The essay didn’t go over well with the apparently all-powerful woke left. Sweet threw a few obligatory shots at the right, perhaps to assure the left-wing ivory tower that he was being balanced in his piece and that the real villains are on the right. He noted how most of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was in Brazil and the Caribbean, and wrote that it was historically problematic to whitewash the prominent role that African nations played in promoting the slave trade. Sweet also took issue with the increasing description of slavery as a problem unique to the United States. Its essays were shredded by historians and writers across the political spectrum, from some of my colleagues at The Heritage Foundation to the World Socialist Web Site. The Times’ endeavor was full of inaccuracies and ahistorical revisionism. That’s a rather tepid way of describing the 1619 Project. history “spoke to the political moment,” but he “never thought of it primarily as a work of history.” While making his argument, he offered a rather mild critique of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, writing that the reimagining of U.S. Here’s the part that really got Sweet into hot water. This is becoming the norm, especially for social history, not the exception. The book devotes much space to debunking “whiteness” and ambles through the history of the Middle Ages making often factually dubious evaluations and value judgments of people and events from over a millennium ago. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues - race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism - are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines.įor an example of this, I’d point to the recent book The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, written by two history professors. This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. Sweet laid out the problem, which he said is transforming the profession of historian: The American Historical Association president argued that academic historians should focus simply on bringing to life the world of people in the past as it was and as they saw it, instead of framing every historical person or event through a modern “social justice” lens. The whole episode demonstrates how American and other Western institutions have been wholly radicalized in a short amount of time, squandering their reputations and authority. Shortly thereafter, Sweet was mobbed by those who clearly didn’t like his perspective, then issued what looked like a forced confession for his crime. Sweet’s column in the American Historical Association magazine, “Perspectives on History,” argued that “doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.” Sweet, published an essay last week arguing that scholars should bar “presentism” from history. The president of the American Historical Association, James H. Arguing for keeping “presentism” out of history seems like a straightforward argument from an acknowledged history scholar, right?
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