deluge of delusional nonsense that followed the BLM "summer of love" moral panic. Tone policing is regularly weaponized by those looking to preserve a narrative. "We can't have facts/logic/reason get in the way! What you're saying is tone deaf to our righteous crusade!"
> History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon (attributed to Napoleon).
If you hold this belief, you have no defense against all the charlatans that wish to deceive you.
Facts do exist--even in the humanities. Part of the job of modern history is actually to unearth the evidence that both contradicts and exposes the lies that have been promulgated.
Yeah, I don't care much for the term either. It kinda assumes that history naturally moves in one direction, and that the everything moves naturally towards whatever the author considers progress.
But who's to say which political 'side' will win? Who's to say it'll become 'better' from our point of view, rather than slide into authoritarianism and dictatorships? Feels like there's no guarantee either way...
Interesting that you state authoritarianism and dictatorships themselves the bad outcome, rather than the consequences of such systems. In a hypothetical world where these dominated, they would do so by creating better outcomes (as unlikely as that seems to many people today who haven’t lived good lives in authoritarian countries).
If Nazi Germany would have won the war, perception of pursued appeasement in Europe would have been completely different. History is written by the victors. Or to rephrase this in modern day language, there is an unconscious victor bias.
