Does History Have a “Presentism” Problem?

On 17 August 2022, Dr. James H. Sweet, a tenured full professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is also the sitting president of the American Historical Association (AHA), which is the oldest and most prestigious association for professional historians in the United States and has the largest membership of any historical association in the entire world, published an essay in the official AHA newsmagazine Perspectives on History titled “Is History History?: Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Past.”

In the essay, Sweet declares that the massive problem of “presentism” is plaguing the historical discipline. He starts out with a halfway decent observation of the real problem of the relative decline in the number of historians studying pre-1800 historical topics over the course of the past few decades. Alas, he very quickly veers wildly off the rails into a reactionary tirade, in which he disparages scholars who study topics with contemporary political salience, such as “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, [and] capitalism,” and spends the remainder of the essay complaining about things that have little direct connection to the work of professional academic historians, drawing multiple wildly irresponsible false equivalences along the way.

Naturally, this essay set off a veritable firestorm of controversy on social media, with many historians and other academics criticizing it. According to this article published by Inside Higher Ed, it also attracted hoards of Neo-Nazis such as Richard B. Spencer and other right-wing reactionaries, who have praised and defended the essay on Twitter and lambasted Sweet’s critics. For his own part, Sweet himself has issued a formal apology for “the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA,” but has not retracted any of the views he expresses in the essay. This post presents my thoughts about Sweet’s essay, including both criticisms and notes about issues he might have been better served to address if he is really concerned about “presentism” in the historical profession.

Sweet’s point about the relative decline in the number of historians studying pre-1800 topics

Sweet sets up his essay as though it is going to be about a serious problem in the historical profession, but he actually spends nearly his entire essay complaining about a whole host of wildly unrelated topics that have little direct connection to the work professional academic historians are actually doing. In fact, he really only spends the first three paragraphs of the fourteen-paragraph essay talking about issues that are actually related to professional academic history.

He actually starts out ok in the second paragraph by talking about how premodern history is grossly undervalued and understudied. He observes that there has been a significant relative decline in recent decades in the number of historians specializing in pre-1800 historical topics. In my opinion, this is a real and serious issue.

At this point, I was expecting Sweet to talk about how the apocalyptically shrinking and competitive job market in the academic humanities creates unfortunate pressure for historians to focus their research on relatively recent history. For one thing, while the job market in the academic humanities is abysmal all around, there are still vastly more tenure-track positions in existence for specialists studying twentieth-century U.S. history than there are for specialists studying, say, the Hittite Empire in the second millennium BCE.

On top of this, there are also vastly more primary sources available pertaining relatively recent history than there are pertaining to ancient and medieval history and there is also less scholarship about relatively recent history that is already published.

As a result of this, much greater room exists for scholars who study relatively recent history to make stunning breakthrough publications, which they may think will increase their chances of being hired for a tenure-track position. (In reality, of course, the job market in the academic humanities is more-or-less a lottery and who gets hired often has very little to do with who has the most original and groundbreaking research.)

I thought that, after discussing these issues, Sweet might try to propose some kind of solution for how historical associations like the AHA can support historians who focus on pre-1800 historical topics, such as, for instance, encouraging members of the association to support the hiring of more pre-1800 historical specialists, creating funds and grants that are reserved for researchers working on pre-1800 historical topics, and things like that.

Sweet’s tirade against historians studying “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” etc.

Unfortunately, Sweet does absolutely none of these things. Instead, he goes absolutely off the rails with an unhinged rant deriding scholars who study issues that have contemporary significance like “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, [and] capitalism.” He writes:

“This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. 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?”

In this complaint, and especially his description of the subjects of “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, [and] capitalism” as “contemporary social justice issues,” Sweet seems to be making the fundamentally incorrect assumption that these issues were basically unimportant and irrelevant for most of human history, have only just suddenly become seen as important issues very recently, and will eventually become seen as unimportant and irrelevant again as the cultural zeitgeist changes.

This assumption is demonstrably wrong in all its aspects. Gender and sexuality have been continuously all-pervasive and massively important aspects of the human experience and human culture for probably as long as human culture has existed. Concepts of ethnic and arguably racial identity (depending on how one defines race) have been continuously all-pervasive and massively historically important since prehistoric times at least. Nationalism has arguably been a major historical factor for just as long (depending, once again, on how one defines the term). Capitalism has been a major historical factor for at least the past two centuries.

The only reason why Sweet seemingly does not recognize that most of the topics he lists have been universally pervasive for millennia is because he is a white, Anglo-American, straight, cisgender man, most likely from a middle-class or upper-class family, who, as a result of his own privilege and the protection that it affords him, has never had to seriously think about any of these issues outside of a contemporary political context. He evidently does not consciously perceive his own identity as having been fundamentally shaped by any of these issues in the way that, for instance, a person of color, non-Anglo-American, woman, or queer person typically would.

What I find absolutely baffling about Sweet’s complaint here is that, on his faculty webpage, he describes the primary focus of his own academic research as “Africans and their descendants in the broader world.” To this, he adds:

“To date, my research has concentrated on the social and cultural histories of Africans in the Atlantic world. My next project will focus on the international dimensions of slavery in the United States. I have also begun several research projects related to South Africa.”

How on earth can Sweet possibly study the history of African people and slavery in the Atlantic world and still apparently think that the subject of race is merely an ephemeral “presentist” concern of our own transient politico-cultural moment? Has he never bothered to look into the racial ideology that served as the underpinning and justification for the mass enslavement of Black people of African descent in the Atlantic world? Or does he just think that this racial ideology wasn’t really important in the grand scheme of things?

ABOVE: Lithograph illustration made by the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas sometime between c. 1827 and c. 1835 depicting an enslaved Black person being publicly flogged

Alas, Sweet doesn’t stop here. He further complains:

“This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines. The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past. This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.”

Sweet’s criticism here is extremely vague (most likely intentionally so) and he does not cite even a single specific example of a professional academic historian engaging in this supposed practice of “ignoring the values and mores of people in their own times,” so it is not totally clear what he is complaining about here.

I honestly don’t know of any professional academic historian who studies issues like race, gender, sexuality, et cetera who genuinely completely “ignores” what people in the time period and locale they study thought about these subjects. On the contrary, quite often these historians are primarily or to a very large degree concerned with trying to analyze and understand historical attitudes and ideologies pertaining to them.

My guess is that Sweet is most likely trying to criticize historians who study issues like race, gender, sexuality, et cetera from the express standpoint that racial, gender, sexual, and economic oppression are bad. If I am correct and this is indeed what Sweet is trying to criticize, then his criticism wildly misses the mark for two main reasons.

Firstly, although the standpoint that oppression is bad is a perspective, it is not an exclusively modern or “presentist” one. In every time period in which oppression has existed, there have always been at least some people who have regarded it as wrong. These people haven’t always criticized oppression in the same ways modern scholars do and their voices haven’t always been preserved for us to study, but they have existed. Certainly, in every era of history, at least some oppressed people themselves have disliked their own oppression and, in many cases, recognized it as unjust.

Secondly, rejecting and criticizing historical beliefs and ideologies (and the oppressive systems they have generally reinforced) is not at all the same thing as “ignoring” those beliefs and ideologies. On the contrary, it is a form of directly engaging with them.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an Attic red-figure pyxis by the Wedding Painter dating to between c. 470 and c. 460 BCE, now held in the Louvre Museum, depicting an ancient Greek wedding. In ancient Greece, women were considered effectively the property of their husbands—a conception which modern scholars have rightly criticized.

Sweet’s false equivalences

Unfortunately, Sweet’s essay only goes even further downhill from this point onward. He complains at some length about The 1619 Project, about seeing a Black American family with one of the family elders holding a “dog-eared copy of The 1619 Project” when he went on a tour at Elmina Castle in Ghana, about the tour guide at Elmina Castle telling what he regards as a whitewashed narrative about Indigenous African people’s role in Atlantic slavery designed to appeal to Black Americans, and about what he regards as historical whitewashing on the same subject in the previews for the upcoming film The Woman King.

As I have mentioned in this post I wrote in November 2020 and this post I wrote in January 2021, I do think there are some legitimate historical criticisms of The 1619 Project. Nonetheless, many of the criticisms that have been lodged against it are themselves unfair and the obsession that senior white male U.S. historians seem to have with attacking the project for its perceived inaccuracies at every possible opportunity—even now, when it is three years old—seems like a deliberate effort to distract attention away from the project’s overarching goals and discredit by association all attempts to reassess the roles and importance of slavery and race in U.S. history.

Sweet’s complaint about seeing the Black American family at Elmina Castle with the copy of The 1619 Project is wholly unjustified and inappropriate. Whatever criticisms one may make of The 1619 Project itself, it is totally unfair of him to use a complete stranger with whom he has apparently never spoken and whose name he does not even know merely having a copy of it in public as an example of the project’s supposedly dangerous influence.

For all he knows, having never spoken to this person, they could be well versed in the most recent relevant historiography, be well aware of the various faults and shortcoming of The 1619 Project, and still value the project for its perspective. He shouldn’t judge a person by the cover of the book they happen to be reading.

ABOVE: Front cover of the book edition of The 1619 Project

I do think that Sweet’s criticisms of the historical whitewashing in the tour guide’s speeches and The Woman King have some validity. What is absolutely disgusting, though, is that Sweet immediately goes on to draw a false equivalence between The 1619 Project, the Black family and the tour guide at Elmina Castle, and The Woman King on the one hand and the ongoing right-wing efforts to ban discussion in schools about the legacy and contemporary influence of slavery and systemic racism. He writes:

“The erasure of slave-trading African empires in the name of political unity is uncomfortably like right-wing conservative attempts to erase slavery from school curricula in the United States, also in the name of unity. These interpretations are two sides of the same coin. If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise.”

While both left-wing and right-wing mishandlings of history are assuredly worthy of criticism, it is entirely irresponsible for Sweet to pretend like the examples he cites are even remotely equivalent.

A journalism project, a random tour guide, and a Hollywood film making historical claims that are not totally accurate is not even remotely equivalent to right-wing reactionary politicians wielding the immense power of the state to try to outright ban all discussion about major historical topics that conflict with their political ideology in schools. Many red states are doing this right now, but I will focus on specific examples from the state of Florida, which has been at the forefront of right-wing efforts to ban or restrict discussion in schools.

As I discuss at much greater length in this post I made in July 2022, in March 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed into law House Bill 1557, titled “An Act Relating to Parental Rights in Education,” which opponents have aptly nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

This law, which came into effect on 1 July, prohibits all forms of “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade and gives parents the ability to sue school districts that have exposed their children at any age level from kindergarten through twelfth grade to any material that the parents believe is “not age-appropriate.”

The law uses intentionally vague language and does not define what “age-appropriate” means, effectively leaving it up to parents who are looking to sue school districts to decide. Some parents will inevitably interpret any mention whatsoever of the existence of any queer people at any age level as “not age-appropriate.”

Thus, even something as innocuous to most people as a brief offhand mention of the Stonewall uprising in a twelfth-grade U.S. history class could potentially incur a lawsuit. As a result, the law is already having a pervasive chilling effect on speech and is making teachers and school districts afraid to even mention anything to students about queer history or the existence of queer people in history.

Meanwhile, Florida’s Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act, which Governor DeSantis signed into law in April 2022 and which came into effect on 1 July, prohibits any K-12 school from teaching students “critical race theory” (a term which right-wingers use in such a vague, poorly defined way that it could conceivably refer to basically any kind of instruction whatsoever about any kind of systemic racism or about the continuing existence of racism in U.S. society) and gives parents the ability to sue any school district that they believe has exposed their children to “critical race theory.”

Once again, because the terms here are so vague, this act effectively leaves it up to parents to decide what counts as “critical race theory.” Thus, under this law, any mention whatsoever of the existence of systemic racism or the continuing influence of racism in U.S. society in the twenty-first century could potentially incur a lawsuit, again creating a pervasive chilling effect on speech and potentially making teachers afraid to teach their students about even hugely important topics in U.S. history like slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, racial segregation, lynching, redlining, the Civil Rights movement, et cetera. (Thankfully, a Florida judge has already declared the Stop WOKE Act unconstitutional, but the state of Florida will most likely appeal the decision all the way to the Supreme Court if they have to.)

In terms of crimes against history, what reactionary right-wingers are doing right now is vastly, objectively worse in all respects than anything social-justice-supporting progressives are doing. The only paradigm in which an equivalence between these things makes sense is one which starts out with the baseless and incorrect presumption that the right and the left are both equally culpable and then looks for examples to illustrate this presumption without ever seriously bothering to interrogate it.

ABOVE: Photograph taken by Wilfredo Lee for the Associated Press, used in this article for NBC News, showing Ron DeSantis speaking on 6 January 2021 at Miami Gardens. DeSantis has been at the forefront of right-wing efforts to ban discussion of certain topics in schools.

Unfortunately, Sweet goes on to draw an even more wildly extreme false equivalence between The 1619 Project, the random tour guide at Elmina Castle, The Woman King, et cetera on the one hand and, on the other, the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court’s invocation of fake history to justify taking away a pregnant person’s fundamental right to choose to have an abortion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and striking down a New York state law requiring that, in order to apply for a license to carry a gun in public, a person needed to state a specific reason for needing one in the case of NYSRPA v. Bruen.

I should hardly have to say that a journalism project, a random tour guide, and a Hollywood film not being totally right about some stuff is nowhere even remotely comparable to the U.S. Supreme Court using false historical claims to justify relentlessly and systematically stripping away people’s fundamental, formerly constitutionally-protected rights in service of their right-wing extremist agenda. The Supreme Court is directly hurting vastly more people in a vastly more direct and fundamental way than The 1619 Project, that one tour guide, or The Woman King put together will likely hurt in a million years.

ABOVE: Photograph showing all the justices of the Supreme Court as of the time Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and NYSRPA v. Bruen were decided. Back row (from left to right): Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett. Front row (from left to right): Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor.

Conclusion

Simply put, while I agree with Sweet about the importance of pre-1800 history, his essay is still an irredeemable garbage fire. There is absolutely no reason why any historian, let alone the president of the AHA, should be publishing this essay in 2022.