What are the biggest disagreements in Academic History right now?

by Alpy94
SadDoctor

Well, in my field of modern East Asia, there's still a ton of disagreement over pretty much all aspects of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. It's not only complex history, it's politically sensitive, and tends to invite a lot of heated resistance to changes in interpretation. The historiography from after the war up until at least the 1960s (and often much later) tended to emphasize the bombs as THE cause of Japan's surrender, considered the bombings to be fundamentally legitimate (if horrible) acts of war, and assumed that the bombs were a unique threat that commanded attention from the Japanese. The narrative also tends to be focused almost exclusively on American decision-making processes, with relatively little attention paid to the Japanese viewpoint, and when it was presented it was usually presented as part of a singular body - Americans are presented as individuals, while Japanese portions of the history are just "the Japanese." This was partly out of an American-centric viewpoint, partly a lack of good Japanese documented sources available right after the war, and also because a lot of the people writing the histories couldn't read or write in Japanese, so they didn't even try.

To steal a passage from Ward Wilson in Foreign Policy

When the story of Hiroshima is told in most American histories, the day of the bombing — Aug. 6 — serves as the narrative climax. All the elements of the story point forward to that moment: the decision to build a bomb, the secret research at Los Alamos, the first impressive test, and the final culmination at Hiroshima. It is told, in other words, as a story about the Bomb.

More recent revisionist works have presented all kinds of different interpretations and problems with this narrative. The Soviet Union is usually given a more important role, as Stalin's invasion of Manchuria was a major worry for the Japanese leadership, who had hoped Stalin could act as a middle-man to negotiate better peace terms between Japan and the West. The bombs' uniquely destructive nature is challenged as well; Japan had already faced massive bombing against almost all major Japanese cities, for a few more cities to be bombed was novel only in the type of weapon used. There's also been great work done in identifying the various individuals and factions in Japanese politics, and how their own disagreements and feuds helped shape Japanese policy. And rather than looking like a monolithic whole, blindly dedicated to their emperor, as Japan had been typically depicted, recent historians have shown deep divisions in Japanese society and politics.

The old view of Japan during WW2 and the end of the war is definitely shifting, but there's still a fair amount of reflexive pushback against these new interpretations, and even the revisionists often disagree with each other over what factors were more important than others. I'm in Asian history, where much of these revisions are widely accepted, but I've seen wildly different interpretations still coming from say, American military historians.

I can add a booklist if anyone wants it, although the subreddit wiki has a pretty good selection on this topic iirc.

lordtreacle

There's a more recent revision of the 1970s. (British history). The traditional narrative is that the global downward trend brought about recession, the trade unions held up growth and the government did not know how to proceed with policy given the breakdown in Keynesian policy options (the presence of 'stagflation' working against the intuition of the Phillips curve).

This all culminated in the 'winter of discontent' of 1978-1979, the year before Thatcher was elected. This was a winter where there were bin strikes, graver strikes and a general sense of collapse. It was more of a public crisis than anything else

The 'revisionist' approach is that Britain did not decline in the 1970s, it is just believed to be that way. Accounts focus either on the 'monetary policy neglect thesis' - that monetarist policies where pursued in the early 1970s through 'competition and credit control' demonstrates that the government weren't just doing nothing. Growth also wasn't that bad, it just wasn't as high as it had been in the golden years of growth under Bretton Woods.

td;lr traditional historians thought the 1970s in Britain sucked eggs, revisionist historians reckon it wasn't so bad.