Academic history began in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria when historians developed a theory that if you wanted to study the Austrian diplomat Metternich, you would be best off looking at the memos he wrote. And in the late nineteenth century, governments started letting historians see closed government files, i.e., those from decades before, where the persons involved were dead and the issues were no longer salient. Closed, inactive government (and other) files of documents are called "archives." Archives are to historians as a cow's udder is to her calves.
The problem with the nineteenth century theory of history is that you get stuck studying government officials. Actually, Trump seems to want us stuck in that stage of history-writing, from a century and a half ago. From the late 1950s in particular, historians expanded their repertoire from kings and prime ministers and foreign ministers. E. P. Thompson studied the working class movements of nineteenth-century Britain.
Then came Second Wave feminism and historians turned to women's history. Neither workers nor women had been big subjects in History departments, which had mostly been staffed by upper class men who graduated from Princeton and Harvard. Women did more doctorates and began to be hired. In 1972 the University of Michigan brought in carpenters and plumbers to put women's bathrooms in the building that housed the History Department. Elizabeth Crosby had become the first woman full professor at Michigan in 1936, but she did not have that many female colleagues even in later decades. Princeton let in the first women students in 1969. Both women and men wrote gender history, but women brought new insights to it. History is like that. If you were a sailor before being a historian, you might be especially good at naval history. You bring to it your experiences, which help illumine the past.
Then historians became influenced by sociology and anthropology. They started writing the history of a city over, say, three decades. Or they might write the history of a religious movement, but not in the old way of only looking at the leaders. They'd try to find the diaries of the rank and file. They might look at what mainstream denominations thought of as heresies. And then they began looking at movements of minorities, under the influence of the Civil Rights Movement. African-Americans and Latinos/Latinas did more Ph.D.s in History and began being hired, and they wrote American history very differently than had the previous generation of diplomatic historians studying Warren Harding. The history of slavery became a big subject. Whereas white historians portrayed Jefferson's form of slavery as benign, a new generation looked at it with gimlet eyes and found brutality and cupidity and concupiscence. The history of immigration from places other than Britain, France and Germany rose in the estimation of historians. Some regional history that had been relatively neglected, such as that of New Mexico where I was born, began attracting attention. It wasn't all about Northeast WASPS any more.
Historians are wide-ranging. They have also taken an interest in the rise of the New Right under Ronald Reagan and his successors. The history of the white suburbs has been addressed. It isn't all studies of Detroit auto workers, though they are important and are and should be studied.
In every case, historians weren't just expanding their topics for the sake of diversity. They were trying to explain why history unfolded as it did, and they had become dissatisfied with the notion that it was because high government officials made particular decisions. While that is important, it is also important to look at the social movements that pushed the leaders in that direction. It wasn't like Lyndon Johnson woke up one morning on 1964 and thought to himself, "By God we need a Voting Rights Act." He had a larger social context, which included Black young men sitting at a lunch counter in a department store where they were not allowed. The history of those young African-American men in places like Memphis is as important in its way as is a biography of Lyndon Johnson.
Trump and the people around him who wrote his speech, white nationalists like Stephen Miller, want to turn the clock back to a time when they imagine historians only wrote the history of white presidents and other elite actors, and when they did so with gushing praise. There never really was such a time. Professional historians have always been skeptical and the very tools of their profession are seditious, because history teaches us that things could have been different (contingency) and can still be different.
And that is what terrifies Trump and his white supremacist cronies.
Bonus Video:
PBS NewsHour: "What Trump is saying about 1619 Project, teaching U.S. history"
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