In our polarized political environment, it can be difficult to draw a clear line between the activists and the more serious revisionist scholars — and, of course, some political bias might be detected in even the best scholarly works. But in assessing the state of historiography, open bias is not actually the deepest problem. There is good reason to assume good faith among the painstaking researchers — including many of my colleagues in the academy — who are devoted to their craft. Plenty of revisionist historians strive to reflect their findings with accuracy and precision; they almost certainly have no interest in deliberately misleading readers or distorting the public understanding of historical events. Many do, however, reflect a widespread and hugely influential intellectual trend, which I propose calling "suspicious historiography."
Suspicious historiography approaches historical events as one would a crime scene. Accordingly, historians are tasked with dividing participants into binary categories of aggressors and victims. More fundamentally, they are called to embrace a suspicious disposition toward their subject matter to uncover hidden, nefarious motives — as criminal investigations so often require. This intellectual tendency toward "unmasking" informs countless historiographical products, from popular YouTube videos to academic works laden with footnotes.
Suspicious historiography is not a particularly useful lens through which to research the past. Analytically, it is reductive and harmful to our efforts to understand historical events and personalities. More practically, it is quite rare that historical realities can be reduced to simple binaries of villains and heroes, or historical personalities to either conniving malefactors or hapless victims. Yet many times, this is the picture suspicious historiography draws.
This trend and its intellectual foundations surely deserve our attention. Turning to Renan once again, a nation's present is shaped not only by the facts of history, but by the way its people approach their shared past. Renan assumed that nations tend to understand themselves as sharing "a rich legacy of memories" or "common glories." What sort of future awaits a nation that sees its inheritance as shameful, marked by common ignobility? What sort of future is there for a community that, almost by default, treats its ancestors with disdain and a sense of superiority?
These are the attitudes we have come to embrace when we look to our past, particularly when crafting historical narratives of importance to national and civilizational self-perception. Describing this approach and identifying its intellectual sources will help us understand a fundamental aspect of our attitude toward the past and its effect on our present.