Historians' Voices in Times of Peril
by David W. Blight
The assault on American history has become a critical part of the assault on American democracy. Here the acclaimed historian speaks directly to the members of his guild and makes clear the stakes in the battle over the American story.
~ Eddie
Reposted with permission…
“A good cataclysm suits our business better.”1
As historians, we dwell—a great deal of the time and with our cognitive energy—somewhere in the past. Professionally, we should. Yet in spring 2025, the present came storming into our work lives with a vengeance.
On March 27, President Donald J. Trump, assisted by the Heritage Foundation, issued an executive order: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. With no psychiatric evidence, Trump’s team has deemed generations of trained curators, preservationists, and historians—not to mention their millions of readers, visitors, and students—“insane.” This executive order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on historians’ profession, training, and integrity, and on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump has declared war on free minds and free education. As members of a profession and as citizens, historians must now fight back to reassert their own freedom, not only against these attacks but also in the interest of scholarly history well told for the public. Ours is a beautiful and ancient craft, essential for any society’s need for self-understanding and for the well-being of the human species. We are equipped with a host of modern methods and sources but are guided ethically by very old rules that no authoritarian political movement should be allowed to profane.2
So, what is history? For 2,500 years we have been trying to improve on a Greek traveler and thinker’s remarkable answer to this question. In the first sentence of the oldest work of history in our civilization, written in the fifth century BCE, that traveler and thinker wrote:
I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds, manifested by both Greeks and barbarians, fail of their report, and, together with all this, the reason why they fought each other.
History is the story (the “color” and the “deeds”), but just as important, it is the explanation (the “reason why” for “all this”).3
But who fills the roles of Herodotus’s Greeks and barbarians now? A legion of reactionary activists stand behind “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and other executive orders, peddling a pickled patriotism and insisting that they alone know how to “restore … truth and grandeur” to national monuments such as Independence Hall in Philadelphia and that they know how American history should be researched, written, and taught. Such an assault on history and education is a violation of the basic elements of academic freedom. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Keyishian v. Board of Regents that academic freedom constituted “a special concern of the First Amendment” and that government may not “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” Justice William Brennan led the 5–4 decision defending an English professor’s refusal to take an oath that he was not a communist in the New York State university system. Narrowly, and tenuously, we historians have history and Court precedent on our side—at least we had reason to believe so. But a new cycle in this fight has just begun.4
The executive order bursts with accusations and slander against historians for their “concerted and widespread effort to re-write our Nation’s history.” According to the President Trump, we replaced “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology.” And then appears that penetrating epithet: historians have led a “revisionist movement.” A beloved historian, the late James Horton had a poignant answer to this charge, usually presented among informal gatherings of historians at conferences: “Would you want your doctors not to be revisionists?” The executive order’s slur assumes a standard, agreed-upon truth and believes that interpretations based on new evidence or methods violate something static and sacred. This is not a debate; it is a war of persuasion over the politics of knowledge and the power to control it. Herodotus was the first revisionist. Trump and his compatriots and enablers have themselves become the new revisionists. His alchemists want to make us great again.5
The attack on history and the Smithsonian Institution comes from the same political playbook as did dozens of other right-wing positions in recent years. In the Heritage Foundation initiative, Mandate for Leadership. The Conservative Promise: Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, the foundation’s director of education policy, Lindsey M. Burke, unveiled an elaborate list of approximately 114 “goals” for a crusade to disrupt and destroy American education as we know it. These goals range from specific programs within the Department of Education to eliminating that department altogether. Other big aims include ending the alleged “woke agendas” for race and gender, establishing “parents’ rights” and school choice, slowly eviscerating public schools, using the charge of “anti-Semitism” to infiltrate and weaken universities, and promoting history aligned with “the founders’ ‘values.’” The strategy is clear: trumpet a claim widely and often enough—historians have written a new history of “national shame”—and people will begin to believe it. Big lies move like viruses, and though we do have evidence, facts, and ethics on our side, no vaccines for those viruses exist—except our voices. The crude intent of this executive order is to break institutions and to silence historians. Such orders are not law, and sometimes they are largely propaganda rooted in fierce ideology and in twisted, Orwellian language. The mission statement of Project 2025 employs words such as pluralism and diversity in the service of school choice (“decisions made by families”), and in the long run, destroying public schools.6
But we cannot and will not be silent! Acquiescence to the Trumpist crusade would be a betrayal of not only our professional ethics but also of the dreams and intellectual freedom of every soul among us who teaches, researches, collects, and writes our past. In graduate school or through the course of our careers in teaching and scholarship, none of us imagined we would have to defend our craft in such a fundamental way. We did not fully grasp how many on the right resent us—indeed, hate us—for dislodging their comfortable, reassuring sense of history. James Baldwin once wrote that the problem with the way Americans approach history is that “words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.” Well, we awakened a reaction over these past few decades, the extent we now see as our foes go to war to crush much of what we have done. We sowed the wind; here comes the whirlwind. Tip-toeing around a present we avoid or disdain, sometimes mired in our own internecine, petty battles, we now risk being crushed by that present. Confident in our self-regard, unprepared with defenses, we now must rapidly mobilize to fight a war with limited resources.7
This is, in William James’s famous pacifist terms, a “moral equivalent of war” for our profession. “Pacifists,” said James, “ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. Do that first in any controversy, then move the point, and your opponent will follow.” Easy to prescribe; difficult to execute. If we cannot match our opponents’ strength of will and their “disciplinary function,” as James put it, with a “moral equivalent of war,” we are likely to fail in this struggle. We need arguments and action. We should not all be activists first; that could produce bad scholarship and possibly bad teaching in the long run. But we need to deploy our scribes, our voices, our organizations, and our meager resources carefully and strategically—first in defense and then on the offensive.8
According to the executive order, the Smithsonian Institution and its leadership have been captured by “a divisive race-centered ideology.” The hottest museum ticket in Washington, D.C. in recent years has been for the magnificent National Museum of African American History and Culture. The executive order makes a nonsensical claim that the museum portrayed “individualism,” the “nuclear family,” and “hard work” as “white culture.” The museum did post similar phrasing on a website in 2020, but museum administrators acknowledged the language as a mistake and quickly removed it. Such notions were widely assessed in scholarship eighty years ago in response to the work of the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and others about the stability of the Black family in the long aftermath of slavery. Perhaps MAGA (Make America Great Again) aides who helped draft the critique could have visited the museum and mingled with the thousands of Black middle-class families who paid for their “free” admission to the site with hard work and, in some cases, with blood.9
The executive order singled out the American Art Museum to condemn its exhibition, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” for promoting “scientific racism.” That there might be elements of racism in forms of art over the centuries will not shock anyone who loves museums, and through many decades of American history, varieties of knowledge and institutions did promote scientific racism. The order then takes great umbrage at the exhibition’s suggestion that race is “a human invention” and “not a biological reality.” For at least a century, anthropologists and historians have demonstrated these truths that writers of the executive order have apparently just discovered with confusion and moral disdain. The order reserved a final insult for the new American Women’s History Museum, demanding that it “not recognize men as women.” These untethered assaults are too easy to refute in settings such as a historians’ convention. Addressing them will not be a fight about their merits; it is a political contest we cannot fight with our usual restraint, subtlety, and even with facts. This will not be a civil debate. Civility is a wonderful virtue at the core of scholarly debate, but the offensive launched at us here is not inviting us to be panel participants.10
For generations, historians have openly and covertly debated the role of the present in how we study the past. Beware “the perils of presentism,” we have all been cautioned in our training for the archives or the classroom. In the safest corners of our guild, as teachers or as scholars, we tend to avoid the issue of presentism, but in all honesty, do we not practice elements of presentism in every conversation we have today? If we read through the long tradition of the philosophy of history we can find this question of past and present informing and torturing the deepest of thinkers. “Every present has a past of its own,” wrote R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History, “and any imaginative reconstruction of the past aims at reconstructing the past of this present … the present here and now perceived.” Thus, we are now asked repeatedly: How did we get here? Please help us with parallels that ground us in time. Our country needs historians, and it needs answers as guideposts.11
We crave the pure pleasures of time in the archive, when the clock moves by its own logic, when we connect with people and places in the recent or remote past—sometimes actually conquering time—and we see or feel our subjects almost breathing back at us. We cherish a good day in the classroom when we know we have really connected with students, and they leave that sacred space with a sizzling sense of history. We might believe we have broken through “the fourth wall,” entered the spirit of our audience, even as we were “performing” some piece of history. Sometimes our greatest achievements in writing and teaching are all but unconscious acts, products of our trained imaginations, as Collingwood suggested.
If we are not vigilant and mobilized soon, this debate and much else that we do in the historian’s craft could become sawdust in the Trump administration’s wood chippers or simply restrained into silence and fear by the slow destruction of universities and public schools. We are always saying our times are urgent—but this moment is urgent, as the core of our purpose, our methods, our ethics, our narrative gifts, our collective existence, our public meaning, and our ability to sustain a whole community of historians are challenged as much as ever before. When barbarians reach our gates, near our most precious libraries, museums, sacred historical sites, and even our classrooms, we can contemplate discussion, although we know it will not work. We surely cannot let them in, even as they hold swords and financial ruin over our heads. Are we afraid of the words elitist or expertise? We may have to represent civilized intellect and order in the face of chaos and disruption used to control thought. We will have to prepare to resist using the means we possess. But just want kind of resistance are we willing to mount?
In the past decade or two, academics and the universities they inhabit have invited the distrust and criticism we now encounter. We have made the disorder of our own house a target. Our fragmentation, our occasionally inscrutable language, our fractured obsession with identity, our difficulty thinking about the whole as we protect our academic parts, and our insularity from the real worlds outside our gates—where 53 percent of Americans have no higher education—have left us more vulnerable than we realize. And our critics have been preparing their current attacks and organizing for this history war for at least a generation.
When opponents want to divide and conquer you, do not help them. Do not seize the few institutions we have that try to speak for all of us with a semblance of unity and purpose, and use them for singular aims. When leaders try to rewrite the script for how Americans should know their past, direct how that past should be taught or what books should be used to convey it, and define the meaning and function of schools and universities with seemingly unchecked power, we must check that leadership, not turn on each other. If necessary, we should take that rewritten script, tear it to shreds, and insist on debates in neutral spaces—or even in their media. Yes, this is a tall order. And historians, and the OAH, are not well positioned to lead social movements against creeping authoritarianism. Yes, we are vulnerable. Yes, we may be divided over the very purpose of our associations, founded to represent and defend us. But we do have ethical ties and moral imperatives that bind us, if we can sustain them.
No one in our profession ever studied so deeply his fellow historians’ voices, their public and private whims and ways, or their conflicts and disputes quite like the late Michael Kammen. In addition to his prolific works of American cultural history and on historical memory, Michael traveled the country delving into the personal papers of many leading historians over the course of a century. No one studied us quite like Michael, and I was so lucky to benefit from him as an extended mentor. There will be many among us who will remember his wonderful habit of inviting several younger historians to dinner at each OAH annual meeting just to get to know them and so they could meet. And many of us will never forget his ubiquitous postcards and distinctive messages of encouragement sent while on his many journeys.
In 1997 Michael wrote a long essay titled “Personal Identity and the Historian’s Vocation.” He crafted that amazing piece at a time when many history and culture wars were breaking out in the 1990s. How I yearn to know his take on the issue of “identity” in today’s environment, as it has become one of the most contested and serious issues. Michael addressed historians’ racial and gender identities but also looked at them in revealingly diverse other ways—via religion, ideology, region, both sides of economic determinism, Marxists or non-Marxists. Charitable throughout, Michael did identify that in the 1960s and 1970s there were no fights quite like those among or between leftists. Especially from private correspondence, Michael compassionately uncovered the religious commitments of some scholars, the ideological rigidity and generational prejudices of others. He saw the racism and sexism of some, and the caring devotion to craft across and despite deeply political lines, whether the problems animating the present were 1930s communism, red scare McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, postmodernism’s invasion of our domains in the 1980s, or who could study what subjects or peoples based on their race, ethnicity, or gender. Along the way, U.S. historians became trapped in more than one intellectual cul-de-sac, surrounding whether there might ever again exist a unifying narrative of the American past, even as they learned that if they did not try to write one, as now, someone else would! Getting back to narrative or abandoning it in obedience to the gods of social history, or the gods of theory, or the gods of identity has long been a recurring argument among us.12
Detachment from or engagement with the current era, and scholarly commitment versus activism, are very old dilemmas. Charles Beard and Mary Beard had their own peculiar answers in an age of economic history that they helped forge; Gerda Lerner had her answers as a Viennese Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust in 1938, becoming one of the earliest pioneers of women’s history. Lerner’s constant work in our profession to build the first master’s degree program (at Sarah Lawrence University) and then the first Ph.D. program (at the University of Wisconsin) in women’s and gender history made her unavoidably conscious of a present that always had to be overcome by studying the past. Carl Becker left indelible challenges for historians to democratize this craft in the 1930s when he told us that “everyman” was a historian, and Edward Ayers’s remarkable presidential address to the 2019 OAH annual meeting was a tour de force about the infinitely multiple the ways of doing history in the digital age. Nancy Cott forged the field of women’s history by training countless young scholars with her fierce archival devotion and careful professional detachment. I have read Nancy’s 2017 OAH presidential address, delivered only three months into Trump’s first presidential term. She took on the problems of free speech and free press in history, drawing careful parallels between the Nazis and Germany in the early 1930s and the politics of spring 2017—an even bolder move then than it would be now.13
That I stand here eight years later, three months into Trump’s second presidency, is not lost on any of us who may now be reading more about the origins of the Third Reich and other fascist regimes of the early to mid-twentieth century than we ever thought we would. Who else is reading Richard Evans’s work right now? In The Coming of the Third Reich, Evans shows how the Nazis achieved power because of several key factors: the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate; widespread contempt, indeed hatred, for democracy that had taken root over at least a decade across Europe; the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities; the Nazis’ ritualistic dynamism, charisma, and propaganda machinery; the development of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into autocracy; the public control and recrafting of history (as Evans says, they “manipulated and rearranged the past to suit their own present purposes”); they knew who and what they viscerally hated—communists and Jews—and made them the engines and objects of insatiable grievance; and vicious street violence (brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses), mass arrests, and the establishment of detainment camps. All these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of a racial utopia and an unbridled nationalism born in the hatred of the Versailles Treaty and German reparations at the end of World War I, gave Nazis the tools of tyranny. In America during spring 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many of, though not quite all, these techniques. They provide us measuring sticks—not direct parallels—for our own present.14
My mentor at Wisconsin, the late Richard Sewell, taught me to beware presentism with both wit and a U.S. Navy man’s considered orders. Dick was never afraid to tell us “that is good history, and that is not.” If you had an ideological horse to mount, better not let him see it. I was so proud later, though, when he read my book Race and Reunion, about Civil War memory, and found my “indignation” at the sheer power and scurrilous use of the past by the Confederate Lost Cause to be “appropriate.” I cheered privately out loud, as only a student can at a revered teacher’s approval. Dick taught me how to write by reigning me in; on the first paper I ever wrote for him, a thorough takedown of Stanley Elkins’s classic book on slavery (so easy to do in the late 1970s), he wrote in the margin more than once—“too purple!” and “You need not surprise us with every sentence.”15
The pesky and sovereign present never ceases to impinge on our quietude, our lesson plans, our careers, our days of wine and archives. “Stand up,” say the headlines every day; “sit down and get your work done,” say our professional imperatives. Can we talk about the current crises, but by phone please, not via e-mail? Right now, as historians we have social-political responsibility for the many dilemmas caused by authoritarian attacks on education. Most days we would prefer to simply teach our classes, run searches, finish our letters of recommendation, find time for research, or just make it to Friday (or June as high school teachers). Rather suddenly, they have come for us; in their sight, we are the liberal elite, hiding in our privileged towers (if we can), pampered by endowments no one can understand, peddling arcane or socially dangerous ideas. Just saying “no, we’re not” is hardly enough. Those of us with at least some security need to reposition ourselves outward, into the world beyond our gates and our classrooms.
Hence, OAH and AHA leadership has issued one “statement” after another in recent months and years. Just how much impact our carefully crafted op-eds and missives on behalf of the profession have on anyone is hard to discern. We cannot “op-ed” our way out of this crisis, as my friend Annette Gordon-Reed said on a recent webinar for the membership she and I hosted. Within the following week the OAH had issued yet another joint declaration of protest with AHA leadership against all the withering threats to the federal Department of Education, the National Archives, the National Park Service, and other agencies. And that was only the beginning. We then issued a fierce statement of protest against Trump’s executive order to restore sanity to history. Will statements take us to higher ground, much less make us victorious? Not likely, but it depends on where we make such statements.16
In 1977, Henry Glassie, an American studies scholar of the old type and unafraid of his political commitments, declared: “If you cannot enter passionately into the life of your own times, you cannot enter compassionately into the life of the past. If the past is used to escape the present, the past will escape you.” When we ignore the present, it often comes back to get us when we least expect it. It can come in the dark of night or in broad daylight, on election days or holidays, on a residential street (as a graduate student is “captured” by immigrations agents, handcuffed, and rapidly flown to a detention center). History never takes a day off, even as we do.17
One of the most heroic works of history ever written was Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft. Bloch grew up in a French academic family, and had just begun his graduate training in medieval history when World War I broke out. He enlisted and fought in the trenches for most of three years, surviving disease, gas, and wounds from the battles of the Marne, the Somme, and Argonne. He was decorated four times for bravery, and like so many other French soldiers, he survived through luck and dedication. While in the army he began to write a kind of combat memoir, “Souvenirs de guerre.” Bloch wrote about his comrades, mostly rural young men, with great affection. And he wrote with discernment about “courage.” “Death ceases to appear very terrible the moment it seems close,” he wrote. “It is this, ultimately, that explains courage. Most men dread going under fire, and especially returning to it. Once there, however, they no longer tremble.” They endured because of “personal honor,” said the platoon captain.18
Shortly after the end of World War I, Bloch finished his Ph.D. in 1918 and began a distinguished career publishing books on the French peasantry and the development of serfdom. With his friend, Lucien Febvre, he founded what became the famed Annales school of historiography, studying the past with the longue durée, by comparative method, and with a concentration on social rather than political history or individuals. Together they edited the famous journal Annales, while Bloch taught for years at the University of Strasbourg. The busy and prolific scholar and his wife, Simone, had six children during the interwar years. A Jew from Alsace, Bloch faced increasingly intense anti-Semitism as fascism took hold in his beloved France by the 1930s. Because of his important work, he was one of a handful of Jewish scholars allowed “permits” to teach in French universities, although he was forced to leave the Sorbonne for Montpelier, where he was sometimes escorted to classes by guards protecting him from student Nazi thugs. When the Germans captured Paris in 1940 they looted Bloch’s apartment and destroyed his book collection. By the end of 1940 Bloch finished his remarkable L’etrange defaite: Temoignage ecrit en 1940 (Strange defeat: Testimony written in 1940), a book of personal witness, a variety of guilt, as well as rage against his fellow Frenchmen—everyone from common citizens to the military high command—who had not stood steadfast to save France.19
At age fifty-three, Bloch once again enlisted in the French Army and was part of the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940 and temporarily evacuated to England. Offered the opportunity to move to the New School in the United States, he sought the chance at first and applied for visas for his wife, his six children, and his aging mother. But the rapid German defeat of the French in 1940 overwhelmed such plans and opportunities. Back in Vichy, France, Bloch joined the resistance in and around Lyon. For most of a year, as regional director of this underground group, Bloch wrote propaganda releases, organized meetings and, somehow, continued writing what eventually became his famous The Historian’s Craft. It is believed that he worked on this manuscript on and off for most of three years, completing four chapters and one “fragment.” “Events,” said his friend Febvre, “deflected him from his path,” although the book is one of the most lyrical explanations or defenses of history ever written. Deflected and distracted are terms we use now. Are you distracted? How are each of us using or avoiding our deflection?20
Bloch started the writing in what was described as a “schoolboy’s notebook,” purchased at a small shop. Eventually, about two-thirds of a planned book manuscript survived and landed in Febvre’s lap. Much of it had been written “on the run” and in hiding. How Bloch managed such serenity, such calm and careful thinking while under this kind of pressure can only be imagined. The book is an astonishing, probing exploration of how historians think, the process of research, how they fashion analytical and critical approaches to evidence, and just how evidence can emerge in infinite forms from myriad places. To read Bloch’s prose today is to accompany him on a self-conscious journey into and out of a historian’s instincts, commitments, ethical sensibility, almost lyrical defense of footnotes, and even his soul. To read Bloch now is to see enormous humility and a hard-earned, principled sense of judgment on display. “Explorers of the past are never quite free,” he wrote. “The past is their tyrant. It forbids them to know anything which it has not itself, consciously or otherwise, yielded to them.” In such challenges, Bloch found great “aesthetic pleasures.” What he called the “spectacle of human activity,” the sheer complexity of past lives, is “designed to seduce the imagination—above all when, thanks to its remoteness in time or space, it is adorned with the subtle enchantment of the unfamiliar.” When we do find enough “tracks” left by the past we study, we can succeed in “knowing far more of the past than the past itself had thought good to tell us.” “Properly speaking,” he concludes, “it is a glorious victory over its material.” In describing writing, Bloch wondered if one could not “feel with words as well as with fingers.”21
Bloch’s love and dedication to his craft is palpable, made so perhaps in part because of the existential circumstances under which he wrote. Bloch was a patriot to two causes: the French nation and the practice of history. Are we patriots to our practice? What might that mean now in America? Bloch dwells at length on the nature of historical time as both “continuum” and “perpetual change,” all while facing great personal peril. We, as citizen scholars and teachers, may also shudder at the rapid assault of authoritarian threats to our profession and our rights, and we may feel befuddled by the way time itself has accelerated.22
Bloch did not finish the book because he was finally apprehended and arrested by the gestapo on March 8, 1944. Imprisoned for more than three months, he was interrogated and tortured with ice baths and beatings. His ribs and his wrists were broken. On June 16, 1944, after the Allied landings in Normandy, the Germans took Bloch and twenty-seven others out of the prison to a meadow, where they were shot by a firing squad. Two people survived the mass killing. According to one witness, in the final moments before his death, Bloch was seen in the group comforting a sixteen-year-old boy who was anguished over whether the bullets would hurt. Someone overheard Bloch and others shout “Vive La France!” as the guns went off.23
A powerful and brilliant section of Historian’s Craft is Bloch’s analysis of the relationship of past and present. Bloch’s first teaching job was in a high school where the headmaster issued him a stern warning about how elements of the past are safe ground but to “take great care” if he were to ever “touch on the religious wars.” Beware “the virus of the present” in teaching history, he was instructed. “With the molding of each new mind,” wrote Bloch, “there is a backward step,” joining the malleable in us all with the inflexible habits we have drawn from tradition. By knowing the living, we gain access to understanding the dead, Bloch argued. He called this “the master quality of the historian.” Past and present, our perennial preoccupation, formed a “solidarity of the ages,” he said. “Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past,” he firmly declared. “But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.” So wrote the historian explaining his sacred craft while hiding from those who would silence or kill him. “Historical research will tolerate no autarchy (no absolutism),” Bloch insisted, even as history itself and human nature certainly do. Bloch chose his allegiance, made his vows, and paid the price.24
We are now engaged in a fierce history war, testing whether our profession can endure against a political attack driven by the power of the executive branch of government, wealthy think tanks, and by scurrilous propagandists determined to discredit us. We will endure, and with luck we can win this war of ideas. We have many truths on our side, but the public waits for our persuasion. And public persuasion, as Bloch heroically demonstrated, is part of our craft.
History wars happen when interpretations of the past in books, museums, historic sites, or politics explode into public debate; they follow patterns. The subjects at their core usually carry visceral meaning for large swaths of people. They often invoke national and group identity and the fate of children. Frequently, they ensue over past stories of violence or inhumanity and their present commemoration. The disputes quickly cause fights over curricula, creeping into school boards and state legislatures with increasing stakes. The combatants then employ a kind of existential rhetoric, with all sides declaring compromise unacceptable and their enemies dangerous or evil. Political teams are chosen, and the media examines but also fuels and thrives on the contest. Publishers tread carefully. Authorities—whether academics, librarians, or curators—try to fight for up-to-date research and interpretation. The politics of knowledge and the emotional attachments to nation can threaten to sweep up nearly all before them. Well-funded centers devise presidential executive orders on issues ranging from comic books to communists, monuments to national pride, sexuality to the many ways of imagining “patriotism.” Sometimes one side declares victory, whether by creating or removing a monument, cancelling or curating an exhibit, eliminating budgets or scrubbing websites, or writing a book about a triumph or failure of historical engagement. “Good” history can be both a casualty or a result of these wars. These days, the body counts are rising, and the media is losing track of how to record the casualties.25
At the beginning of the twentieth century, an early history war broke out over American textbooks. With waves of new immigrants arriving on American shores, a ferocious dispute ensued over the purpose of schooling: Was learning history a means to establish civic virtue and national loyalty, the past as a “sacred temple” where young people learned obedience to a single nationalist narrative; or, was history to teach reflective, critical engagement with the past to equip young people for the conflicts of their world? This debate is as old as that most democratic of American institutions—the public school. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of public schools increased almost five-fold. By 1920, 2.2 million students were enrolled in public high schools; how better to “Americanize” these teeming urban masses than by teaching a common heritage?26
Many patriotic texts were available, but as of about 1910, professional historians entered the growing market. David Saville Muzzey became the most prominent and controversial author of textbooks, with many editions and millions of copies sold through the 1920s and 1930s. A progressive historian, but certainly no radical, a Boston Brahmin with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and also a faculty member there, Muzzey did not offer what guardians of youth and nationalism wanted, especially in the wake of the Red Scare and a violent racial environment in 1919. He did not like labor unions, wrote about Reconstruction as a disaster because of Black suffrage, and portrayed Native Americans as backward and inferior. But he wrote about conflicts critically and portrayed a history that had forged widespread poverty in a capitalist society. Superpatriots in the popular press portrayed Muzzey’s book as “treason,” and a form of “sedition” in the schools. Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, which argued that the Founding Fathers were a propertied class serving only their own interests and not the noble geniuses of balanced government, also came under bitter attack for alleged anti-Americanism. These authors were accused of many sins; among the nicer ones were that their writing was “libelous, vicious, and damnable,” and full of “filthy lies and rotten aspersions.” Some city school systems banned Muzzey’s and Beard’s work, as well as other textbooks.27
Muzzey’s original text, titled An American History, changed titles and content over the decades. Still selling in droves as it reached over eight hundred pages in the 1930s, the book became A History of Our Country. A 1939 edition took the American saga all the way through the New Deal, about which Muzzey wrote with fairness and admiration. Muzzey’s critics in the press, some of whom made careers attacking him and many other noted historians, may have been touched off by the brief introduction of the book, “The Past in the Present.” Muzzey did not want students engaged in any form of memorization or recitation; he wanted them to pay attention first, he said, to newspaper headlines, magazine articles, radio broadcasts, and dinner table discussions to begin to grasp why history mattered. Events in history, he claimed, were “not sudden accidents,” nor were they sprung from the “head of Zeus.” Stage by stage, he offered his young readers, the “biography … of our country.” Muzzey told stories. To the critics of these professionals, the “present” loomed as dangerous territory for a school history class.28
The tactics of the critics were no different than today’s: ad hominem assaults on the ideology and character of authors. Today we are called “radical left lunatics” and accused of liberal “indoctrination,” often without the slightest evidence. Our “sanity” is questioned in a presidential executive order. To protect secondary curriculums, the right-wing saviors of schools in the 1920s fought “indoctrination” and created the Patriotic League for the Preservation of American History, which issued a guidebook, Treason to American Tradition: The Spirit of Benedict Arnold Reincarnated in United States History Revised in Text Books. The group’s founder, the journalist Charles Grant Miller, published a book titled The Poisoned Loving-Cup, which was a kind of public indictment of an entire generation of professional scholars. Miller’s organization began the politicization of the term revisionist as an epithet used repeatedly in our history ever since as a public condemnation of interpretations one does not agree with.29
History wars abound in the past. From 1935 to 1939, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration created the Federal Theatre Project as part of the Works Progress Administration. In four extraordinary years the project managed, under the intrepid leadership of the drama professor Hallie Flanagan, to stage over one thousand productions in twenty-nine states, witnessed by some 30 million Americans, approximately two-thirds of whom had never seen a play. Project managers adapted William Shakespeare and many other traditional playwrights, but also numerous new works about all manner of contemporary and historical issues. Past and present exploded on stages coast to coast, as plays addressed race, women, workers, slavery, and the rise of fascism. The “Negro units” became a primary mode of employment for Black artists. The national project brought performances to asylums, orphanages, hospitals, prisons, and veterans’ homes. But its existence offended staunch conservatives who accused the Federal Theatre Project of espousing radicalism and communism, launching a major culture war, this time over the role of government in the arts. In 1939, Martin Dies, a bigoted and ambitious Republican representative from Texas, took the chairmanship of the first incarnation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Nothing short of American “democracy” was at stake, claimed both sides, in the Dies Committee hearings, which riveted the nation in newspapers and over radio.30
Dies and his right-wing benefactors established the “playbook,” as the theater scholar James S. Shapiro has recently written, for how to take down pluralistic, creative, open arts and scholarship by overhyped, scurrilous propaganda claiming to save national morality. The Federal Theatre Project, despite widespread popularity, was killed by the Right and even by some New Dealers themselves within FDR’s administration. When the Federal Theatre Project launched an expensive adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, a terrifying story of the rise of fascism in America staged in eighteen cities; a version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with an all-Black cast, done in Harlem; One Third of a Nation, a stunning revelation of slum life; and Liberty Deferred, a compelling history of American racism, the project may have ensured its political doom with its enemies by the very measure of its success. The Federal Theatre Project remains a historical template for how culture wars are fought, won, and lost.31
Post–World War II scholarship mostly put to rest earlier victories of the old progressive historians as prophets of “relativism” over “objectivity.” The chief critique of the progressives had always been that they were driven by a “misguided presentism.” One of my favorite sentences in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream is this swipe at the consensus school: “With that recurrent conceit that is always guaranteed to produce a wry smile a generation later, postwar historians often assured themselves and others that whereas previous generations of historians had produced work deformed by contemporary preconceptions and preoccupations, their own historical writing was not thus disfigured by ‘presentism.’”32
And then came loyalty oaths, hysteria, loathsome tactics by real communists, and all manner of McCarthyism. This phenomenon is often seen as a terrible, if temporary, onslaught against free thought and speech, a red scare that came and went. Its roots, though, were very deep well before anyone had heard of Joseph McCarthy. Anticommunism was ubiquitous in American politics and media during World War II and in its immediate aftermath, and the Left has no clean record for red-baiting. In the wake of the war, as conservatives swarmed back into Congress in the midterm election of 1946 and as many left or liberal historians and other academics lost big with Henry Wallace’s failed Progressive campaign in 1948, dissent cooled or died. The Cold War chilled nearly everything. Communists were banned from speaking on many campuses, even younger historians sought “vital centers,” and utopian ideas were considered unwelcome or ridiculous. Not only did irony and complexity experience resurgence or dominance in visions of history, but even the idea of “tragedy” made a comeback. None of this should surprise us about a generation or two that endured the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, and the American use of the atomic bomb. I do think Novick missed something in calling all these trends “deeply conservative.” Too many still just refuse to digest the insights of Reinhold Niebuhr, who left a mark of wisdom all over American thought in the midtwentieth century. No one scorched American vanities quite like Niebuhr, who made irony and tragedy modes of national self-understanding for those who would listen. “The crown of irony lies,” he wrote, “in the fact that the most obvious forms of success are involved in failure.” All Babylons will eventually fall, one way or another, he preached. That is why “laughter and understanding” are the proper ultimate “response to irony.” We need a Niebuhrian irony to endure our current Trumpian Babylon.33
McCarthyism in its many guises destroyed lives and careers, stymied others, and left a legacy still felt or even useful in academic circles. In this sense, it was a history war like no other; it turned like-minded intellectuals and teachers on each other. In those years, unlike now, institutions such as schools and universities were less at stake than targeted individuals. As Ellen Schrecker has shown, at least one hundred academics were fired as alleged communists or for taking the Fifth Amendment in hearings or investigations. Most American academics essentially embraced a Cold War consensus and believed that real communists should not teach on campuses. Loyalty oaths, especially in California, destroyed many more careers for those who refused the demands. When HUAC targeted Hollywood with a vengeance, all Americans learned the meaning of the word blacklist, those in support of them and those not. Fear-driven self-censorship swept through universities, the liberal leadership of which practiced their own brands of chilling anticommunism.34
Right wing propaganda groups attacked public schools as dens of “Reducators,” and mass-produced pamphlets with titles such as “How Red Are Your Schools?” Many school systems produced lists of banned books by authors such as Howard Fast and many others. Civics textbooks came under special scrutiny as the most likely vulnerable to communist infiltration. The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its files to school boards and administrators who wished to probe teachers’ views, and, according to Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, answered nine hundred such inquiries. All of these measures had a profoundly chilling effect on teachers. Clay Risen reports in Red Scare that thousands left the profession in the 1950s and an unknown number chose never to join, causing a teacher shortage just as school construction boomed and baby-boomers had many children. As Schrecker has also said, McCarthyism ended for a wide array of reasons, including the emergence of the civil rights movement and the Republican loss of congressional elections in 1954.35
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower condemned McCarthy and his enablers, they were doomed. Even before the 1954 elections, Eisenhower went to Dartmouth College in June 1953 and in a commencement address admonished the graduates:
Don’t join the book burners. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? … They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.
Eisenhower, it turns out, was not a very good culture warrior. He was a states’ rightist and did not take well to civil rights activism. But at least he did not yet practice the style of wedge-issue politics at which his party would become so adept. Devise a compelling, frightening big lie, shout it out repeatedly in ever more powerful forms of media, worry about its justifications later, when it already has achieved a patina of “truth.” Then, declare truth itself either alternative or irrelevant.36
What is to be done today? Where are we now with the legacies of all the earlier history wars? And we have not even touched upon the many tensions over multiculturalism, national history standards, the creation of the Holocaust Museum, the Columbian quincentennial, the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the meaning of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the wave of controversy over monuments and all things neo-Confederate in the wake of the Charleston massacre of 2015. And then in 2020 was the death of George Floyd, and the swirling ideological battles over protests, support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and its occasional leftist excesses in language, curriculum, and public demands. My colleague Beverly Gage provides a ray of hope for those of us defending open minds, universities, and schools. She says the far Right lacks a single issue around which to forge “consensus.” I do not find solace in that. It is true that the Trump administration does not have a national “consensus” on most of its obsessions, even on immigration detention and enforcement. Even so, every day the administration uses an elected authoritarian willing to push beyond the limits of the Constitution, beyond tried-and-true norms, beyond the rights of the free press, beyond the rule of law, and beyond the hard-won bulwarks of academic freedom to frighten, extort, and even destroy the very idea of the American university, the public school, and the study of history as we have practiced it.37
But they will not defeat us as a collective profession—not because we are inherently good people but because a functioning civil society, with faith in education as the essence of mobility and a free society, needs us. We represent an important public good. Countless American historians awaken each day to do their jobs as teachers and scholars, but they also try to enter the public fray to defend our craft and, in effect, our country.
During the fall 2024 semester, I taught a special course, “Can It Happen Here Again? Yale, Slavery, and the Civil War Era.” The course was open to undergraduates and the entire New Haven and university community. Some 350 people attended regularly, most from the public. Without knowing the outcome, of course, of the 2024 presidential election, I assigned Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. The book—a brutal, violent, and harrowing story of how fascism had taken over the United States in the 1930s—turned out to be more relevant and poignant than I could have imagined. The main character in Lewis’s story of how a democracy collapsed in violent autocracy is the small-town Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup. The book captured widespread anxieties swirling in the nation during the mid-1930s, and it became a massive best seller. Doremus is a frustrated historian who loves to retreat to his attic library to read, until the larger crisis forces him into resistance and eventual imprisonment. His “liberal” instincts and his faith in any political ideals are crushed as his life seems to survive every vulnerability and mental assault of fascism, even failing fascism. But, astonishingly, survive he does. In the last line of the book, Lewis says, as if to all of us today, “a Doremus Jessup can never die.”38
Fleeing across the Canadian border and back again, seeking yet another safe outpost of a resistance movement, his family and most friends all gone, in Lewis’s novel, Jessup reflects on what he actually still believes. “More and more, as I think about history,” says Jessup to himself, “I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.” Historians and teachers: We cannot be silenced.39
Notes
This article was the presidential address from the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians on April 5, 2025.
David W Blight, Historians' Voices in Times of Peril, Journal of American History, Volume 112, Issue 3, December 2025, Pages 445–460, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaf196
This is Awesome! Thank You Professor Glaude!! Always Appreciate You Truth and Wisdom! May God Bless You! Love and Prayers to Mom and Dad💗💗💗💗💗💗🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
Evil will not prevail.