We are living through a terrible time in many ways, but it is a Golden Age for public-facing history. No major pundit, as far as I’m aware, has as consistently & powerfully drawn on historical scholarship to explain the present than @jbouie./1 nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opi…
And thanks to @madebyhistory in @washingtonpost, @TheAtlantic @contingent_mag @BostonReview @NewYorker and many other magazines & editorial pages, historians are sharing their research I. Written form with the public in a way that dwarfs the era of the “New York Intellectuals.”/2
Furthermore there are so many amazing podcasts that are either historical in nature of that frequently feature historians and historical topics. Not room to mention them all but the various podcasts of the @NewBooksNetwork showcase a huge variety of historical scholarship. /3
Thanks to the work of @womnknowhistory #twitterstorians and others, the work of a wide variety of historians is regularly highlighted in magazine and newspaper articles to provide context for the news. They are also guests on tv and radio shows, as well as documentary films./4
We should not forget that this phenomenon has deep roots & owes a great deal to the work of @ncph & the archivists, historic preservationists, National Parks, museum curators and Public History programs, which have been training practitioners and teaching students for decades. /5
There are also history blogs & blogs with lots of history content. Even with the emergence of @twitter and other social media, these remain vibrant. Some, such as @Ideas_History & @aaihs to name only 2, have (usually via the labor of younger scholars) have re-energized fields./6
One important and urgent thing to note about this “Golden Age” is how precarious it is. Lack of investment in public universities, archives, museums, historic sites, and history education in general means that many of the essential instituons are underfunded...../7
And many superb historians are unable to find jobs in their field or can find work as poorly-paid adjuncts. At a time when we should massively increasing public investments in all manner of history education, austerity, which long predates the current moment, remains the norm./8
We need a New Deal for history, a massive public spending program that will employ the army of superb historians out there (and train more of them) so that they can do their work at all levels, starting with K-12 education, through museums, archives, historic sites.../9
Documentary editing, digital history, environmental history, and oral history projects, documentary films, and so much more. This is to say nothing of the expansion of history teaching that should be happening at community colleges, liberal arts colleges and universities. /10
This “Golden Age” has demonstrated the value of understanding history to provide context for the present—think of recent public-facing work on police violence, mass incarceration, Juneteenth, authoritarianism, the women’s suffrage movement, the Great Depresion, New Deal, etc./11
Academic presses continue to publish cutting-edge scholarship--many also have excellent blogs too--some of whose significance takes a while to reach the general public, but is nonetheless essential. Yet so universities are cutting the budgets of these essential institutions./12
As one of our greatest historians @agordonreed noted (in the context of attacks on monuments), "There are far more dangerous threats to history. Defunding the humanities, cutting history classes and departments. Those are the real threats to history."/13
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
Now is the time to invest in history. Providing support for institutions that disseminate history and well-paying jobs for historians so that they can do their work will benefit society and allow us to make this Golden Age of public-facing history sustainable./14
