I am a history professor at one of the universities under attack by the Trump Administration. I am also a flag-waving patriot with an abiding love of the United States.
Those two statements might seem surprising, or contradictory, if you do not know what has happened to the teaching and writing of American history in the last fifty years. According to the executive order President Donald Trump issued earlier this year, historians have rewritten American history and replaced “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]That’s not true. There has been a change, but it has been driven by facts rather than ideology. Why do historical interpretations change? We expect medicine to make progress thanks to new scientific research, but isn’t the past over? No, it isn’t. In the middle of the twentieth century, understandably proud of America’s indispensable role in defeating totalitarian autocracy, historians tended to emphasize our nation’s undeniable achievements. Especially since the 1960s, in part because of the Black freedom struggle, feminism, and other social movements that challenged prevailing distributions of power in the Unted States, historians have been asking different questions and probing other dimensions of our past. Combining old and new methods, including the discovery of previously unknown sources and the use of statistical analysis, historians digging in the archives have uncovered solid evidence concerning the expansion of freedom for many Americans and the denial of freedom for many others. The experiences of enslaved Africans, women, indigenous people, ordinary soldiers, owners of small businesses, and countless other Americans have emerged from a generation’s painstaking research into a new light.
Historians have delivered these truths to the public with the understanding that our entire history should be known. Such knowledge, fully consistent with patriotism, provides an indispensable foundation for debates about contemporary issues. We should, of course, tell stories about the undeniable virtue and valor so many Americans have shown. But to see American history as simply a narrative of heroism would be a lie unbecoming a great nation.
What are historical facts? It is not so simple. Fans of vintage television will remember Sergeant Joe Friday, who insisted that witnesses give him “just the facts.” That is one way to see history–as nothing but an unvarnished chronicle of what happened. But history, like life, is more complicated. From the almost infinite array of information historical actors leave behind them, historians put together interpretations consistent with recognized rules of evidence and reasoning. No generation of scholars can escape the intellectual climate of their own time, and the upheavals in recent decades have reshaped historians’ questions and their answers to those questions. Critically engaging with the prejudices of the present as well as those of the past is central to historians’ role. For decades, historians have been working to provide the public with knowledge about our history grounded in hard facts, knowledge that the president’s order wrongly characterizes as the product of unprofessional bias.
The integrity of historical scholarship is crucial in a democracy. Articles appear in scholarly journals, and books are published by university presses, only after a rigorous, double-blind review process. The identities of authors and reviewers are masked to ensure that the evidence and reasoning meet the profession’s highest standards. Fiery critiques are subject to equally fiery responses from members of the historical profession, who insist that passion cannot take the place of carefully marshaled evidence. That is as it should be. If the pendulum has swung too far toward critique and away from acknowledging progress, and a new balance must be struck, that work must be done by conscientious scholars and teachers, not by political partisans who clamor for “viewpoint diversity” while trying to impose their own views on all Americans.
The executive order contends that “revisionist” historians present the American past as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” One-sided judgments, whether celebrations or condemnations, are met by dissent within the profession. Errors and misjudgments should be identified and corrected, however, not by government officials who demand a particular narrative of our nation’s past but by scholars and teachers adhering to the profession’s demanding standards. Historical facts never speak for themselves. Historians must always balance their own convictions, and their own aspirations for our nation’s future, against the available evidence. Although entitled to their opinions, historians are never entitled to their own facts.
The idea that there are no objective facts, only perceptions, has gained currency in recent decades. Our current president told more than 30,000 documented lies during his first term in office, and he shows no sign of slowing down. Historians cannot permit that approach to our nation’s past. Politicians’ attempts to police our publications, our classrooms, or our museums must fail. We must defend the integrity and independence of historical scholarship. Telling Americans only those parts of our complicated history consistent with preconceived notions of American grandeur is unacceptable to everyone who cherishes our nation and its history. Otherwise we approach the nightmare world of Stalin’s Soviet Union or George Orwell’s 1984, where truth is whatever people in power say it is.
Historians bear a responsibility to craft accounts of our nation’s past firmly grounded in evidence. Without reliable history, Americans cannot know that our Constitution, framed by a generation that fought a bloody war against monarchy 250 years ago, erected sturdy barriers protecting us against executive overreach. Without reliable history, Americans cannot know that the judiciary has a duty to protect those barriers at a time when the majority in Congress has abdicated its responsibility to rein in this president’s unconstitutional and illegal actions. The stories we tell ourselves as a nation must be consistent with objective facts, but they should also be consistent with our democratic ideals, our commitments not only to liberty and individual rights but also to equality and justice for all.
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