We had a recent thread about this and in my opinion what is mixed up here is the question of historical assessment and the question of which figures a contemporary society chooses to celebrate.

As I wrote in that other thread concerning Dr. Seuss,wWhat I mean – and this is very much colored by my own sub area of history – is that as historians when it comes to assessing Dr. Seuss and Jefferson and other historical figures, we sure do take into account their historical context. E.g. with Seuss, we can and should take a close look at the general discourse concering the Japanese and Japanese Americans at the time and draw a connection between what that discourse was and Seuss' cartoons, in the sense of how they were influenced by it and in turn further influenced the discourse themselves. We can also look for similar influences in his other work and so forth.

When I study the Nazis, in order to understand their actions and the reasons behind them, I am very much forced to explore their stereotypes and ideological ideas in-depth and examine why they took hold, how they took hold, how widely they were held, and how they came about.

But does the fact that we can understand Nazi ideology in a historical context of European anti-Semitism and post-WWI Germany does not mean that we should not find their actions morally and politically reprehensible today.

Because the question, what and whom we as a contemporary society chose to celebrate, hold up as an example and revere while linked to a historical assessment within the context of their time is not solely dependent on this assessment but also linked with what images and traditions we want to project of our society and hold up as worthy.

The reason why we as a society want to and should celebrate for example Sojourner Truth or Rosa Parks is not solely related to their courageous actions against a system of injustice in their time but also because we as a society or as individuals want these actions to stand as examples to live up and aspire to in the sense of also standing up courageously to injustice. So, when it comes to the question of which figures to celebrate and revere, it is not just about their time but also about ours.

While undeniable that important things historically happened under Jackson's presidency, the question if we as a society want to celebrate him as an exemplary president, who's legacy people should live up to, is not answered yet (and the answer is no, if you ask me).

The Stalinist Soviet Union played an undeniable important role historically in liberating Europe from the dangers of Nazism and Fascism – but that doesn't mean we should celebrate it as a shining example of virtue to aspire to.

This also applies to slave holding presidents in that sense, that, yes, historians will access them and will find that slave holding was normalized in their day despite the fact that due to the moralities they shared with ours also at the time did recognize the wrongness of slavery, at least partially. Yet, when it comes to the question if we as a society should celebrate them as shining examples of virtue we want to us to inspire, there needs to be a place for the full historical assessment and we have to ask ourselves the question if in terms of providing examples for society and people we want to overlook that they were the products of a time deeply racist – and if we instead of holding them as products of these times up as exemplary if we shouldn't critically assess that time and its continuing legacy it has to this day.

In that vein, the question if we want to make them part of what at this moment in time represents what our society wants to celebrate is not solely historical anymore, it is also influenced and shaped by what kind of society we want to be and what we want to celebrate as good and righteous.

I do not have the expertise to comment on this subject, but there have been some threads with very good discussions between many of the flaired members here.

Why do historians reject moral presentism? asked by by /u/qspec02.

And

Can anyone help me understand presentism and morality? asked by /u/124876720.

(I limited my search to the past year.)

The gist of it seems to be that moral presentism is detrimental to considering historical figures within their own time.

To me as an amateur, it seems that using our own morality to judge historical figures instead of attempting to understand the context of an individual tends to reduce characters to binary figures (much as many "moral judgements" tend to today). And that is not helpful to the study of history.

This is mostly my own opinion (as I believe that is what you're asking for; correct me if I'm wrong).

Edit: I fear I've rambled a bit. Oftentimes what makes perfect sense to me can be complete nonsense for others. Not insinuating that anyone here is dumb, but I know I can have a tendency to make less and less sense, thus the TL,DR.

TL,DR: No, they shouldn't. It's all based on context. These same men if they lived today would have doubtlessly found the practices as disgusting as we do. We are all affected by the society we live in and the morality that-that society has accepted as the norm.

I've certainly observed a lot of historically 'good guys' have their names smeared for engaging in what amounted to standard practice when they were alive. Why this happens could really be any number of things. Everyone wants to erase the shame of their past even though were it not for that shame progress wouldn't have taken place and then continue to take place.

As for judging these men and women, I feel that context is everything when it comes to understanding their motives, actions, and very way of life. Many great men in history have done what by modern standards amount to 'evil' deeds but that does not diminish the fact that they were great men. It merely shows that they were victims of circumstance. In 1863 the London Anthropological Society published, "The Negro's Place in Nature," which was an attempt to scientifically justify slavery. The men who wrote it weren't 'evil,' those that read it and accepted it weren't either, and those that rejected it weren't 'good,' not for the time they lived in. If something like that were published today, it would be unilaterally condemned, but back then it was completely acceptable.

Something like owning slaves, which by our modern standards is seen(and rightly so) as barbaric and cruel, was completely acceptable when it was practiced. Had it been widely accepted as 'evil' when it was practiced and these people had persisted regardless, then I could see the base for accusing them of being bad men, but judging everyone from history under the scope of our modern moral code without first understanding what their moral code was is pointless. I imagine that in 100 years people will look to 2017 and think all kinds of negative things about the people of today. Say (hypothetically) that some controversial thing like abortion becomes outlawed and taboo by 2117 and the pro-choice people of today are slandered and hated for that one specific belief. Today they are heralded as generally good and decent people by our standards not because they were pro-choice, but because they contributed positively to society.

At the end of the day, what we happen to be or believe shouldn't have any bearing on what we do unless it is that belief that prompted us to take action in the first place. Jefferson, Columbus, Wilson, Washington, they all did good for their people and in the time they lived they were heroes in their people's eyes. It doesn't mean we need to regard them as heroes, but we shouldn't diminish what they did simply because of what the world around them encouraged them to believe.

Another part of the answer that I haven't (yet) seen anyone else post: historians, and scholars generally, first and foremost want to understand the past, and then and only then (if at all) judge it.

If we just say that everyone who owned slaves was a terrible person -- which may or may not be true -- and leave it at that, that puts a stop to the dialogue. A historian might want to know why people owned slaves, or why it was more prevalent in one area than another, or what arguments slave-owners used to justify it to themselves, or even how it affected the larger culture. In my area of expertise, ancient history, we might talk about, say, the gladiatorial games, and want to research the lives of gladiators, or how common the institution really was, what other people at the time thought of it, etc.

Just saying "They did it because they're bad people" -- which, again, may or not be true -- makes it difficult to research those other topics or to discuss them with other scholars.

Personally, I usually try, one the one hand, to keep hold of what I think are real ethical advances in our own day (slavery really is bad, so that has to detract somewhat from Washington), while still putting historical figures in their own context and judging them accordingly (Washington was, by all accounts, a better master than most, and even if not he certainly did a lot of other good and noble things; he can't have been a villain). Yes, there were abolitionists in his day, but I can't blame someone for not having the intellect or unerring moral compass to realize that some things that were perfectly normal and acceptable in their societies, that they saw every day of their lives pass uncriticized, were actually evil. Washington isn't a monster because he wasn't a saint.

Yes, I think it's perfectly appropriate -- though as historians, we should be doing much more than just judging people's morality, if we seek to actually understand the past for what it was.

Moral absolutes don't, by definition, change, and consequently I cannot (for example) in good conscience say that slavery is always a moral evil while making excuses for people who practiced it in the past. It is true that different people, cultures, times, and places have different moral systems, and I have to recognize that something I feel to be morally obvious may not be obvious to others around me -- especially in the past. But that doesn't mean that all morality is relative. If my principles are sound, then the time or place doesn't change their soundness, and I would be violating my conscience by holding the past to a special standard.

That said, judging the past only gets us so far. Jefferson is dead, and he doesn't care what we say about him -- judging him is something we do for ourselves, not for him. It's important for our own moral health to be honest about the complicated way he was able to blind himself to the lack of freedom in his own house while writing eloquent defenses of freedom in public, and we shouldn't hesitate to condemn him for his hypocrisy. This is valuable, as the past can teach moral lessons for the present: we learn to identify evils in our own society by identifying them in the past.

But we can say much more interesting things about Jefferson's hypocrisy than just calling him a bad man. The fact that he -- and the rest of white Western Europe -- was able to live with such radical cognitive dissonance tells us a lot about how people thought and acted in the 18th century. If we want to really understand their motives, their actions, the writings they left behind, and their impact on the world we continue to live in, we need to dig into their ideas on their own terms, taking for example Jefferson's belief in the fundamental rightness of his actions seriously (even though I would say this belief was wrong), and doing our best to wrap our heads around the logic that made their moral world make sense to them. We need to practice empathy, and not just write off people in the past as monsters. But we can practice empathy without sacrificing our own moral judgment.

Is there an uptick? No, I don't think so. If you read old historiography, it's full of moral judgments (declining societies, primitive peoples, barbarous actions...look at the adjectives historians used in the past!). More recently, it's been the trend to stay away from this language, as it can color our ability to fairly analyze the past if we start by writing it off as 'barbarous' or backwards, and perhaps we're seeing a bit of backlash against that now as more historians (myself included) realize that having empathy doesn't mean making excuses for people in the past. Yet these kinds of moral judgments have always been a part of history writing -- not the only part, and not I think the most important part, but part nonetheless of making sense of our place in time vis-a-vis the people who came before us.