Should historians interpret the past through the prism of the present?

A recent debate about whether the study of history should address contemporary concerns exposed faultlines in academic approaches

- DAVID MOTADEL

One of the fiercest historical controversies in recent years exploded last summer, sparked by an essay entitled ‘Is History History?’. Written by James H Sweet, then president of the influential American Historical Association, it was printed in that organisation’s magazine in August 2022. The global social media backlash was overwhelming. Angry readers branded his article “crap”, “smug condescension”, even “white supremacist”. Scholars around the world weighed in, along with media commentators. An opinion piece in The New

York Times called it “one of the confusing messes that pop up from time to time in the highest reaches of academia”, while The Washington Post mocked “academia’s most recent pratfall”.

In his piece, Sweet, professor of African history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, criticised a shift toward ‘presentism’ – the study of the past through the lens of the present – in historical writing. He warned that more and more historians let current concerns dictate the focus of their scholarship, giving in to the “allure of political relevance” or even, in more extreme cases, using history as a “grab bag” to advance political goals such as identity politics in their work. Moreover, he advised interpreting “elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors”. If we “read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues”, he declared, we risk producing history that “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”.