History of slavery 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.

Should We Judge Historical Figures by Contemporary Standards?

There has been a lot of political controversy in recent years about the question of whether it is appropriate to judge historical figures by “contemporary standards.” This controversy often particularly flares up surrounding figures who are traditionally seen as “heroes” of United States history and yet actually committed horrific crimes, such Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

I think that the issue is a lot more complicated than most people realize and I think that, in most cases, it is extremely misleading to frame the debate in terms of judging historical figures by “contemporary standards” because this implies that people during the period in question had no way of knowing that the things they were doing were wrong, when, in fact, we know there were people at the time who did know that these things were wrong.

Did Abolitionism Exist in Ancient Greece and Rome?

The prevailing attitude towards slavery throughout the ancient Mediterranean world was essentially that being a slave was horrible and unpleasant, but that that was just the way things were and the way things always would be. As far as we can tell from the surviving sources, the idea that slavery even could be abolished does not seem to have occurred to most people.

There were apparently a few people in ancient Greece and Rome who thought that slavery was immoral, but these people seem to have been extremely rare, since they only appear briefly in the sources. Furthermore, we have absolutely no documentation of the existence of any large-scale, organized movement to abolish slavery in ancient Greece or Rome. Some people did criticize slavery extensively and there were probably people who wished slavery didn’t exist, but no one seems to have ever developed any realistic plans to abolish it.

The Founding Fathers’ Views on Slavery

We have all heard that our country was founded on the idea that “all men are created equal.” That is certainly what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Unfortunately, ideas are often quite different from actions. The vast majority of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America owned slaves and, for many of them, their public statements stood in stark contrast with their own private actions and beliefs. Nonetheless, their views on the issue of slavery were actually quite diverse and many of them changed their views on the subject over the courses of their lives. In this article, we will examine the unvarnished truth of some of the major Founding Fathers’ views on slavery.

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