Peer-Reviewed History is Dying of Wokeness

What is the state of academic history? Take a look at the latest issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the academic discipline. It doesn’t publish bread-and-butter research articles; those go to specialist journals and fill published essay collections. Instead, its articles illustrate entire schools of historiography, using research as an entrée into a particular historiographical approach or a subfield’s bibliography. The AHR’s bias is toward showcasing newer approaches and providing them with a stamp of approval. It isn’t a typical journal, but it tells you where the profession is going.

To begin with, a transcript of American Historical Association president Jacqueline Jones’s recent conference address reviews similar speeches by previous AHA presidents. Her judgment repeats the self-satisfied conclusions of the new historians: that the old historians were narrow-minded white men who delighted to write about other white men (pp. 3, 7-8) and that the new history is “inclusive” (p. 2) and thus superior. Jones’s “inclusive” history dovetails with a perception of current events that aligns remarkably well with every talking point of the Democratic party (pp. 1, 24, 27-28) and with an unselfconscious embrace of radical advocacy. Her presidential address dedicates the historical profession to the political agenda of the new radical establishment.

Judd Kinzley’s “Wartime Dollars and the Crowning of China’s Hog Bristle King” describes America’s promotion, during World War II, of China’s hog bristle enterprise—hog bristles providing the material for the paint brushes used in America’s industrial processes (pp. 35, 37-38). Kinzley, with insufficient substantiation, argues that “the often destabilizing role of US dollars … unwittingly fueled a wave of postwar government corruption, growing inequality, and pointed class tensions” (pp. 34, 36). This episode, moreover, “is part of a larger global story central to the history of capitalism” (p. 36).

Just imagine the Renaissance we would have if academic disciplines stopped being stupid branches of political science.

Such an outcome is almost inconceivable. I have posted many times that eventually people will write books about what the Progressives have done to this country and what they did to Trump. But I always get a lot of replies from Freepers who remind me that Historians are always on the Left and that it is inconceivable that any Historian would even publish a truthful book about the Trump administration and the Deep State. Like, ever. Like, not in 100 years. Because the Left just “owns” history.

But just imagine if History became a truthful academic field of study. Or imagine is Psychologists tried to really study humans and help them function in a normal way ( I know — also inconceivable: psychologists are in the business of spreading perversion, right? They manufacture crazy people for a living.)

So many fields are deeply polluted.

If it got cleaned up, we would indeed have a Renaissance.

The Academic discipline of History has been dying ever since the PC Revisionists started taking over in the late 80s.

Notice how you hardly see any significant differences of opinion inside the Academy about historical events anymore? Why should that be? People disagree and debate about everything else. History is not a science. Its just current events far enough back in time that we call it history. Do people agree about current events? Of course not.

So again, why should there be unanimity of opinion and perspective about historical events? There shouldn’t be. The fact that there is tells you all you need to know.

It tells you that you are being force fed political dogma by the hardcore Leftists in Academia. It tells you they are gatekeeping to prevent the hiring and awarding of tenure to anybody who does not parrot their talking points. Having a one way narrative crammed down your throat is not a good way to gain an understanding of what happened in the past. It is a good way of being indoctrinated - and that’s all.

Long, long before the modern “woke” era, peer-reviewed history was in trouble. I think the last article I was asked to review was in the early 1990s.

Realize, not only was I supposedly known as “the” authority in antebellum banking, especially in the South, but my article on the Panic of 1857 TO THIS DAY hasn’t been refuted or substantially challenged in any way. It is cited in virtually every paper on banking panics and depressions. So one would have thought I would have been asked to look at almost any paper dealing with banking or finance in the 1800s.

First, NO ONE can review for the “American Historical Review” unless you are first a MEMBER of the “American Historical Association,” which I refused to join. I don’t know, but I suspect that other journals, such as the “Journal of Southern History,” “Civil War History,” and “Western Historical Quarterly” are the same. Strangely, you could PUBLISH in such journals without being a member-—my article on Kollyfornia banking and the housing boom with Lynne Doti in the early 1990s was accepted by the prestigious Pacific Historical Quarterly, and I think I published in WHQ (I forget-—so long ago and so many published articles). If my suspicion is correct, then a prof who didn’t belong to any of these orgs would never get asked to review a paper.

Second, because my particular field was business/economic history, and I published in “Journal of Economic History” and “Business History Review,” sometimes they had a different bias, namely you couldn’t publoish in JEH or American Economic Review unless you had lots of math and equations. Well, I did “old fashioned” banking and economic history with what they call “qualitative,” not “quantitative” evidence, so the only way I got published was to co-author with a true economist who could throw in some math. Fortunately, in the JEH article that continues to be cited, my colleague was a genius, a Columbia U. Finance Prof who knows the statistics of banking inside out.

The point is, long before woke there were barriers to anyone not worshipping at the idol of the leftist organizations ever reviewing anything-—so none of these papers ever got a truly critical non-woke review.

One problem with history (and most social "sciences") is that not enough new is being discovered about the past to feed the need to publish either academic papers or textbooks. Discover a new Rosetta stone or a unknown and older settlement in North America and you can change the knowledge base. But most of it is just reinterpreting what is already known. You don't get published if you say "what we knew was right". That doesn't sell new books. So you have to say "what we knew was wrong". Since the amount of real, new knowledge is limited you have to either throw out old knowledge or just make up stuff like the thoughts and intentions of people long dead. You can also take the anecdotal and claim it is common rather than rare.

Hard sciences are always expanding new knowledge. But even they are subject to those same issues, but to a lesser extent.

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