Why is U.S. history the most important academic field right now?
Every academic discipline has its moment. Has history taken a flawed approach to seizing this one?
This is my monthly newsletter, where I work out the ideas I’ve been obsessed with lately. Today, I have an essay about history for you. There’s an update on my forthcoming book, The End of Burnout, at the end.
When I was a physics major in college, my professors believed that theirs was the highest field of study, the one that answered the most fundamental questions of the universe. Indeed, that mythology was a big reason I was drawn to physics. I wanted to have those unsurpassable answers.
One of my professors — indeed, one of the best teachers I have ever had — argued that every other academic discipline could either be reduced to physics or was just irrelevant babbling. To him, biology and sociology were the same, just “naming things.” You could shut down pretty much every other academic department without consequence. Except for math. Physics doesn’t work without math.
The reasons for physics’ supremacy were, of course, contingent on events outside of science. Some of my professors’ own mentors had worked on the Manhattan Project. During the Cold War, physics was a matter of geopolitical significance. Figures like Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Stephen Hawking opined on all manner of topics, and the public accepted their authority.
Physics wasn’t always on top. In the thirteenth century, the “queen of the sciences” was theology. The Enlightenment deposed the queen, though when I was studying religion in grad school two decades ago, one of my professors, a rumpled yet arrogant Brit, believed theology still reigned supreme, that nothing else made sense without it.
Every discipline seems to have its day. Psychology in the 1930s. Literary theory in the 1980s. Sociology in the 2000s, until it was usurped by behavioral economics.
Today, U.S. history swaggers across the public stage, seen by some as a threat to American greatness, to others as the country’s savior. President Biden invited historians to the White House a few months ago to advise him on an ambitious economic and climate agenda. Historians are on TV all the time. History professor Heather Cox Richardson has the top-earning Substack, raking in over a million dollars a year. If you go on Twitter (and you shouldn’t), you’ll soon encounter someone writing a long, tedious thread about a current news item, beginning with something like, “Hi, actual historian here!”
Why is this history’s moment? And why U.S. history in particular? No one in government or media thinks European or Asian or African history explains the world. Rachel Maddow is not booking experts on Ottoman society for her show.
Now, some of my best friends are U.S. historians. I don’t mean to question what they do. But I have often wondered why what they do seems as urgent now as physics did in the mid-twentieth century, or as theology did in the thirteenth. There are so many ways one might attempt to comprehend the present conditions of our world. That’s why we have whole universities, to give us options about how to understand things. Why, right now, does everyone want to look to the past?
I got closer to an answer after reading the Princeton historian Matthew Karp’s essay in Harper’s, “History as End.” (Some evidence of history’s current cultural significance: the covers of both Harper’s and Time magazine read, “The History Wars” when I saw them on a newsstand recently.) Karp does not directly answer the question of why history ascended the throne a few years ago, but he does explain how both liberals and conservatives are viewing history right now. In short, while the right has given up on serious history in favor of trolling (“Did you know the people who defended slavery were Democrats??”), the center-left has adopted a vision of historical stasis, in which America’s “original sin” of slavery, or the white supremacy in the country’s “DNA,” determines social outcomes today. The most prominent instance of this approach is in the New York Times’s 1619 Project, whose authors argued that present-day capitalism, traffic, music, and medicine are all continuous with a historical crime the country cannot expiate.
So how did this outlook help launch history to the forefront of academic disciplines? Around 2014, following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the first Black Lives Matter protests, American public discourse took a renewed interest in questions of race — and this only a few years after some white liberals imagined a “post-racial” America following Barack Obama’s election to the presidency. When the discourse shifted, historians were ready. They had already developed the “original sin” mode of talking about race and racism as a way to explain 21st-century America. As the Trump presidency made questions of race more urgent, so did it make the need to know the history of racism that led to Trump. If history is not about change but about continuity, then being an expert on the past is no impediment to speaking authoritatively about the present.
Other fields, inside academia and out, have followed U.S. history’s lead. Journalists like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones have helped turn their field toward history. The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, currently a journalism professor at Columbia, is a former professor of U.S. history.
Despite seeming to condemn so much of America’s past and present institutions to irredeemable racism, this approach to history, including the 1619 Project, has been embraced in mainstream liberal circles, including within Congress and the White House. Coates was widely praised for his 2014 essay on the history of racist housing policy and his call for reparations. Granted, conservatives have railed against the 1619 Project and the focus on race in teaching history. They have even tried to ban it from schools.
But not all critics of this approach come from the right. To Karp, the historical focus on origins and continuity overlooks how U.S. history is enmeshed in world history, including the history of enslavement up and down this hemisphere. He also contends that negative conditions today, like economic inequality, don’t spring simply from a 400-year-old crime but from more recent inventions like deregulation and financialization. Worst of all, for Karp, the “original sin” view can’t account for the times in U.S. history when racism has been beaten back:
Thus [this view of history] offers no way to understand either the fall of Richmond in 1865 or its symbolic echo in 2020, when an antiracist coalition emerged whose cultural and institutional strength reflects undeniable changes in American society. The 1619 Project may help explain the “forces that led to the election of Donald Trump,” as the Times executive editor Dean Baquet described its mission, but it cannot fathom the forces that led to Trump’s defeat—let alone its own Pulitzer Prize.
Bear in mind, Karp is no Obama-esque evangelist for the long arc of history bending toward justice. That older liberal view is also severely flawed, to his eyes. Rather, he sees the past as always serving present struggles toward a justice that is neither foreordained nor forever out of reach. As Karp argues elsewhere, in 1850 it looked like slavery would expand in the U.S. and its nascent empire. Instead, it was decisively ended. If you want things to change, you first need to admit that they do.
The heyday of physics is long gone. Today, particle physicists have a hard time getting their big projects funded. They now even claim to have evidence that objective reality doesn’t exist, which seems to me like an epic self-own; if there is no objective reality, then why are you investigating it, huh, smart guy?
History’s moment will pass, too. If we believe Karp, then the big question is whether, during history’s time atop the throne, Americans can use it to disprove, through their own agency, the very assumptions that guided the field’s ascent.
Book update
I recently got page proofs for The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, which is coming out right at the beginning of 2022. The pages I have look like the pages you will get to read in early January. It’s pretty cool to see them. I think the pages are well-designed and the whole thing will be very reader-friendly.
I was particularly struck by seeing the epigram page, which also serves as a dedication page because the only thing on it is a quote from my father, who passed away in 2018: “You don’t have to like it. That’s why it’s called work.” Seeing his name in small caps, with his birth and death dates, stirred something in me.
If you visit the book’s webpage, you can preorder a copy through the publisher, University of California Press, or through some other vendor.
Preorders are important for books’ commercial success. They signal to booksellers that there is interest, and that interest tends to snowball. So if you can preorder a copy, I would be grateful. Another way to support my work is to share this newsletter with people you think might like reading it. This mailing list is like gold to me. You are my core audience. Let’s get more people to join us.
Thanks for reading, and for your longtime support.
Jon