modern history Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

No, You Can’t Buy One Square Foot of Land in Scotland and Become a “Scottish Lord”

If you’ve been on the internet much, you’ve probably encountered an advertisement at some point claiming that, if you own any amount of land in Scotland, even if it is only one square foot, then you legally qualify for the title of “lord” or “lady.” Numerous companies have promoted this assertion, purporting that, if you buy one square foot of land from them, then you can call yourself a Scottish lord or lady and they will send you a certificate to indicate your new title. A few of the companies of this sort that you may have heard of include Highland Titles, Scotland Title, Scotland Titles (which is apparently a different company), Established Titles, Laird Title, The Scottish Gift, and so on.

All the titles these companies are selling are fake and they are not worth the paper they are printed on. For one thing, under current Scots law, it is not actually possible to transfer legal ownership rights to a single square foot of land in the first place. Furthermore, even if it were possible, merely owning one square foot of land would not make anyone a “lord” or “lady” in any sense.

Is It Ethical to Exhume Mummies and Display Them in Museums?

In October 2020, a team of Egyptian archaeologists working at the site of Saqqara, which is located about thirty kilometers south of the modern city of Cairo, excavated a total of at least fifty-nine sarcophagi containing the mummified corpses of Egyptian priests and officials from the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (lasted 664 – 525 BCE). The Egyptian government sought to publicize this discovery as part of a massive ongoing effort to encourage tourism, since Egypt’s tourism sector has still not fully recovered from the hit it took after the 25 January Revolution in 2011. Consequently, the Egyptian archaeologists made a big display of opening one of the sarcophagi in the presence of reporters. A video of the opening of this sarcophagus was widely shared on social media, where it spawned considerable controversy. Many people were criticizing the archaeologists for exhuming the sarcophagi, insisting that exhuming human remains is immoral and unethical.

I originally began writing this post as a response to this controversy shortly after it broke out, but, as I was writing, I found myself doubting my position. In my aporia, I gave up on the article and set it aside. Now, a year and a half later, I have come back to it. Alas, I will admit that, even now, after I have had a lot more time to think about it, I still don’t have a fully worked out sense of how I feel about all aspects of this issue. I am convinced that it is both moral and ethical for archaeologists to excavate human remains. Nonetheless, I do think that these complaints raise some very important questions about how ancient Egyptian human remains are usually treated.

Why Is the Parthenon So Famous?

The most famous building in Greece today is almost certainly the Parthenon, a spectacular temple to the Greek goddess Athena that towers atop the Athenian Akropolis and is almost universally admired for being supposedly the most “perfect” and “timeless” work of ancient Greek architecture. Some people may be surprised to learn, though, that this was not always the case.

The Parthenon did not immediately become the most famous and admired Greek temple as soon as it was built. It was certainly seen as an important temple in antiquity—one especially notable for its size, its prominent location, and its extraordinary chryselephantine cult statue of Athena, crafted by the master sculptor Pheidias. Its present-day status as the most famous of all Greek buildings, though, is the result of the events and ideological movements of the past 2,400 years of history. If post-classical history had gone differently, the Parthenon’s status might have gone to a different temple.

No, Santa Claus Is Not Inspired by Odin

I’ve spent a lot of time debunking the perennially popular misconception that modern Anglophone Christmas customs are of ancient “pagan” origin. My most thorough article on the subject remains this one I originally posted two years ago. One of the more popular claims associated with this misconception is that Santa Claus is actually somehow inspired by the “pagan” Norse god Óðinn, who is closely associated with wisdom, war, death, and the runic alphabet. I already debunked this claim in this article I posted two years ago about the history of Santa Claus, which I highly recommend reading, but I did so only briefly and I feel that this notion is so common that it deserves a more thorough rebuttal.

Jackson Crawford, who has a PhD in Old Norse studies, spent many years teaching the subject at various universities, and is now a professional public educator on the subject, posted a video on his YouTube channel last year explaining why Óðinn is not Santa Claus. Crawford’s video is excellent, but it is, for the most part, merely a simple comparison of Óðinn and Santa Claus and it does not take into account the history of Santa Claus. In this article, I intend to give this misconception the proper, in-depth refutation it deserves—one that fully takes into account Santa Claus’s complicated history.

The Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis Is Racist and Harmful

The so-called “ancient astronaut hypothesis” is a popular genre of pseudohistory which centers around the claim that extraterrestrial beings visited earth in pre-modern times, leaving behind supposed evidence of their presence. The supposed “evidence” for this “hypothesis” is based entirely on flagrant misinterpretations and misrepresentations, tendentious reasoning, false assumptions, forged artifacts, and often outright lies. As a result, the “hypothesis” is universally rejected among professional academic scholars, historians, and archaeologists.

I have written about the ancient astronaut hypothesis before. For instance, I wrote an article back in January 2020 about how we actually know that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids as tombs for their pharaohs, in which I debunked claims made on the show Ancient Aliens. I also posted an article a few days ago in which I debunk the popular ancient astronaut theorist claim that Alexander the Great saw flying saucers while on his campaigns. In this article, however, I am not going to try to debunk the ancient astronaut hypothesis. Instead, I want to explain the history of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, why it is not just a “harmless” conspiracy theory, and why it is actually harmful.

Alluring Anecdotes about the Olympic Games

The 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo are now officially underway, having been delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have absolutely no interest in sports and, in all likelihood, I will not watch any part of the ongoing Olympics. Nonetheless, I do know a little bit about Olympic history, due to my intense study of ancient Greece and Rome and, on account of the occasion, I’ve decided to share a few of my favorite anecdotes about Olympic history.

The first is a legend about why ancient Olympic athletes were required to compete naked, the second is about a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to attend the Olympic Games, the third is about how women were sometimes able to compete in the ancient Olympic Games due to a loophole, and the fourth is about how the modern Olympic Games at one point included competitions for literature and the arts.

Yes, Young Women in the Nineteenth Century Knew What Sex Was

It seems that, when people think about sex in the historical past, they have a tendency to think in terms of extremes. For instance, the popular perception of the ancient Romans seems to be that they were all having wild sex orgies all the time. (This perception is usually coupled with the idea that this sexual “degeneracy” somehow led the Roman Empire to collapse, which, as I address in this article from July 2020, is complete nonsense.)

By sharp contrast, the popular perception of nineteenth-century British people is that they were so prudish and sexually repressed that young women had no idea that sex even existed. This idea that nineteenth-century women had no idea how a woman becomes pregnant is notably a major part of the Netflix historical drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813.

In reality, however, nineteenth-century mothers generally saw it as their responsibility to tell their daughters what sex was so that they could know to avoid having it before marriage. Moreover, a parent of any social rank in any society in any time period would have to go to truly extraordinary lengths to shelter their daughter in order to prevent her from finding out what sex is until she reached young adulthood. Trying to shelter a daughter to this degree in the nineteenth century would have been at least as difficult as trying to do such a thing today.

Yes, There Were Black People in Britain in the Nineteenth Century

It seems that, with my characteristically late timing, I have only just gotten around to watching the show that everyone was talking about six months ago. On 25 December 2020, Netflix released the period drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813 during the Regency Era. The show has triggered enormous controversy over the fact that it portrays a large number of British aristocrats who are not white, including one of the main characters, Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings, portrayed by the Black British actor Regé-Jean Page. Many people on the internet are predictably outraged over this, insisting that the show is not historically accurate and that it is “blackwashing” history.

The show, however, for its own part, makes very little pretense at historical accuracy in the first place. After all, most of the music is modern pop music played in a “traditional,” orchestral style. Furthermore, the show is not quite as historically inaccurate as some people might think. It is true that there were no Black people who held titles of nobility in Britain during the period when Bridgerton is set, but there were certainly free Black people living in Britain at the time who were both prominent and prosperous.

“Rewriting History” Is Not Inherently a Bad Thing

There seems to be something of a trend going on right now in politics where people have developed a habit of accusing their opponents of wanting to “rewrite history.” I’ve mostly seen conservatives accusing progressives of this, but I’ve also seen a few cases of progressives accusing conservatives of it without further clarification. In all cases, people who accuse other people of wanting to “rewrite history” portray this as something unambiguously bad.

The problem is that “rewriting history” is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, “rewriting history” is literally a historian’s job description. It is inevitable that each generation will rewrite history and there is really nothing anyone can do to stop it. It is, however, extremely important that the people who rewrite history do so honestly, using correct evidence and correct methods of interpretation. When we talk about “rewriting history,” what matters is not whether people are doing it, but how they are doing it.