Thread by @jbf1755

1/ Holy crap.

I wake up & glance at twitter & see:

*the signed letter by 700 historians demanding impeachment

*historians attacking the 1619 project in the WSJ

*a group of Republicans founding “the Lincoln Project” to tell America’s story

2/ It makes perfect sense that at a time when “history is happening”—so to speak—& American ideals & governance are being discussed in the media nonstop, that history would take center stage.

But there’s more to say.

3/ Something obvious that people forget: how we understand & frame our past profoundly shapes our present & thereby our future.

As a nation & a people, we are the sum of our past & our understanding of it.

The study of history offers the building blocks.

4/We are living thru a stunning example of the vital importance of studying history.

For people to value democracy & see the threats against it, they need the building blocks of history to understand our core ideals & beliefs, & the ways we have & HAVEN’T met them in the past.

5/ When people don’t understand their rights as citizens & don’t know how hard people fought to obtain & preserve them in the past, they don’t value them in the present.

We see everyday that vast numbers of people have no idea of their rights, & are willingly surrendering them.

6/ The gutting of history departments? The sneering dismissal of the study of history as a (gasp) humanity?

They can have very real consequences.

Political consequences.

National consequences.

7/ This isn’t to say that there is uniform agreement about our history. That only happens under authoritarian regimes—which know all too well that sharing a (fake propagandized) history unites a people, & teaches them obedience to the regime & what it represents.

8/ It is the process of figuring history out that reveals to us who we are. And there is a mighty wide spectrum of people & beliefs that co-exist in that “we”

There should be.

9/ Being free to think & study & argue.

A glorious cacophony of ideas & voices.

An ongoing debate about who we are and who we want to be as a people.

That’s democracy. (I know that’s over-simplified, but you get my point.)

10/ If people understand their history, they can enter that debate informed.

Of course, there is no single interpretation of our history.

It’s not set in stone. We discover & rethink things. We disagree. A lot. Loudly.

Meanings get added and subtracted.

But...

11/ There is such a thing as a historical fact. And one of those facts is:

The US began as an experiment in self-governance.

However we choose to interpret our Constitution—however much we disagree about meanings & implications...

That simple fact is there.
Self-governance.

12/ You can’t engage in self-governance if you don’t understand it.

And the study of history is how you learn what it is, how it succeeded or failed, what it means to you, & how you choose to take part in it.

Study history.
A lot depends upon it.

Signed,
A historian