The Historical Profession Stumbles on the Edge of Ruin – The American Spectator

In recent years, we have heard much about the need to accept the findings of “the science,” despite the fact that such a thing does not exist. Scientists and informed observers know that science is seldom settled but instead consists of an ongoing process of rigorous debate, further research, testing hypotheses, and challenging conclusions. Nonetheless, certain experts attempt to close down debate on issues — the efficacy of face masks and shutdowns in the recent pandemic, the ability of solar and wind energy to supplant fossil fuels in the near future, the dangers of gas stoves — by claiming the authority of a reputed scientific consensus. Usually for political reasons, they tell us that “the science” has settled the matter and further questions are raised only by the ignorant and the depraved.

The same trend is becoming evident in humanistic study where, particularly in universities, left-wing ideologues are foreclosing debate on a host of issues by insisting that expertise, and hence a kind of moral authority, confirms their conclusions. Challenges to radical racialism or genderism, for instance, are disdainfully dismissed or censored by woke zealots who first reify their own “professional” standards of judgment and then label skepticism as the effusions of white supremacists, misogynists, authoritarians, conspiracy theorists, anti-intellectual troglodytes, and liars. Historical study has emerged as ground zero in this process. Over the last several decades on campus, leftist activists have largely succeeded in establishing their version of the American past as “the history,” and then driving other interpretations into the wilderness.

Demonstrations of “the history” and its powerful groupthink appear everywhere. It inspired the 1619 Project with its ludicrous claim that British moves to emancipate black slaves triggered the American Revolution. It lay behind the College Board’s recent proposal for a national Advance Placement course in African American studies that, in its concluding section, proselytizes for socialist transformation and “intersectionality” while denouncing “color-blind racism,” a template the organization agreed to modify with more diverse points of view only after Florida state officials refused to allow it in their schools. It prompted a clampdown in August 2022 when James H. Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, the oldest and largest professional organization in the field, dared publish an essay in the organization’s monthly magazine suggesting that some current history writing had fallen prey to “presentism” — judging the past by the standards of the present — and produced work flawed by “historical erasures and narrow politics.” A horde of outraged radical historians immediately bombarded the organization with accusations that Sweet was trying to delegitimize studies of race and gender and demanded his resignation. They excoriated his “white gaze,” described his essay as “significant and substantial violence,” and contended his words supported “white supremacism and misogyny.” Sadly, but typically, Sweet, like transgressors in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, was forced into a humiliating public confession of error: “I apologize to for the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA. I hope to redeem myself in future conversations with you all. I’m listening and learning.”

“The history” with its radical orthodoxy now dominates the academic study of American history and the results have been disastrous. A chilling atmosphere has descended to discourage the historian’s traditional goal — the free pursuit of knowledge wherever it leads — in favor of a carefully circumscribed radical activism. Much historical education of college students has devolved into political indoctrination. An eye-rolling public grown weary of far-left renderings of the American experience has largely abandoned academic history as a useful guide for illuminating contemporary issues. And the historical profession itself, by destroying the nuts-and-bolts structure that sustains it, has stumbled to the edge of ruin.

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A prime example of “the history,” both its contents and its discontents, is Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past (Basic Books, 2022), a recently published volume of 20 essays edited by Princeton historians Kevin M. Cruse and Julian E. Zelizer. The volume’s introduction establishes its crusading mission. Because a wave of historical “disinformation” has washed over modern America, the editors claim, they have assembled a group of university scholars to recapture our past from those who “lack any training in the [historical] field or familiarity with its norms.” These contributors, self-described heroic successors to Progressive historians of the early 1900s and New Left historians of the 1960s, constitute a new generation of scholars entering the public lists “to push back against misinformation in the public sphere.” The stakes are high, the editors claim. There is a “war on truth” in modern America that is rooted in distortions and outright lies about the nation’s past, and by marshaling “the best scholarly traditions of the profession” these essays will help bring victory for the virtuous.

Myth America takes aim at politicians and popularizers who construct historical interpretations “not from scholarly motives but rather from patriotic demands or political considerations.” These professional historians bemoan “how common it has been for history to become politicized” and decry “partisan authors producing a partisan version of the past to please partisan audiences.” So far so good. Fair-minded readers anticipate that such claims of disinterested, nonpartisan truth-telling will produce a balanced rendering of the American past. Imagine their surprise, then, when they read the editors’ explanation of the causes of the modern crisis of history.

Kruse and Zelizer claim, in what sounds like a talking-points memo from the Democrat “Squad,” that the Republican Party in general and “the political campaigns and presidency of Donald Trump” in particular are solely to blame for current warped views of American history. They accuse conservatives of polluting the nation’s historical consciousness by creating a huge platform for disseminating “right-wing myths.” First, right-wingers have created a “conservative media ecosystem” composed of Fox News and Newsmax, Breitbart, and talk radio shows to disseminate historical lies. Second, they have encouraged “the devolution of the Republican Party’s commitment to truth” with the likes of George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Trump “positioning themselves against intellectuals, universities, the media, and other sources of valid information.” There you have it — an unbiased, nonpartisan explanation of America’s history problem informed by the expertise of disinterested professional historians.

The essays that follow elaborate on this theme with a parade of radical leftist readings of the American past. Claiming to overturn a boatload of “myths and lies,” the essayists march down History Avenue wielding the past as a cudgel to bash the conservative side in contemporary political disputes. They take up a series of issues — these include immigration, Native Americans, isolationism, imperialism, American socialism, the market, Confederate monuments, the Great Society, police violence, feminism — and reach predictable conclusions. The history of the United States, in this telling, unfolds a long tale of xenophobia, systemic racism, state-sanctioned violence against minorities, land-hungry imperialism, corporate profit-mongering, right-wing insurrection, God-fearing homophobia, and misogynistic anti-feminism. This deplorable history, and the refusal to face it, has produced the current “age of disinformation,” Donald Trump, and his follower’s “violent insurrection at the United States Capitol.”

Here is American history rendered as a political morality tale of virtuous leftists combating conservative blackguards. And anyone who challenges this narrative is a liar or peddler of fake news. But a closer look at four typical essays in Myth America reveals another characteristic pattern: radical activist position their view of hotly contested issues as “the history” while evading a host of inconvenient truths.

The first essay in the collection, “American Exceptionalism,” by David A. Bell, takes on one of the bedrock beliefs in the nation’s historical consciousness — that from its founding, the United States has been a unique polity providing, through its republican government and social ethos of opportunity, an inspiration for freedom to the rest of the world. Bell denies this claim. He argues that…