From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   Professor James H. Sweet is a temperate man. He seeks to avoid extremes.   
   But he also seeks to be bold in his temperance. You can do that by   
   emphatically stating an opinion that seems above reproach. But Professor   
   Sweet miscalculated. His emphatic bromide blew up, and he was left   
   offering emphatic apologies.   
      
   For those who have not followed this little academic circus, Professor   
   Sweet, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is   
   also the president of the American Historical Association (AHA). That’s   
   an important post. The AHA has more than 11,500 members. It publishes   
   the American Historical Review, ‘the journal of record for the   
   historical profession in the United States’. And AHA holds a huge   
   conference each January. The coming conference is in Philadelphia. Among   
   other things, these conferences are job fairs, where recently minted PhD   
   historians go to get noticed for the relatively few academic positions   
   that are available.   
      
   To be president of the AHA is to preside over an organisation where   
   getting noticed matters a lot, and one of the best ways to get noticed   
   these days is to proclaim a grievance. It might not be too much of an   
   exaggeration to say that AHA is an arena in which contestants battle it   
   out for the most noticeable grievance. History was once among the most   
   popular majors in college, but it has suffered a catastrophic decline.   
   According to the AHA itself, ‘As of 2019, history accounted for slightly   
   less than 1.2 per cent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded, the lowest   
   share in records that extend back to 1949’. Surely every professional   
   historian worries about this picture, and who would worry more than the   
   president of the AHA.   
      
   But this is where Professor Sweet stumbled. He suggested a reason for   
   the decline that ran athwart the sensitivities of some of his members.   
   He did this by publishing a column in one of AHA’s journals,   
   Perspectives on History, in which he temperately and oh-so-cautiously   
   broached the idea that maybe historians today are trying a little too   
   hard to shoehorn the past into the dominant cultural categories of the   
   present. He titled his column, Is History History? Identity Politics and   
   Teleologies of the Present. To mention ‘identity politics’ without a   
   deep bow of respect was itself a risky move, but it got worse. Sweet   
   noticed that the number of PhDs awarded to those who studied the period   
   before 1800 had declined relative to those who study more recent   
   periods. And this shift coincided with ‘plummeting undergraduate   
   enrolments in history courses and increased professional interest in the   
   history of contemporary socioeconomic topics’.   
      
   Could Sweet have been more explicit about the danger of what he calls   
   ‘presentism’? Well, yes, he could have been. His next paragraph included   
   a couple of sentences that landed like drone strikes on the radical   
   left’s oil refinery:   
      
   “If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social   
   justice issues – race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism – are   
   we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values   
   and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time,   
   neutralising the expertise that separates historians from those in other   
   disciplines."   
      
   Perhaps Sweet got carried away. Did he really mean that historians   
   obsessively twisting every fact into a narrative about systemic   
   injustice is somehow discrediting the profession? One might have read it   
   that way.   
      
   In fact, Sweet goes on to describe some of the deep inaccuracies in   
   Nikole Hannah Jones’s The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, admittedly   
   the work of a journalist and not a professional historian, but a work   
   which was anointed by the profession: ‘professional historians’   
   engagement with the work that seemed to lend it historical legitimacy’.   
   Sweet gives reasons why Nikole Hannah-Jones’s account (and others like   
   it) are not to be trusted. He is ‘troubled by the historical erasures   
   and narrow politics that these narratives convey’.   
      
   But Sweet is also at pains in his short essay to distance himself from   
   any views that might be considered ‘conservative’. Indeed, he   
   mischaracterises much of the conservative reaction to The 1619 Project,   
   saying that ‘conservative lawmakers decided that if this was the history   
   of slavery being taught in schools, the topic shouldn’t be taught at   
   all’. As someone who has been talking with those lawmakers for almost   
   three years, I have yet to meet one that expressed this view. The   
   consensus is that the teaching of American history should definitely   
   continue to include the history of slavery, but that it should be told   
   factually and accurately, not as a collection of suppositions and fables.   
      
   That points to a problem that differs from the ‘presentism’ that Sweet   
   decries, though there is a connection. It is easier to justify making   
   stuff up if you think you have a social justice mandate to tell a   
   compelling ‘narrative’.   
      
   Sweet’s canard about conservatives attempting to ‘erase’ slavery from   
   history classes is followed by a few paragraphs slamming Justice   
   Clarence Thomas for a different kind of presentism in his originalist   
   jurisprudence in overturning New York’s conceal-carry gun law and   
   slamming Justice Samuel Alito for his majority opinion in Dobbs v   
   Jackson. These paragraphs may reflect Sweet’s real opinions but they   
   seem tacked onto his article to assure his readers he is on their side.   
   He too hates conservatives, and he doesn’t want his strictures against   
   presentism to be mistaken as some sort of endorsement of conservative   
   concerns. Pray not.   
      
   But his doubling back did Sweet no good. No sooner was his essay   
   published than the engines of outrage began pouring teleologies of   
   indignation on the hapless Professor Sweet.   
      
   Being a man of character, Sweet did the honourable thing of publishing a   
   grovelling apology. I’ll skip the expressions of outrage, which are as   
   routine as nose rings on student nostrils, and go directly to Sweet’s   
   recantation. Highlights:   
      
   “I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and   
   for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on   
   how we do history in our current politically charged environment.   
   Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm   
   to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.   
   If my ham-fisted attempt at provocation has proven anything, it is that   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)