The AHA-Atlantic History Discussion

This week my Dad sent me a link to an Atlantic article by David Frum, titled “The New History Wars”. I’m not a huge fan of Frum, but I AM a huge fan of my father, so I started reading it. The article, which I think is only a week or so old, describes a controversy that erupted recently in reaction to an August 2022 Presidential essay in the AHA’s Perspectives on History. Since the first paragraph of Frum’s article contained a link to the AHA essay, I thought I’d read that first. So I’ll give you my reaction to both.

The August 17, 2022 essay by James H. Sweet was titled “Is History History?” It currently begins with a page-long author’s note describing the “anger and dismay” the article caused. Sweet does not retract any statements, but he does express regret that “In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power.” He claims this was not his intention, and I believe him. But I think this is a deeply flawed essay.

In HIS first paragraph, Sweet links to a 2002 essay by then-president Lynn Hunt, called “Against Presentism”. I’m tempted to read and comment on this as well, but a line needs to be drawn somewhere, so I’ll resist! (personally, I would have gone all the way back to Carl L. Becker’s 1931 AHA Presidential address, “Everyman His Own Historian”)In this context, what’s important is that Sweet feels himself in agreement with Hunt’s warning that presentism threatens to “put us out of business as historians.” The problem is, throughout most of the rest of the essay Sweet turns away from the professional discipline of History and complains about the failures of pop history and propaganda.

Sweet does mention that in the decade following Hunt’s warning, the number of PhDs granted for post-1800 histories rose 18% while those awarded for pre-1800 topics declined by 4%. This is his last mention of the professional academic discipline, however. He moves on to a suggestion that as a culture, we’re much more likely to “read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues”. This may be true, but what about change over time? Haven’t Americans always approached our national past in this way?

Sweet goes on to criticize the 1619 Project and the book and public school curriculum that came out of it. Now for the record, Sweet is a full professor at UW Madison, where he specializes in Atlantic World slavery and the social and cultural histories of Africans. He describes the irony of “professional historians’ engagement with the work that seemed to lend it historical legitimacy.” The impression I get is of disappointment with oversimplification, where a complex history was reduced to “a zero-sum game of heroes and villains viewed through the prism of contemporary racial identity.” He continues in this vein, telling a story of a trip to Elmina Castle, an infamous collection point for African slaves. He once again subtly criticizes the site’s current use as an “African American shrine”. Then he more directly criticizes the movie The Woman King, which he says inaccurately portrays the involvement of Africans in enslaving other Africans.

Sweet says “If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise.” He proves his point with examples of idiotic “historical” arguments offered by Supreme Court judges Alito and Thomas to justify bad decisions of the court. I don’t disagree. The people writing these briefs are historical as well as judicial hacks. But doesn’t that sort-of prove the point? We’re no longer talking about academic history at all. We’re talking about movies and political rationalization. Our culture’s blind application of myths claiming to be history for present ends would have been a valuable subject for discussion. It was a missed opportunity, and Sweet’s big error was a failure to clearly distinguish between professional history and popular myths and consider the purposes and uses of the two.

Frum depicts the “Sturm und Drang” over the article, picking some juicy, woke-sounding objections to reel in his reader. He then asks, “Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one? Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?” I’d answer, yes and yes. “We” should do both those things. But more to the point, who are WE? The academy? The culture? Should we all have the same goals and interests?

Frum then tackles Sweet’s little story about Elmina. He says Sweet was “irked” that the Ghanian guides seemed to excuse Africans from complicity and that the use of Elmina as a destination for African Americans was a bit inaccurate, since most of the people taken through Elmina ended up in Brazil or the Caribbean. But isn’t that like criticizing American Jews (and non-Jews) for visiting the “shrine” of Auschwitz? And Frum seems to compound Sweet’s missing the point that there’s a big difference between the careful historical research Sweet did in his 2011 book and the myths created out of whole cloth for The Woman King. There’s a serious discussion that could be had about that difference, but it’s largely missing here.

To his credit, Frum went to visit and interview Sweet and also had conversations with his critics. The critics seem to have some valid points (“it is more complex than that because at the time they would not have seen themselves as Africans”) in their reaction to Sweet, but Frum also finds an earlier statement by the same critic complaining of an approach to studying Africa that “assumes the continent and its peoples can and should be studied for the benefit of the western student and scholar, that knowledge is a commodity to be extracted from the continent to benefit the western student and scholar”. This seems a bit of a zero sum approach, where the "extraction" of knowledge diminishes the continent. Or is the point that it diminishes opportunities for black scholars, who he believes should have first dibs?

Frum (again to his credit) raises the issue of some white scholars of Africa beginning to believe they should step aside a bit and let people tell their own stories. He accurately describes that

Scholarly study of Africa in the United States began a century ago with work by Black writers and scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. These writers and scholars were denied research and travel funds, and sometimes even refused access to academic libraries. When private foundations began to fund African research, in the 1920s and ’30s, they instead directed their resources to rising white scholars at elite universities. These credentialed scholars became the leaders of the field in the 1950s and ’60s, when the Cold War made Africa an urgent interest. Those established patterns have come under fiercer and fiercer fire.

And he’s right when he says:

This attempt to separate history from politics is rejected by Sweet’s critics as at best naive, at worst dangerous. When has history-writing been nonpolitical? When George Bancroft, writing in 1830s America amid Native American removals and the expansion of the cotton empire, wrote the story of the nation as one of democratic progress—was that not political? When William Dunning and his many influential students depicted Reconstruction as a “tragic era” of northern vindictiveness and African American corruption and abuse—was that not political? When modern-day “presidential historians” tell the story of the United States from the Oval Office down, rather than from the streets and neighborhoods up—is that not political, too?

But then he concludes that “mythmaking is spreading from ‘just the movies’ to more formal and institutional forms of public memory” and describes the pendulum swing from left to right resulting in laws being passed about what can and can’t be said in history. This is alarming and deserves to be addressed head-on. Frum’s identification of the actual issue is much more valuable and alarming than Sweet’s.

Finally, Frum says “If old heroes ‘must fall,’ their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place.” Fair enough. But it’s not a foregone conclusion that removing Confederate statues means we have to believe in Wakanda. Social History began after the Second World War as an attempt to bring some new voices into the discussion. Maybe the point is, we need to get over this Marvel Comics worldview, where there are spotless heroes and irredeemable villains.