American historians and others involved in American history are among those saying “now more than ever,” and not surprisingly what historians think we need, now more than ever, is history. Analyzing my own delusion doesn’t save me from participating in it, as I think this post will make overwhelmingly clear. Still, I feel I have a sliver of space in which to question what many people I respect have been doing, lately, regarding American history, and to question my own responses to those efforts.
The historians and the fans of history do have a point. Almost everybody who thinks about it agrees that understanding current politics — understanding human life — requires history. In a national crisis involving certain bizarre qualities heretofore rarely seen in public life, the qualities on which the history profession rests — critical thinking, regard for fact, evaluation of sources, cogent argument — naturally seem the very things that might help us resist and get through and right the ship. Those values are liberal, in the old-fashioned sense that sometimes embraces certain conservatisms. Now more than ever, it might seem obvious, history is one of the key sources on which the survival of liberal values must depend.
But I don’t think we need more of the same approach to history. Quite the contrary: I think the recent election shows that we should stop doing everything we’ve been doing, regarding our history, and re-assess the value, purpose, nature, and common modes of historical work itself. That’s what I thought before. I just think it more than ever, now. I think the current crisis proves that what I thought before is right: that certain ways in which the study of history has been conducted in the US for the past sixty years or so are contributing to a major problem.
So now more than ever, I feel strongly that both the US history profession itself and the well-educated, liberal consumer and discusser of that history must be challenged and, as the scholars used to say, interrogated. The larger interrogation, in this crisis for liberalism, would be of the liberal imagination itself, with particular regard for how liberal ways of thought and culture, in which all thinking people must participate to some degree, relate to the past.