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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2022
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.
1 Martin Luther King Jr, “Beyond Vietnam,” 4 April 1967, at https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam (accessed 23 Jan. 2021).
2 Martin Luther King Jr, “I Have A Dream,” 28 Aug. 1963, at https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/i-have-dream-address-delivered-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom (accessed 23 Jan. 2021).
3 King, “Beyond Vietnam” (April 4, 1967).
4 White, Hayden, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5/2 (1966), 111–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 125.
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 After Joe Biden took office, he rescinded the commission.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).
6 For an excellent example of how the history of the “Lost Cause” can illuminate Trumpism see Zach Stanton, “How Trumpism Is Becoming America's New ‘Lost Cause,’” Politico, 21 Jan. 2021, at www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/21/trump-civil-war-reconstruction-biden-lost-cause-461161 (accessed 24 Jan. 2021).
7 Among the many who have carved out significant public profiles, Kevin Kruse has been particularly successful with Twitter, Ibram X. Kendi with trade (and even childrens’) books, and Heather Cox Richardson with Substack. Emma Pettit, “How Kevin Kruse Became History's Attack Dog,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 Dec. 2018, at www.chronicle.com/article/how-kevin-kruse-became-historys-attack-dog (accessed 25 Jan. 2021); Jennifer Schuessler, “Ibram X. Kendi Has a Cure for America's ‘Metastatic Racism’,” New York Times, 6 Aug. 2019), at www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/arts/ibram-x-kendi-antiracism.html (accessed 25 Jan. 2021); Ben Smith, “Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break from the Media Maelstrom. It's Working,” New York Times, 27 Dec. 2020, at www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html (accessed 25 Jan. 2021).
8 The demand for magazine writing and podcasts favors issues with clear contemporary relevance. So while opportunities for historians have expanded in recent years, they have not necessarily done so evenly across fields and specializations.
9 Timothy Snyder, “The American Abyss,” New York Times magazine, 9 Jan. 2021, at www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html (accessed 9 Jan. 2021).
10 Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins identifies a variety of contemporary history courses offered at other institutions in “Beyond the End of History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 Aug. 2020, at www.chronicle.com/article/beyond-the-end-of-history (accessed 11 Jan. 2021).
11 Lowenthal, David, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar. The phrase comes originally from a novel by L. P. Hartley.
12 Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (1854) (New York, 2004), 140.
13 Kellyanne Conway first used the term “alternative facts” in a 22 Jan. 2017 interview on Meet the Press; Rudy Giuliani used the phrase “truth isn't the truth” in an 19 Aug. 2018 interview on Meet the Press. See www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/conway-press-secretary-gave-alternative-facts-860142147643; and www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/giuliani-truth-isn-t-truth-1302113347986 (accessed 24 Jan. 2021).
14 Leffler, Melvyn P., “The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration: Memoirs, History, Legacy,” Diplomatic History 37/2 (2013), 190–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 See Wineburg, Sam, Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) (Chicago and London, 2018), 140–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Antoinette Sol, Catriona Seth, and Julia Douthwaite Viglione, Teaching Representations of the French Revolution (New York, 2019), 168.
17 Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discovery, May 1999, at www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race (accessed 25 Jan. 2021).
18 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Anthropocene Time,” History and Theory 57/1 (2018), 5–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Grégory Quenet, “The Anthropocene and the Time of Historians,” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 72/2 (2017), 267–99.
19 We can also question the value of periodizing altogether. For the classic statement on historians’ use of periodization see Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods?, trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise (New York, 2015).
20 Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Beyond the End of History.”
21 Zerubavel, Eviatar, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (New York, 2015), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Ibid., vii.
23 Hartley, L. P., The Go-Between (1953) (New York, 2002), 17Google Scholar.
24 Jacob Burkhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History (New York), 358.
25 Tuchman, Barbara, Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.