In the Fall of 2024, history matters

Here is Harvard intellectual historian James Kloppenberg at Commonweal:

Before entering graduate school I had read a little book by the Oxford historian E. H. Carr, What Is History? I found his answer persuasive: it is a practice of interpretation. Historians can never make up their facts. Within the boundaries of the available evidence, however, historians cannot avoid engaging in hermeneutics. A fact, to use Carr’s image, is like an empty sack. It cannot stand up without the meaning that a historian provides. Such historical interpretations, of course, are always subject to debate, but no one is entitled to her own facts.

That is why, in the fall of 2024, history matters. For more than a decade, a spectacle has been unfolding before our eyes. Interpretations have escaped the boundaries of evidence. It is the ethical responsibility of historians to insist that, inescapable as interpretation is, history untethered from facts becomes a masquerade. In politics it is not only the Big Lie of Donald Trump’s election denial and his and his allies’ baseless insistence that all the indictments issued for his illegal activity are politically motivated “witch hunts.” The masquerade is also evident elsewhere: in the concerted effort of some school boards to ban books and shape history teaching to their liking; on the fringes of the internet, where fantasies pass for reality; and in books written by right-wing provocateurs and published by mainstream presses. These efforts to whitewash U.S. history require suppressing inconvenient facts such as genocide, slavery, and white male supremacy and replacing them with the comforting fiction of heroes who brought peace and prosperity to the world. What we need instead is a frank reckoning with injustice, including the appropriation of Indian lands, the enduring effects of centuries of enslavement, and the lingering remnants of earlier beliefs that consigned women to second-class status. There is much in the record of American history worthy of praise; there is also plenty to criticize.

In law, the most consequential rejection of serious history is the blatant mythmaking that goes under the name of originalism, a brand of partisan jurisprudence that serious historians reject. Because I have written about our bitterly partisan politics in several earlier essays in Commonweal, I will focus here on the fictions being presented as history in the law.

Read the entire piece here.