Recently journalist Matt Yglesias asked his more than 530,000 Twitter followers this question:
At the time I am writing this, his post has 384 comments.
After eliminating non-historians and purveyors of the past who think they are historians, I made a rough list of the historians who received multiple mentions in Yglesias’s unscientific poll.
- Gordon Wood (23)
- Niall Ferguson (18)
- Allen Guelzo (15)
- Paul Johnson (11)
- Wilfred McClay (10)
- W.H. Brands (8)
- David Hackett Fischer (8)
- Richard Brookhiser (7)
- James McPherson (6)
- Ron Chernow (4)
- Joseph Ellis (4)
- Walter McDougal (4)
- John Lewis Gaddis (4)
- Thomas Kidd (4)
- Bernard Bailyn (3)
- Doris Kearns Goodwin (3)
- George Marsden (3)
- Don Critchlow (2)
- Larry Schwiekart (2)
- Daniel Walker Howe (2)
Baylor University historian Andrea Turpin noticed something about the list:
I am a bit confused. Are these historians, conservative, or are they just historians that conservatives like? Is there really such a thing as a conservative or liberal historian? Does that mean that historians write with a bias?
Some are conservatives (Guelzo, Ferguson, McClay, Johnson, Schweikert), which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “biased,” but that they write from a clearly right-of-center stance. Others I’m not so sure about; they write on topics and offer interpretations that conservatives find congenial (Chernow, Ellis, Wood, Gaddis, Bailyn, Marsden, Kidd), but work for people elsewhere on the political spectrum.
The other hurdle to discerning anything from this post about the real world is that it’s Matt Yglesias’s Twitter followers’ guesses about the historians conservatives like. Those answering the question may or may not be conservatives, and may or may not (themselves) like these historians. It seems like an entirely speculative exercise.
Of course, Jay. I still found it interesting. Moreover, I think most of the books they came up with are pretty on the mark.
Susan: Great question. I think the focus is on historians who conservatives like regardless of the author’s political conviction. For example, I don’t know anything about Gordon Wood’s politics, but he writes about the founding fathers from the perspective of intellectual history. Conservative love the founding fathers. Many of them also opposed the 1619 Project, but they did so at a Trotskyist (Marxist/socialist) website.