The Suicide of the American Historical Association
American Institute for Economic Research | Phillip W. Magness
Magness covers the American Historical Association’s recent tangle with progressivism’s “presentism.” First, AHA president James Sweet published a piece critical of presentism in historical studies. “According to Sweet, an unsettling number of academic historians have allowed their political views in the present to shape and distort their interpretations of the past.” Sweet was swiftly attacked online with calls for his resignation. “The frenzy further exposed the very same problems in the profession that Sweet’s essay cautioned against.” Instead of standing up for his views, however, Sweet apologized, complete with self-flagellation for his ignorance, with a letter that “reads like a ‘struggle session’ for academic wrongthink.”
As Magness argues, historical accuracy does not matter to the activists— “The only concerns are whether its narrative can be weaponized for a political cause or used to deflect scrutiny of the same. As is often the case in the pseudo-moralizing political crusades of academia, the loudest demands against Sweet also came from the least-productive academics.”
Magness goes on to discuss the AHA decision to lock its Twitter account only when the non-progressives began to express their own outrage over the situation. As he writes, “The final irony is that the AHA only shuttered its twitter feed from the public when it could no longer restrict the conversation to the activist mob calling for Sweet’s cancellation. It’s the same brand of intellectual closure that Sweet’s offending column warned against in its final passage: ‘When we foreshorten or shape history to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions, we not only undermine the discipline but threaten its very integrity.’’
Read Sweet’s Original essay and apology: American Historical Association President Apologizes for his article, “Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present” (AHA, August 19, 2022)
Related:
Never Apologize for Trying to Tell the Truth— Those who repress inconvenient facts or produce fictitious evidence to nourish a politically convenient story are simply not historians. (Quillette, 9/13/22)
The Unmaking of American History by the Woke Mob (WSJ, 8/26/22)
