My first thought on reading Sweet lament the loss of focus on premodern history was that it probably has more to do with changes in the structure and economy of higher ed than it does with any other political or cultural concerns. Let’s be honest, American higher ed has embraced its role as the producer of an educated workforce in the context of neoliberal global economics. I teach at a small college, and I can not imagine us hiring a historian who could not offer classes that had a broad contemporary appeal with a catchy title. We are lucky to still have historians at all.

I'll be blunt. I think Dr. Sweet is nervous.

Frankly, it's got to be an unsettling position. You spend your entire career researching a topic, "Africans and their descendants in the broader world," and your next project "will focus on the international dimensions of slavery in the United States." (According to your faculty bio, anyway.) You've dedicated your entire life to studying a diaspora, and you're really good at it and well respected in your field, even though you're not of this diaspora yourself. You're actually of a more dominant group, but that makes you objective, right? You can study without involving your personal bias, just as you learned in school, from people of your same group.

And then folks come along who are of the marginalized group you study. Maybe they study that group, same as you! They're studying themselves...can that be objective? They're infusing their own experiences, their own political lenses, into the study. Some of them aren't even historians, they don't have your training, so they're probably not even doing history right in the first place. They don't know that you need to divorce your own views from study of the past. That you analyze not based on how you feel about what happened, but based on facts. Facts happened. Facts are a good solid way to understand history. There's things that happened, and there's how you feel about it, and never the twain shall meet.

Obviously I'm being dramatic for effect here. But this is how it read to me. A white historian who studies Black people didn't like the way Black people studied themselves. He didn't like that they analyzed the past through the lens of what has happened to them as a result of that past. (It didn't happen to him, so he's exempt.)

He knows this, and he apologized specifically to his Black colleagues and friends, saying:

In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.

He wanted to talk about presentism, he wanted to be bold, but he did it by sweeping marginalized historians (especially Black historians) under the rug. He did it by blundering through as a white historian who has been given a role of power by our field. It's worth noting, too, that of the 23 presidents of AHA since the turn of the millennium, we've had one Black man (Tyler Stovall), and one Latina woman (Vicki Ruiz). The other 90% have been white. This is a white profession, and essays like Sweet's serve to keep it that way.

Before anything else, I’d like to highlight this earlier AHA piece by Dr. Sweet that I thought was particularly well written and thoroughly considered. In comparison, this column reads like the start of an idea that went off half-cocked (and this seems to be what Sweet’s implying by “my ham-fisted attempt at provocation” in his update). I can certainly empathize.

I think the question to ask, and one which I didn’t get an answer to in this column, is where exactly is Sweet seeing this presentism? I can’t think of a single journal article or academic monograph I’ve read recently that “ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time”. Can someone point me towards an example? That might lead to more fruitful discussion. As it stands, I just don’t see presentism, in the sense of historians ascribing values and ideas from the present onto past actors, as a serious threat to the integrity of historical scholarship.

That leaves us with the broader public’s perception of history. I can certainly understand how talking about, for example, “homosexuality” in Ancient Greece or “trans identity” in the Pre-Columbian Americas would bring up a slew of complications (they get discussed often on r/AskHistorians). But the debate that I see on the news and at school board meetings doesn’t usually focus on these issues - it’s focused on how race has shaped US history - and how we should talk about it.

As someone who studies colonial history, I’m not sure how to separate race out from the broader narrative. The system of racial inequality that we grapple with today - that is, white superiority and black inferiority - is fundamentally connected with historical events that took place from the 15th century onwards. That’s when the categories of “white” and “black” as we now understand them began to take shape. Sweet himself acknowledges that while our ideas of race have their initial roots in the Mediterranean, they were “forged” closer to their current shape in the Atlantic.

“The early English experience with race and slavery was closely bound to that of Spain, Portugal, and the rest of Europe. As early as the fifteenth century (and before) Iberians created a well-articulated language of racial inferiority and applied it to non Christians and non-whites. By the sixteenth century, ideas about centralized monarchy, governance, humanism, and Christianity were intrinsic to a much broader European identity and were utilized as tools for measuring humankind on other parts of the globe. When Europeans encountered Africans, they often found them lacking European-style religion, government, and respect for individual rights. Moreover, these “uncivilized” Africans were marked by their blackness. The racial nation of “Negroes” that emerged from these cultural and phenotypical differences was a direct contrast to a European “nation” that shared a common “civilization” and a common “whiteness”... In the burgeoning Atlantic, “Europeans” were forged white, free, Christians, while “Negroes” were forged as black, enslaved, heathens.”

Sweet, J. (2003, November 7). Spanish and Portuguese Influences on Racial Slavery in British North America, 1492-1619. Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University, New Haven, CT.

These ideas did not develop in isolation. When the Virginia Assembly decided in 1662 that the children of enslaved people would follow “the condition of the mother”, gender and race were legally intertwined. Through the systems of trade and exchange that developed in the Atlantic world, ideas of race became intimately connected with capitalism. So, when Dr. Sweet asks “ 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?”. I would ask in reply: if we’re going to talk about history post 1492 (and we are), how could we possibly avoid it?

Edit: formatting

One question for me as a history student outside of the US is in how far this "US-centric" discussion is replayed outside the US and what other controversies (similar or not) exist all over the world. Surely different countries/regions/continents either grapple with similar topics but also have their very own, specific contemporary politics that influence how history (as a field of study) is taught and researched. IT'd be great to learn more about those as well.

AskHistorians has long recognized the political nature of our project. History is never written in isolation, and public history in particular must be aware of and engaged with current political concerns. This ethos has applied both to the operation of our forum and to our engagement with significant events.

Years of moderating the subreddit have demonstrated that calls for a historical methodology free of contemporary concerns achieve little more than silencing already marginalized narratives. Likewise, many of us on the mod team and panel of flairs do not have the privilege of separating our own personal work from weighty political issues.

I'm going to be blunt: I hate this. Hate hate hate this. I've spent a lot of time on this subreddit over the years, and even time-to-time contributed answers when questions have brushed against subject matters where I am familiar with academic works. But over the past few years I have browsed less and contributed nothing. Originally I didn't think much of it; interests shift and change and it was of course better to contribute nothing than to give misleading answers. But over time I wondered whether something had shifted with the ethos of the sub and its moderation. There were a couple of instances that seemed to suggest to me it was taking an overt partisan purpose which I felt was at odds with the original intent of the subreddit and what made it originally so captivating to me.

Take for instance perhaps what was the central rule of the subreddit: the 20 year rule. Linked is an explanation by venerable mod /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov about the importance of the rule to the function of the sub: namely that including recent events was fatal to the quality of the sub, because the clouding influence of personal experience, the contentiousness and uncertainty of politics, and the lack of historical remove made it fundamentally impossible to provide quality answers.

Six short (long?) years later and in those two short paragraphs you have quoted you obliterated the original purpose of the 20-year rule, and by extension, of this subreddit. AskHistorians is now, rather than being explicitly opposed to soapboxing is now deliberate in its "political nature." A methodology that excises current politics is now "silencing already marginalized narratives" rather than an effort to promote sober assessment. Eschewing personal experience and anecdotal evidence is now a "privilege" rather than a guiding principle.

Yes, on some level it is impossible to remove the cloud of bias or the influence of one own's experience in academic work. Nevertheless I think it is an ideal to strive for. I see little value in the thought of those who, acknowledging the impossibility of objectivity, seek to tear it down. Six years ago this subreddit's moderators would've agreed with me. Now it would seem they decidedly do not.

I am aware I have no say over the direction of the subreddit. If you wish to turn this into an explicitly political vehicle it is by all means your prerogative. But I would nevertheless lament the decline of what I thought was one of the best places to discuss history and solicit expertise on the internet.

One of the biggest problems in Sweet's article is that he uses Black people as props. This concerns his trip to Ghana, where he commented on an African-American family at the hotel all sharing a copy of The 1619 Project, and African-Americans in general who travel to Elmina in Ghana as a personal history pilgrimage.

As we waited for several members of our party to show up, a group of African Americans began trickling into the breakfast bar. By the time they all gathered, more than a dozen members of the same family—three generations deep—pulled together the restaurant’s tables to dine. Sitting on the table in front of one of the elders was a dog-eared copy of The 1619 Project.

Later that afternoon, my family and I toured Elmina Castle alongside several Ghanaians, a Dane, and a Jamaican family. Our guide gave a well-rehearsed tour geared toward African Americans. American influence was everywhere, from memorial plaques to wreaths and flowers left on the floors of the castle’s dungeons. Arguably, Elmina Castle is now as much an African American shrine as a Ghanaian archaeological or historical site. As I reflected on breakfast earlier that morning, I could only imagine the affirmation and bonding experienced by the large African American family—through the memorialization of ancestors lost to slavery at Elmina Castle, but also through the story of African American resilience, redemption, and the demand for reparations in The 1619 Project.

Yet as a historian of Africa and the African diaspora, I am troubled by the historical erasures and narrow politics that these narratives convey. [...] The erasure of slave-trading African empires in the name of political unity is uncomfortably like right-wing conservative attempts to erase slavery from school curricula in the United States, also in the name of unity. These interpretations are two sides of the same coin.

Sweet never claims to have even spoken with these African-American tourists, let alone talked to them about the trip they were taking or their opinions on The 1619 Project. And yet, he is happy to use this family and their deeply personal trip as strawmen to argue against, positioning them as no better than far-right conservatives for distorting historical narratives to suit their personal politics. This is at best patronizing, and at worst, dangerous, playing straight into fascist rhetoric (which is why Sweet's post has been widely lauded by white supremacists).

As Charles W. McKinney, Director of Africana Studies at Rhodes College, puts it, Sweet "assumes Black people he bumped into have only read one source on slavery." How dare he use this family's monumental and emotional trip to a slave port in Africa to push his agenda? It's so insulting to the Black family to imply that they're wandering willingly down a road of dangerous misinformation just because they read The 1619 Project and went to a tourist destination in Africa that memorializes the slave trade. So what if that's not the slave port African-Americans are most likely to have had their ancestors pass through? How dare he act like he's better than them because he knows a technical detail about how the trans-Atlantic trade worked that he assumes with no evidence that they're not aware of?

Sweet also completely ignores that there are Black scholars who have written plenty about the nuances of representations of the diversity of African responses to the slave trade. When railing against the inaccurate portrayal of Dahomey warriors in a film, he fails to acknowledge, as Dr. Ruby points out here, that plenty of Black scholars have already tread this ground before. Jamai Wuyor expands on that more here with a far more nuanced and, frankly, coherent contribution than Sweet attempts to make. It's totally disingenuous and ignorant of Black scholarship that he is trying to lump this movie about the Dahomey with conservative racist misrepresentations of history as two sides of the same coin.

So in one fell stroke, Sweet has managed to a) reduce Black people to gullible, uncritical consumers of The 1619 Project and other works of public history (like the Elmina memorial) and b) completely ignore that Black scholars have done tons of excellent work on all the subjects he's talking about - and that being Black gives them insights that he doesn't have, and c) play right into the far right's hands. I agree completely with u/woofiegrrl that he is scared of losing status now that Black scholars are being heard more and more.

It does seem fair to say that the current focus on identity as a key lens of historical analysis is deeply rooted in present day discourses.

What I wonder is, what comes after this era? It would be presumptuous to be certain that these discourses will themselves be eternal

For my contribution here, I want to talk about the "apology" that Sweet wrote, and particularly the "Ham-fisted attempt at provocation." As Dr. Erik Wade notes, it's really not provocative at all. Admonitions against "presentism" have consistently been a feature of medieval historiography, often platformed in the most prestigious journals in the field. Sweet seems to view the relative dominance of "modern" history PhDs over pre-modern ones as a case of his beloathed "presentism" so... yay for medieval studies having a stranglehold on its own isolationism? oh wait that's a bad thing.

Anyway, while the main post links some fabulous, fabulous critiques (seriously, read them - they are beautifully poignant as well as brilliantly well-argued, and are well worth your time), I want to re-emphasize: Who is Sweet trying to provoke? He doesn't cite a single case of a professional historian doing this "presentist distorting," he doesn't seem to have a strong sense of what "presentism" even is (moving from history PhD counts to pop culture to curricula to hyper-conservative legal briefs), and he doesn't have a coherent call to action besides "don't do it it's bad for the integrity of the field." In other words, this isn't really targeted at anyone. And then posted on twitter, with no regard to the fact that twitter is filled with people who want proof that this whole "wokeness" thing is Bad, Actually. And so the AHA's twitter got flooded with fascists.

The only surprising thing about this is that it is so unsurprising. Every time there is an event about "public outreach" and "writing for the public" someone asks about twitter, and every time the advice is "don't go on twitter." In fact, what should be clear is that in modern discourse, you must be very confident and clear about who you are writing for, and what audiences are not welcome. As I think the backlash showed, the negligence and privilege that allows a senior white scholar to post such an incoherent, dehumanizing mess under the flimsy guise of "provocation" (and to genuinely believe he was saying something novel???? still unsure about this) poses a much greater threat to the integrity of the profession than the vaguely defined spectre of "presentism".

It's interesting to see this post being linked around Reddit, and to read the (scornful) commentary people are piling on it. What astounded me when I read Dr. Sweet's initial column was that it feels less like someone pushing back against recent events (as the "wokists go too far" crowd takes it) and more like someone pushing back against most history since about 1970.

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.

Essentially, Sweet is saying there should be more "objective" history. People should talk about, for instance, the slave trade without discussing how it impacts the present day, they should analyze early modern political discourse without using a feminist lens, they shouldn't look for hidden LGBTQ+ people in history because that's importing modern identities into the past (they were just crossdressers of opportunity! they were just romantic friendships!), and so on. What this means is either being or pretending to be a cis, straight, white man of a certain socioeconomic context. Many members of this social group scoff at that, because surely you wouldn't say that only they have the capacity to be objective! But that's not what I'm saying, because they aren't actually any more objective. They're just used to their social group's history done under their eye being considered the norm, so they don't realize that they are actually doing the same things they complain about. Look at the "Founding Fathers" being given passes for atrocities or Columbus being rationalized as someone who was no worse than anyone else of his time. There's no inherent difference between that and the bad history Sweet's complaining about at Elmina Castle/in The Woman King ... except that the former is absolutely entrenched and hotly defended in American culture, where it's seen as "unmarked" in anthropological terms, and the latter isn't.

And the truly ironic thing is that while Sweet is bemoaning the possibility of this discourse neutralizing historians' historical expertise in favor of the wokism of the masses, nobody I've seen defending him is actually a historian! What shocked me about the column was that most historians seem to be aware that this is BS, at least on some level; there are certainly lots of problems with all forms of privilege in the academy, but my experience is that that usually comes from an inability to turn these lenses inward and examine their own biases rather than a belief that history shouldn't engage with racism, capitalism, etc. at all. Quite frankly, I tend to see that attitude almost solely from "history buffs" who are flustered because their outdated handling of their own pet topics has been criticized, even if only implicitly by those handling them in more current and nuanced ways.

How does this compare to either Hunt's "Against Presentism" which Sweet cites or Degler's "In Pursuit of American History" as an argument against history becoming too narrowly focused?

As someone just starting a doctoral program this week (onboarding and orientation is tomorrow morning) I already know I'm going to spend far, far too long tonight on reading all of these threads and answers linked in the OP by the mods.

As to Presentism, it's something I've been accused of by a few professors - cishet white men just a few years from retirement - given some of my research as an undergraduate and as a masters' student. In particular, given my research focus on 19th Century United States, specifically focusing on what I myself am calling "Antebellum Marginalized Voices" - LGBTQIA+ communities, people of color, women, etc. - in the 1850s in northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio, I've had some slight pushback from people within the academy that I'm injecting too much modernity in things like:

1. During a seminar discussion of the American south in the post-Civil War era, saying that Federal forces should have remained in place and forcibly reconstructed the former Confederacy at the point of a bayonet rather than the Corrupt Bargain of 1876;
2. Saying that Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, etc. were traitors against the United States government and should have recieved full treason trials;
3. Being told my idea for a paper was "too niche" when I wanted to investigate the story of Albert Cashier, who is - I would argue - the first fully, formally documented transgender military veteran in U.S. history that we know of so far;
4. Was informed - point blank - by a fellow student in front of a professor that I was "a terrible historian" for "being so virulently against the South, you can't do your job as a historian with any sort of objectivity. You need to separate yourself from your subject." - and the professor said nothing.

Now, as an openly gay historian writing in a predominantly cishet white male subfield ("The American Civil War Era") with projects that focus a lot on the semi-taboo field of Military History in the academy, I've had to pull my punches just because of how much of an "old boys club" my field is. For instance, in my book that came out earlier this year, I was strongly counciled by my editor to use "Confederate" or "Southern" instead of the "rebel" or "traitor" I had used in the manuscript - because it might offend Southern readers. I fully believe in calling a spade a spade: the Confederate States of America was an armed insurrection against the United States government, led by men who had resigned their commissions in the U.S. Army, or their places in the U.S. Congress, specifically to defect and take up arms against their government. So I complied - my first book, I don't want to make waves with the publisher or with reviewers - but I also replaced every use of "Northern" or "Union" with "Federal" as a quiet emphasis of the fact that these were United States army troops fighting against an insurrection.

This thread, actually, was my first intimation to Dr. Sweet's comments - I am not yet a member of the AHA, because I'm still in the poor-graduate-student mode. And I cannot believe this man - who is, by all acounts, a well-respected scholar - just so thoroughly and fully shot himself in the foot like this. Was there no one who proofed his column who could have gone "Uh, sir?" before hitting the publish button? This is, as a student in a class I TA'd last year taught me, "Yikes in the yard."

I hope people will read Tom Mackaman's comment on the Sweet affair on the World Socialist Web Site as well as the whole of the website's analysis of the 1619 Project, the only substantive and sustained critique from the left.

/u/LXT130J answers “To what extent were the Dahomey a tribe of slavers?”

This was an interesting read, mainly because it read a lot like elite history; history written by and for elites. This could be why it comes across to me as having an exculpatory tone. This is in contrast to the social history I often read, which takes a ground up perspective and addresses history primarily from the viewpoint of those who are affected by elite decisions. I think this difference in perspective results in different conclusions about how justified the Dahomey elites were in building an empire, conquering and enslaving their neighbors in the process.

The issues Sweet raises are a big part of why my interest in this sub has waned the more answers I've read and (particularly) the more meta posts like this one y'all put up. There's this belief that proper historical work is historical work in service of a particular modern political project or point of view, and a significant tendency to try to impose modern categories on pre-modern people and societies.

I'm not a historian -- just a hobby, but I am fairly expert in brain/mind/perception from both a bio and AI/robotics perspective.

This thread is interesting to me because it touches on the nature of perception/bias in perception as it relates to our narrative model of the past -- His Story -- as it were. This is a subject of deconstructionist claims and really goes all the way back to Plato's cave.

My own take comes from a kind of "what must be true" when you build a robotic brain and what that says about the nature of our own perception. Citations along this line are sparse, maybe: Anil Seth https://www.anilseth.com/ and even a wacky guy who draws things out in cartoons which must be taken with some grains of salt, Steve Lehar (some fun here http://slehar.com/wwwRel//cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html )

In any case, we start with a truth, that we have no direct access to reality -- in the same way the graphical user interface (GUI) on your computer is not like the Von Neuman machine that runs it, our perceptions, whether historical or sensual are an interface to reality but no more like reality than the GUI on your computer is like the transistor substrate that runs beneath. But note: The "trashcan" icon on your screen doesn't mean there's a real trashcan inside your computer and even the physicist who tells you the trashcan is made up of quanta called "pixels" still misses the central point: The GUI, the trashcan are causal models of the underlying reality. So, moving stuff to the trashcan can cause real deletion in the world. In the same way, I promise you a car moving down a street is not a car on not a street, but moving in front of it will delete you.

To get a feel for this, look up at your ceiling. What is just beyond that ceiling? -- the inside of your skull of course. Look at a nice green tree outside your window and accept that the colors are categorical constructs in your mind (see the uniformly same gray balls here https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/scale--1200/public/illusion_colorballs_stripes.jpg ).

This is the hook around which deconstructionism is built. BUT, it's important to realize what they leave out -- our brain models of perception which I'd argue extend to history, mathematics, natural "laws" and consciousness itself are causal models. They have utility to the extent they are causally predictive of the future or explanative of the past. They are useful redaction/model tied to the physical world.

So, back to history. The best history would lead a present-day holder of that narrative to best extrapolate mores, motives and to noisy extent events of that time. IF you tell me about the Romans and then present an issue that I didn't know about that went before the Roman Senate, I should be able to reasonably approximate the arguments about that issue and have some reasonable guess about which way they decided, even if I get it wrong (I should feel a 50-50 issue was hard to interpret, but I should get decisive issues mostly correct). To such an extent, that history model is "true".

I’m glad no one here is accepting his apology. It’s a classic white supremacist strategy: write an extremely racist text and then chicken out when BIPOC call them out on it. When you read Sweet’s article, it drips of his intense hatred towards Black people of color. Moreover, he’s scared of Black folks. Scared that they will replace him. Scared that they will tell a different kind of history, one that isn’t tainted by his white nationalist agenda. He sees things like the wonderful 1619 Project (by all accounts, a highly historically accurate piece of work) expose his ilk’s (white people) long history of brutality towards minorities and he realizes the jig is up. He sees movies being made about African warriors rising to resist European colonial oppressors (The Woman King) and it angers him, because he believes “those Blacks should stay in their lane and be good slaves!”. The correct action right now would be to publicly refuse his half-baked attempt at apologizing (which is obvious to anyone who reads it that it’s insincere - he clearly didn’t want to write it and only did it because he felt forced to after the backlash) and have him fired immediately. After that, it’s also important that every other institution then refuses to accept him joining them. He will fit in much better with like-minded alt-right outlets like PragerU or Daily Caller. But the first step must be for the American Historical Association to dishonorably discharge him, apologize themselves for committing the grave of hiring a Nazi-adjacent person in the first place (and the apology certainly must be longer than the 4 measly paragraphs he did), and recognize their white privilege as sharing a welcome home for far-right personnel. Since Sweet is deathly afraid of Black POC adding their own narratives to historical discourse instead of his single fascist one standing true, it would be fitting to replace Sweet’s position with a Black person (preferably a woman, from the LGBTQIA2S+ sector). The AHA has a long way to go before they’re allowed to be redeemed, and until then, they must be considered a safe home for racists to shelter themselves in under the guise of “historicity”. In conclusion, the lesson learnt here should be that “Anti-Presentism” is a codeword for “Anti-Black”.