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The Present as a Foreign Country: Teaching the History of Now
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2022
Abstract
In recent years, historians have been in increased demand to use their expertise to help understand contemporary events. The forces that are driving news outlets and podcasts to enlist historians for their perspectives on the present are also drawing students into our college classes. This article explores how courses on contemporary US history can use students' desire for historical perspectives on their long now to teach them more broadly about the historian's craft. Working with and against the conceit of the “now,” courses on contemporary US history can provide students a novel way to learn historical theories and methods, identify and work with primary sources, interrogate periodization, and challenge different modes of ahistoricism. Properly conceived and executed, histories of the present offer a challenge to presentism by denaturalizing the familiar.
- Type
- Forum: History and the Present
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
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5 Among the most prominent examples of this difference are the 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published by the New York Times in 2019 with the goal of reframing US history around slavery and its repercussions in the lives of black Americans. The Trump administration organized a rival “1776 Commission,” intending to offer a “patriotic” and anti-civil rights version of US history. After Joe Biden took office, he rescinded the commission. “The 1619 Project,” New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019, at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html (accessed 25 Jan. 2021); Caroline Kelly, “Biden Rescinds 1776 Commission via Executive Order,” CNN, 21Jan. 2021, at www.cnn.com/2021/01/20/politics/biden-rescind-1776-commission-executive-order/index.html (accessed 25 Jan. 2021).
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