Politics in History

I'm writing today's post based on a recent op-ed in the New York Times titled "A Confession of Liberal Intolerance". I'd like to preface this by laying out my own biases here: for the most part I lean left-of-center and am a registered Democrat. With that said, I agree with the article 100%.

Long-Haired College Brandon, Wearing a "Free Tibet" T-Shirt. I was THAT guy...

In the piece, Nicholas Kristof, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, discusses the bias, sometimes turning into outright discrimination, against political conservatives in academia today, and in the liberal arts and humanities in particular. The article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html .

Within history, the growth of liberal bias was largely a result of the counterculture movement in the 60s and 70s. In the early 20th century history was primarily the preserve of elderly, largely conservative males, discussing high-level political, military, religious, and architectural and art history. The explosion in the number of liberal historians was at least in part a response to these earlier historians. However, in the past decade or two the pendulum swung right past the center and far to the left.

"A Famous Historian" From Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The type of historians the left rebelled against beginning in the 1960s. 

I think this is probably this is one of the largest issues in the field of History today,. History should be the unbiased analysis and interpretation of past events, and the teaching of the results of that work. What it should not be is a platform for political or social movements, whether liberal or conservative. The very first thing that any college undergraduate learns in their first upper-level history courses is about the idea of academic bias, why it is bad, and how it should be avoided to the best of one's ability.  I have time and again seen teachers and professors teach a class on bias, then spend the very next meeting of that same class delivering a lecture full of those overt biases. The problem extends into the field of Public History as well, and I've seen it pop up time and again at museums I've worked for or at.

In addition to the ethical problems this brings up, I believe it is a contributing factor to more concrete problems within our field. Funding for history departments and museums is down across the country, and while there are a number of factors involved in this, I believe the public perception of history institutions as self-congratulatory echo chambers certainly isn't helping us. Our objectivity has been compromised; why would I trust a historian's interpretation of any subject if I was aware that they had an overt political bias or agenda, particularly one counter to my own? I think this is part of the reason art museums routinely eat history institutions alive when it comes to fundraising; it is often far more difficult to politicize the interpretation of an art work than it is to do so with a historical event. A political painting can easily be presented as "the painter believed..." which leaves the controversial topic up to interpretation, while it is far more difficult to do so with "x happened because of y". In my capacity as a museum curator I have been told dozens of times that a group or visitor was worried about going to a museum because they worried about the "preachiness" that some people think museums have begun to adopt.

This is an issue that has far reaching implications. Entire fields of history, including ones with much still to contribute, have been left to wither because of the belief that they are dens of conservative thought. When telling people that I am a military historian, peers are often surprised that I am in fact a liberal. More than once have I been accused of being a conservative simply because of my field of study: as big of a problem as this is, the fact that "conservative" is used as an accusation at all is far more troubling.

A History Field

In many cases this has had negative consequences on the study of history itself. Military history, my forte, has become the preserve largely of armatures with only a small core of academics keeping things on the straight and narrow. While there have been many worthy contributions by hobbyist historians, many others do not maintain rigorous academic standards in their studies either because of want or will. It has led to an explosion of misinformation, and has created a self-sustaining loop that the field is finding difficult to escape. Military history was seen as a "conservative" topic and sidelined, and its study was therefore picked up by amateurs, which in turn began to give the perception that the field was one suited only by amateurs, despite that not being the case at all. I have mentioned extremely prominent academic military historians to non-military historian colleagues, only to have them stare blankly.

As an example of this sidelining, I will use Japanese history. I've been listening to a series of lectures on the subject recently, so it happens to be on my mind. While not an expert in this field, I have had conversations with those who are and this is what I have been more or less told. The Sengoku, or warring states, period of Japanese history that led up to the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate has in the last 40 or so years been almost totally ignored by English-speaking academic historians. I have seen this in popular histories on the subject, which sometimes go as far as summing up the period, which lasted nearly 150 years, in a few sentences so that they can move onto the social, political, and economic changes of the Edo Period which followed. This is despite the fact that the battles and wars of the Sengoku had a major impact on the thinking of the first Tokugawa Shoguns, on Japanese art, culture, and mythology, and continued to be a major influencing force on the Japanese psyche and even Japanese government policy at least through the end of the Second World War. The period remains prominent in Japan, but the later Edo Period receives the lion's share of study in the west. Outside of academia though, it is perhaps the best known period of Japanese history in the west, aside from the Second World War. It remains a period popular in video games, films, cartoons, and in popular histories of japan.

Also, The Seven Samurai Kicks Ass

This leads me momentarily to the issue of basic economics. The most visited history museum in the world is the National Air and Space Museum in DC; in addition to scientific history there is a heavy focus on military aviation history. As of the time of writing more than a quarter of the top 20 best selling popular histories on Amazon are on military subjects, while in the Academic arena military historians still continue to battle for a place on the stage. It is possible to include more varying perspectives and topics in historical study without taking focus away from others. While I personally have little interest in say, the history of fashion, that does not mean that I discount it as a field of study. I am aware that many others are interested in it, that fashion has an important role to play in history, and is worthy of study, but for some reason many others do not provide other fields the same level of professional respect.We can adapt to what the general public is interested in, or be left behind.

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum

This bias against thought believed to be coming from a conservative has led to a stifling of ideas in the field as well. On numerous occasions I have received emails from students around the country asking how to get a job in history. Many are extremely eager to study history, but have been routinely discouraged from doing so because they prefer fields that are not currently in fashion. When they do write on topics that interest them, they receive criticism.  We, as historians, should be encouraging young historians to study the fields that interest them, and not discouraging those that are interested in fields that give off the "wrong image". New ideas are what make an academic field thrive, but I feel as if they are being snuffed out in favor of a comfortable narrative which increasingly seems to try to paint a black and white, good vs. evil narrative of the past.

My point in all of this is this; being political on your own time is great, as I certainly am. But being political within the field is detrimental both to the study of history and to our potential sustainability as an area of serious scholarly study. I argue that only two political stances should be taken by historians; expansion of funding for our study, and expansion and improvement of the historical curriculum in schools. Above all, a historians personal politics should be removed from their study as much as possible. This will never be done perfectly; my liberal leanings sometimes bleed through in the exhibits I've done or the papers and articles I've written, but I strive to keep my work as objective as possible. Working with veterans, especially elderly ones, I frequently find myself talking to a deeply conservative crowd. So far none has called me out for being biased, but a few have thanked me for helping to present a narrative they felt was balanced, even if they didn't agree with all of it.

 The fact that a specific, fairly narrow political belief is not only tolerated, but encouraged openly has made even me begin to question if it is worth staying in the field. You also shouldn't take this as me bashing liberal ideology; I would be making the same arguments if the situation were reversed.