Posted on 08/29/2022 2:56:58 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Arguing for keeping “presentism” out of history seems like a straightforward argument from an acknowledged history scholar, right?
Wrong. Not these days.
The president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet, published an essay last week arguing that scholars should bar “presentism” from history.
Sweet’s column in the American Historical Association magazine, Perspectives on History, argued that “doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.”
Pretty basic stuff.
Shortly thereafter, Sweet was mobbed by those who clearly didn’t like his perspective, then issued what looked like a forced confession for his crime.
The whole episode demonstrates how American and other Western institutions have been wholly radicalized in a short amount of time, squandering their reputations and authority.
Here’s how it went down.
The American Historical Association president argued that academic historians should focus simply on bringing to life the world of people in the past as it was and as they saw it, instead of framing every historical person or event through a modern “social justice” lens.
Sweet laid out the problem, which he said is transforming the profession of historian:
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysignal.com ...
Wokeists:
Important point. You can’t help but view history from your own perspective, but you’ll never understand it unless you push yourself to see events as the people involved in them would have seen them. You can look for people in that time whose views correspond to our modern perspective, you may or may not find them. If you do, it’s useful to ask why these people saw what others of their time did not. And to notice if they were respected, or ignored, or persecuted, and why.
For later.
Sweet! Some logic still exists in American academia. (I wonder how long he’ll last...)
Sounds similar to Monica - teaching history to the college students in “Yellowstone”.
.
I wonder what the wokeists’ judgment is of ‘buffalo jumps’ by Native Americans - or if they extend their lazy judgmentalism to the other sometimes gruesome habits of primitive cultures...human sacrifice, cannibalism, ownership and debasement of females...
Well at least they didn’t beat him half to death or to death like they did in Mao’s China.
We are so screwed.
All these historians must never have joined the Debate Club in school. They cave immediately.
The issue is anachronistic criticism, such that a long ago era is evaluated by 21st century standards, woke standards in particular. It is not a new problem for History, which has been crippled by it at least since the 1970s New Left takeover of the universities,
I think of it in terms of someone at the seventy yard line criticizing the guys who fought it out at the thirty yard line to get the ball to where it is now.
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