On “Weaponizing History”
Thoughts on a wide range of topics by the host of The History of the Americans Podcast. There may occasionally be evidence or facts, but mostly just spitballing! Subscribe if you’ve always wanted to pay for the ad-free podcast!
In early 2024 I went to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, the “AHA” to the cognoscenti, that year held in San Francisco. In its aftermath I was a bit grumpy, and dropped the one and so far only purely “editorial” sidebar episode of my podcast, The History of the Americans. This piece is adapted from the script for that episode, with some elaboration and a fair amount of new thinking.
The formal part of the AHA annual meeting consists mostly of panel discussions, which are known as sessions. These address some unifying topic, and typically involve three or four historians who have recently published arguably related papers, and a “chair” of the session that helps organize the discussion. During any given time slot – say, 8:30-10 on Saturday morning – there are 20-25 simultaneous sessions, so even if one fills his entire calendar, going to some session for every time slot, you’d only get to see 4-5% of the sessions on offer. Therefore, the rank generalizations that follow are actually based on a very small sample, and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt. Think of them as the start of a discussion, rather than the end of it. Some would say I’m just spitballing.
There are also “plenary sessions,” which are intended to accommodate all the attendees, a president’s address, which in the past has been the occasion for some really notable talks by leading American historians, some “workshops,” such as how historians might find non-academic jobs, the academic job market sucking so much, and a trade show floor. This last was actually my favorite part, since it consisted of displays set up by university presses featuring the history books that they have published recently. I spent hours prowling the trade show floor taking pictures of books to buy via the miracle of Amazon, which, it must be said, is absolutely not the socially acceptable way to buy books among this crowd.
As it happens, there were very few sessions that covered my main area of interest for this podcast, early American history. That led me to a topic that does interest me – how the teaching of history has evolved in our schools and universities since, shall we say, my day. I went to sessions with such titles as “Historical Inquiry in History Classrooms,” “Teaching History in Polarized Times,” “Historians and the Culture Wars in Higher Ed,” and “What is the Civic Value of a History Education?” There were any number of competing sessions I did not see along these general lines. My impressions, such as they are, come from the sessions I attended. I have reduced them to a couple of hot takes which may or may not be fair.
The first is that academic historians feel under siege, especially if they live and work in one of the states, such as Florida or Texas,1 that has responded to the conservative campaign to bend the teaching of history away from the seemingly dominant critical narratives of the last generation to something more closely approximating a “national heritage” approach. This is a complicated topic, and I have mixed and still incomplete opinions about it, so I am not going to get into it substantively here. In the spirit of transparency, my broad opinions are two. First, I am opposed to government interference with the curriculum in colleges and universities, even those run by the state and even when I sympathize with the problem that red state legislators – and, now, the Trump administration – are trying to address. I just believe that this is not a problem that can be effectively addressed by laws or regulation without trampling on academic freedom, which I believe is a critically important value, especially in public universities. This should come as no surprise to people who have listened to my podcast or followed me on the socials – they know that I serve on the board of FIRE,2which has opposed and even sued to overturn content-based regulation of university curricula, such as Florida’s “stop woke” act and, this year, the federal attacks on Harvard and other universities.
