I read an offhanded comment in a post today which noted that a couple of Reddit threads which addressed a similar question to OPs were a bit old, but that the third link was recent and a good read. That got me wondering. Those 'old' answers were obviously younger that this sub, and they're already losing authority.
Is influencing those who come after the best that any historian can realistically hope for while writing in his time?
Do you have to accept that certain things you write about, and terms or phrases you use, are going to sound bigoted or prejudiced in a few decades, in areas you have no reason to suspect society will become sensitive to?
In AskHistorians specifically, sometimes an answer being called "old" can mean it's from the earliest years of the sub when standards were...not what they are now. If you comb through sections of the FAQ that haven't been revamped in the last 8 months or so (still a substantial portion, unfortunately), you'll catch a LOT of these. Suffice to say there is a lot of block-quoting from Wiki.
As far as historians more generally, I think it's fair to say we are all on a spectrum between two points: (a) History is THE BEST and I want to know EVERYTHING and I want to understand EVERYTHING the BESTEST and the RIGHTEST OH MY GOSH, and (b) This is my territory and I am right about it. In general, I tend to see people tilt wonderfully towards the former.
First, scholars' views change over time. /u/commustar and I were discussing the work of Timothy Pauketat, North American archaeologist and grandmaster of Cahokia research the other day--one of Pauketat's recent books is Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions, in which among other things, he argues that "chiefdom" is a broken term for understanding past civilizations (specifically Eastern Woodlands and Mississippian Native Americans; similar criticism has been levelled at e.g. scholars of early Africa)--not just useless, but actually misleading, since it carries with it modern assumptions about simplicitly/complexity and the homogenizing tendency to view "chiefdoms" as structurally similar. Well...Chiefdoms/Delusions was published in 2007. Pauketat's foundational-to-Cahokia-research first book, published in 1994? The Ascent of Chiefs.
Second, challenges from other researchers mean something really important that's often hidden from those working in popular field: other people paying attention to your topic! This can be as focused as "the textual transmission of Piers Plowman among women" or as broad as "Pacific islander political history." More research means more knowledge, period. There are unfortunately some scholars who will double-down on their first theory in the face of additional information (my master's thesis resulted from noticing the changing details of footnotes on the same piece of information in the body text over someone's career), but again, I generally see people psyched to go to an entire conference panel on the obscure person they research, or so eager to hear about a new book in their field.
Your last question, OP, is a little different, and I think refers to the "everyone in the past was a horrible person by today's standards" problem ('...she's quite progressive for her time because she puts Jews in the nice part of hell.') On the face of it, the answer is pretty clearly that scholars go along with what is "trendy" in scholarship at a given moment because it gets you published, and that's important. More seriously--I think historians (and scholars of various things in the past, like 19th century literature or 18th century art or whatever) are both keenly aware of this problem and accepting of it. It is what it is. We all have to just sort of embrace that our "good" subjects (I am not talking about people who were objectively horrible here) would not be so good if you plopped them in today's world, and study them in their own contexts. Hopefully our work, too, will be studied in its context when scholars in 100 years are writing the historiography of our field.
I mean, is it annoying to think I'm wrong? Yeah. I have an AH answer that I was super awesome proud of. I used like 15 sources to piece together an answer for OP on a question that's never been comprehensively addressed.
And then two weeks later, I came across a primary source mention (uncited in scholarship, to my knowledge--at least, everyone I've told has been amazed) that blew about 50% of the answer to smithereens. Grrr.
But at least now I know more.
There will, we hope, always be new sources that add more information to the stories we tell.
There will also, we assume, be new perspectives, interpretations, questions to be asked.
Both of these add up to the sensible notion that while we labor to produce the best work we can in our own time, the future may judge it differently. One can hope that one's work today will contribute to that future — that, to some degree, there is some sort of cumulative knowledge production, in the same way that Newton's work, while incomplete by the later standard of Einstein, is still useful and, even in areas where it is surpassed, still made important contributions that led to the "better" state.
On the other hand, I think historians who are thoughtful about knowledge, esp. the kind produced by historians, recognize that there is never going to be any "final story" about the past. There will always be different stories to tell; the idea of some kind of "perfect" version of the past is itself essentially incoherent, even for relatively limited topics. Can there ever be any perfect understanding of the French Revolution? Of slavery? Of World War II? I mean, what would such a thing even look like?
Anyway, it means there will always be needs for historians in the future, which is a good thing.
As for questions about future sensibilities: we all live in our own contexts and can only be as thoughtful and sensitive as we can be. Terminologies change over time and that is hard to predict or help. One does one's best. If that leads to future judgment — so be it. It is better to try and say something true, and be judged wrong, than to shrink from the endeavor out of fear of the future, in my view.
I love the answers on this thread, so many good points have been made! A quick note I would like to add is on the use of historiography in the study of a field or subject. (Side note: Unfortunately I have only just earned my BA in History, so I'm not at all what would be considered an expert, please bear with me!) The idea that a historian's work will be considered "old" or "outdated" is really an important factor in this particular field. Historiography is, simply put, the study of how a subject has been studied by historians over time. In my personal experience, I have used this field to study how writers and historians have written about Anne Boleyn, from her contemporaries up to ours. It offers another (albeit meta) layer of understanding of the subject, as well as its historical context. This also helps create an understanding of why we have whatever assumptions or biases towards historical subjects today. So to answer the second question specifically, I believe that, no matter the subject, a historian can hope that their work will not only give insights into how their subject was understood in the historian's own historical context, but also how this subject will be understood in the years to come.