The Slow Suicide of History

In our universities, it is the 'End of History' indeed. Can it be reversed?

News just out that the number of academic job openings in history has collapsed over the last few years, as there are fewer and fewer students interested in majoring in the subject. The data from the H-Net jobs database look like this for all history fields, and U.S. history:

Those are the trend lines of shrinking departments.

Why has this happened? Maybe there is a clue to be found in the fact that biographies of major American figures are extremely popular with the reading public. Biographies especially of presidents and figures from the American Founding, but also generals and major business leaders, have not only rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists, but even spawned Broadway musicals.

But very few of them are written by academic historians. Instead, they tend to be written by journalists or professional non-academic writers like Ron Chernow (Washington, Hamilton, Grant, and J.P. Morgan), James Grant (Bernard Baruch), Doris Kearns Goodwin (FDR and Lincoln), or David McCulloch (John Adams, Harry Truman).

There are a few current exceptions such as Yale’s David Blight, author of recent biography of Frederick Douglass, or Beverly Gage, author of a recent biography of J. Edgar Hoover (with Ronald Reagan next on her project board) but these tend to be exceptions that prove the rule. The few academic historians like Blight and Gage who have written popular biographies tend to older, and withdrawn from the mainstream of academic history (or out of the academic world entirely), like Douglas Brinkley, H.W. Brands, Andrew Roberts, and Joseph Ellis. This is likely related to the fact that undergraduate majors in history have been dropping through the floor over the last 20 years.

It was not that long ago that academic historians, and leading academic presses, produced lots of biographies and narrative histories with crossover appeal to both academic and general public audiences, like the best-selling biography of Lincoln from Harvard’s David Herbert Donald back in 1996. And if you go back to the mid-20th century, the best popular histories and biographies often came from academic historians and political scientists, such as James MacGregor Burns’s multi-volume biography of FDR (still one of the best in my opinion), or Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s Age of Roosevelt.

But today biographies and general narrative histories are mostly out of fashion in the academy. (Jill Lepore’s These Truths is a significant exception, as are all of the works of John Lewis Gaddis and Sean Wilentz, though Gaddis is retired and Wilentz is nearing retirement.) The reasons for this are partly ideological, and partly methodological, and it is not easy to sort out and weigh each factor because they have a reciprocal influence on one another.

Academic history—especially American history—more than most other disciplines is notable for the way in which each generation sets out to overturn the dominant viewpoint and leading interpretations of the preceding generation. You can see this as far back as the Progressive Era historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, Carl Becker, Albert J. Beveridge, and James Allen Smith, who sought to overthrow the whiggish narratives of the leading 19^th century historians like Henry Adams and George Bancroft. Those Progressive historians all cast a deeply skeptical eye on American democracy and the Founding, and their critical histories fit closely with the reformist political mood of the Progressive Era.

By the mid-20^th century, however, a new revisionist cadre, the so-called “consensus school,” rejected the Progressive Era historians wholesale, dismissing the Progressive canon according to errors of fact and interpretation. (The leading figures of the “consensus school” were Louis Hartz, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Henry Steele Commager, and above all Richard Hofstadter.) On the surface this revisionism was not directly ideological, as the consensus school historians were all liberals or progressives of one stripe or another. But as was the case with the Progressive historians, the consensus school’s understanding of American democracy was in close harmony with the dominant ideology early Cold War liberal internationalism and anti-Communism.

Fast forward another generation to the 1960s and 1970s, and a new wave of revisionism rubbished the consensus school. Some of this was ideological: New Left historians (Staughton Lynd, James Franklin Jamieson, and Gabriel Kolko are good examples, along with Howard Zinn of course) cast a skeptical eye on the American liberal tradition and the Cold War amidst the hothouse climate of the Vietnam War and the student protest movement of the time. Less radical historians also produced sweeping new interpretations that rejected both the Progressive and consensus school historians, seeing America as a product of many more discordant and neglected ideas and cultural contingencies, such as Caroline Robbins, J.G.A. Pocock, and Gordon Wood. You can see another iteration of this cycle at work at the moment with the reaction to the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which relies on the work of younger historians, many of them writing a self-conscious “new history of capitalism.” The 1619 Project arguably reflects the new academic consensus about how slavery should be understood in American history, but has provoked the sharpest reaction not so much from conservative historians (because there are so few—Wilfred McClay and Allan Guelzo being the notable exceptions on this controversy), but from older liberal historians such as Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, and, most odd of all, the World Socialists. Here the generational split looms larger than the ideological split.

But there were also some distinct methodological changes in academic history that contribute to this constant generational overturning. To take a long sweep again, in the 19^th century there was great enthusiasm especially in Europe for both philosophical history and scientific history—the first owing to the influence of Hegel and German historicism, the second to Darwin. Henry Steele Commager wrote that “Almost every historian of that [19^th century] generation felt that he was on the verge of some discovery that should do for history what Darwin had done for nature.”

Philosophical history has not gone away, but in the 20^th century the strong influences of social science and Marxism went a long way toward instigating new methodologies for historical investigation that paid more attention to social and material forces (“history from the bottom up”), and often explicitly scorned the “great man” style of Macaulay and Carlyle. A pre-eminent example of this methodological innovation is the famous mid-century Annales school clustered around the French historian Fernand Braudel, with its fine-grained syntheses of how material and social forces shaped historical change over the long run. In the U.S. there was a period in the 1960s and 1970s when “cliometrics”—historical investigation rooted in detailed statistical analysis—was ascendant in many history departments. Some cliometric history could be a mind-numbing exercise in statistical trivia, but some made significant contributions to widening our historical horizons. The controversial analysis of southern plantation slavery by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in the 1970s arguably prepared the way for the 1619 Project, for example.

Along with the impulse to be more scientific and cross-disciplinary came the corrections of social history of minorities and underrepresented groups. Social history is partly cliometric, but also partly linked with demands for justice and recognition from minorities. It is just here that the pendulum swings of academic history make it difficult to draw clear lines between overdue revisions and inclusion of neglected voices and perspectives, and an ideologically distorted emphasis that starts to affect the discipline as a whole. To be sure, there are still many academic historians who specialize in “big events” or specific subfields like the French Revolution, imperial Russia, Victorian Britain, Latin America and Africa, or dynastic China, but some once-prominent subfields, like military history and constitutional history, have largely disappeared, along with, as mentioned at the outset, conventional biography of prominent political figures. Academic biographies of lesser known figures, such as labor organizers or ethnic thinkers and activists, are another story, but needless to say seldom attract much interest from the non-academic reading public. More prevalent today in history is the emphasis on race, class, and gender that is seen across most of the humanities and social sciences, along with an emphasis on colonialism that sometimes makes it seem as though the imperial phase of the European powers in the second half of the second millennium is the most important fact of all human history.

Conservative-minded historians are likewise alienated from both the ideological center of gravity and the dominant methodological focus of American history today. A self-reinforcing feedback loop deepens. One of the strange paradoxes of academia today is that the fierce competition for academic jobs and pressure for university departments to climb up the coveted U.S. News rankings actually stifles innovation and risk-taking within many disciplines, as no one wants to be “out of the mainstream.” Set aside possible ideological biases; few history departments will want to hire—or even have a subfield position for—someone who wants to specialize in military history or presidential biography. Methodological and ideological homogeneity harden further, aggravating what Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law calls “the dominance of conformity” in which individuals with strong points of view become even more extreme when they deliberate only with others of the same point of view. The effect of this is not simply a further narrowing of campus orthodoxy that sometimes aggressively marginalizes non-left thinkers and ideas (the “cancel culture” phenomenon); the “mainstream” of academia is becoming even more remote from the mainstream of America.

There is no obvious remedy for this state of affairs, but the trend ought to be more widely recognized. There is a reason, Sunstein points out in his book Conformity: The Power of Social Influences why most federal commissions are constituted on a bi-partisan basis to prevent narrowness in deliberations and policy, along with empirical evidence that federal appellate court three-judge panels reason and rule differently when they have judges drawn from both parties instead of just a single party. These two specialized but still controversial examples of expert political institutions offer a strong hint to universities. If universities want to revive a culture of true free expression, they will need to find some conscious way of emulating how our governing institutions incorporate a wider spectrum of views.

P.S. Sometimes people ask who my favorite historians are, and my list is indeed long. I’ll do a separate item soon on different historical writing styles, almost none of which can be found in academic history departments any more. But I’ll just flag for now one in particular: John Lukacs, the Hungarian-born historian who John Rodden captures well in this recent essay in Modern Age.