New Yorker writer Emma Green has an interesting piece in the New Yorker on the well-publicized article by the president of the American Historical Association on the distortion of Black history. Jim Sweet of the University of Wisconsin-Madison used his presidential column in the AHA’s journal Perspectives on History to criticize what he saw as the distortions of the history of slavery, and Black history, at modern sites claiming to interpret it and by popular efforts like the 1619 Project. His article set off a controversy within the AHA, and criticism of him as a historian of the African American experience. Here are some substantial excerpts from Green’s article:
At his hotel one morning, “a group of African Americans began trickling into the breakfast bar,” he wrote. Sweet noticed that one of them had brought along “a dog-eared copy of The 1619 Project,” a book-length expansion of the Times’ exploration of America’s founding, which looks at the country’s origins through the lens of slavery and racism. Later, Sweet and his family visited Elmina Castle, a slave-trading post on the Gulf of Guinea. “Our guide gave a well-rehearsed tour geared toward African Americans,” despite the fact that “less than one percent of the Africans passing through Elmina arrived in North America.” To Sweet, these examples illustrated the temptation of “presentism”—a concept, often used by scholars in a derogatory manner, referring to studies of the past that are distorted by the ideas of the present. In his essay, he leaned on some other examples, such as “The Woman King,” a popular film from last year, which seemed, to him, to twist violent episodes of African history into a story of Black, feminist triumph. He also brought in Supreme Court decisions written by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who made historical arguments to support decisions on guns and abortion rights. It was a list of strange bedfellows, but his point, or at least the point he wanted to make, was methodological. “We’re being inundated with history at all sorts of turns. No one is immune to that,” Sweet told me recently. “Certain narratives are harnessed in the service of particular political perspectives. For me, that’s a dangerous trend for professional historians to get drawn into.”
The piece was published on the afternoon of August 17th. Sweet, who is also a high-school football coach, was walking off the field after practice when he got the first indication that something was up: an e-mail in his in-box from a famous historian that said “Wow! . . . Just, wow.” By the time that Sweet got home, his piece was blowing up on Twitter. “Oh, hell,” he recalled thinking. “Here we go.”
A number of academics were exasperated that Sweet criticized “The 1619 Project,” which had already come under attack from other white-guy senior historians. Others were confused that he used non-academic examples to illustrate supposed problems in academic history. Some were incredulous that the leader of the country’s premier history organization seemed to dismiss work that was focussed on fundamental issues of power: Jamelle Bouie, a columnist at the Times, tweeted, “Bold take from [checks byline] the president of AHA that race, gender, sexuality, nationalism and capitalism are ‘contemporary social justice issues’ which have been imposed on the study of history.” Many observed that Sweet’s targets for criticism were nearly all Black. One junior faculty member at a private Catholic university wrote about the essay on his blog, saying that he “cried re-reading it, seeing starkly the smug condescension and slap in the face to professional historians of Africa, and to Black Americans.”
It was a strange juxtaposition. If someone looked only at Twitter, they might reasonably assume that Sweet is a racially insensitive crank. But, if they peered into his in-box, they would get the impression that he is a brave free-speech warrior. This split-screen view is an indication of what academic history has become: a weapon in America’s daily war over contemporary politics. On the Internet, historians have become influencers—judges who rule on the present using the gavel of the past. To Sweet, this kind of behavior inevitably leads to bad history. “The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past,” he wrote. “This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.”
Jim Grossman, the executive director of the association, called Sweet and explained that the A.H.A. was potentially at risk of losing hundreds of members. They discussed the possibility of the A.H.A. issuing a retraction, but decided against it. Ultimately, Grossman asked him to draft an apology, which specifically included two things: an admission that Sweet had harmed the A.H.A., and a clarification that responsibility for the piece was Sweet’s alone. (Grossman says that it was more of a suggestion.) “The organization basically put me on an island and said, ‘You need to own this thing,’ ” Sweet told me.
Sweet apologized, drawing the ire of right-wingers on Twitter, who felt that he was yielding to the woke academic mob. White supremacists started trolling the A.H.A.’s account, prompting the organization’s staff to take the account private for a brief period. Sweet became his own mini news cycle, fodder for analysis in the Washington Post and on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” But, eventually, the commentators moved on, leaving historians to their own debate about who and what their work is for.
Sweet is part of a dying breed of old-school academics. He has a secure job in a field where tenure-track positions are dwindling. He relishes writing books and teaching, not influencing public policy or the news cycle, which many academics now consider part of their job; his manuscripts have led him aboard a mutinous eighteenth-century British slave ship, into the religious lives of early-modern Africans, and along the unlikely travels of an eighteenth-century slave and healer named Domingos Álvares. In a field that’s deeply divided over whether archives can do justice to the stories of the marginalized, Sweet is an archives guy; to tell Álvares’s story, he sifted through a six-hundred-page Inquisition file, along with Catholic parish records, travelogues, and census records. And, as a white expert in African history, he has become part of a larger debate about whether someone should teach a history that is not their own.
Sweet finds it strange that he’s been cast as a reactionary conservative. He went to public schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, that had only recently been forced to integrate by the Supreme Court. He grew up in a working-class community where many people have since become Trump supporters, but Sweet himself has always been unabashedly liberal. He found his way to Latin American history, and later African history, through the encouragement of a mentor at the University of North Carolina, where he went to college. In graduate school, he discovered that there wasn’t a lot of scholarship on the beliefs and cultures of the wildly diverse African groups that were brought to early-modern Brazil via the slave trade. He would eventually make this the focus of his career. His second book, which was on Álvares, charts a map of the Atlantic world: the kingdoms of West Africa connected by ship to the rural towns and unruly cities of Brazil, crisscrossed by Portuguese slavers and watched by suspicious Inquisitors, who were deeply shaped by notions of racial and biological hierarchy. By necessity, it is work closely focussed on the power of racism and white supremacy.
The question of how much historians should pay attention to these topics has been a subject of intense public discussion—and the A.H.A. has been actively involved. After Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, took over a small public school, New College of Florida, and banned a new Advanced Placement course in African American studies in Florida classrooms, the A.H.A. signed on to a statement saying that these “attacks threaten public understanding of our nation’s history and culture.” Sweet has played a role in the organization’s advocacy work. His first Perspectives column as president decried Republican bans on “divisive concepts,” such as race, gender, and sexuality. In a video on the association’s Web site, titled “Teaching with Integrity: Historians Speak,” Sweet points out that race and slavery are fundamental features of every American’s history. “I have a very difficult time understanding the kind of fear that this stokes,” he says, referring to G.O.P. legislators. “My question back to them would be: What are you scared of?”
Sweet thinks some of the backlash to his essay came from colleagues who saw the piece as a snub against the A.H.A.’s advocacy efforts, which is not what he intended. “There is such a great urgency in the profession right now for historians to have public voices because of the way that history has been under attack,” he told me. His actual target was the “professional historians who believe that social justice should be their first port of entry, which is not the way that we’ve traditionally done history.” Even though archives, especially those that deal with slavery, are often partial accounts created by people who oppressed others, that “doesn’t mean you can use literary devices or use a fragment of evidence and try to embellish it into history,” Sweet said. He sees these methodological approaches as “dangerously close” to the selective approach to history that he believes has been deployed by the American right.
It’s no surprise that Sweet led his essay with a critique of “The 1619 Project.” He has written about it repeatedly, including for an earlier column in Perspectives and a recent forum in The American Historical Review, once praising it for “its singular commitment to challenging the triumphalist narrative of American democracy.” It is difficult to overstate how much the 1619 Project, which has expanded to include curriculum guides and history-lesson plans, has shaped recent conversations about the nature and purpose of history—even though Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator, has described it as primarily a work of journalism. When I asked Sweet for concrete evidence of where actual academics are using history as “an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions,” as he put it in his essay, he only gestured vaguely at books and syllabi that have circulated online. It was almost as if he were responding to a diffuse political sensibility in his field, rather than arguing against a particular person or school of thought.
Other historians whom I spoke with had mixed impressions of how widespread this sensibility is, and whether it has had a real effect on scholarly work. “The love of complex narratives sits at the center of what a lot of academic historians are doing—certainly what we’re teaching,” Angela Dillard, the chair of the history department at the University of Michigan, said. The notion that academic history is driven by identity politics “tends to feel like a little bit of a straw man.” Conversely, David Blight, a Yale historian of the Civil War, told me that “there are tendencies these days among younger historians, but not just younger historians, to sometimes put advocacy ahead of scholarship.” Blight himself has long engaged in political advocacy, but thinks issues of race, gender, and sexuality have come to dominate fights over history. “If we get so obsessed with them, we can lose sight, sometimes, of other, bigger questions,” he said….
The other thing Sweet was clearly thinking about was social media. Sweet is not on Twitter—“I’m not a clout chaser,” he told me—but many historians are active on the site. (Just look up #Twitterstorians.) The trend took off in the Trump years, when prominent scholars amassed huge followings debunking Trump’s claims about American history and comparing the maga movement to fascism. But plenty of Ph.D. students and underemployed historians have become Twitter famous, too, by eagerly weighing in on whatever controversy is trending in the news or online. In some ways, the platform has evened out the playing field of expertise. One doesn’t have to clear the hoops of tenure to earn respect as an academic. “There is a tension in the fact that historians want to have public voices,” Sweet told me. “If everyone who has a Ph.D. and can claim a Twitter account is a public intellectual, how do you separate those who are producing new knowledge from those who are simply being public intellectuals?”
Sweet’s anxiety about the need for historians to produce new knowledge—and his desire to define the field by this act—stems from a debate that’s been happening behind the scenes at the A.H.A. After Sweet took on his role as president last winter, the A.H.A. council convened an ad-hoc committee to develop the association’s guidelines on what counts as scholarship. Traditionally, a historian who goes up for an academic job, tenure, or a promotion needs to have written a book—typically something called a single-author monograph. Under the proposed new guidelines, which the committee developed, additional categories of scholarship would count textbooks, reference guides, op-eds, and testimonies to legislatures and regulatory agencies, along with more novel ideas of scholarship such as consulting on the development of video games and “expanding our media presence across a wide range of platforms.” University history departments can adapt these guidelines as they wish, but the A.H.A.’s imprimatur is influential. Grossman, the A.H.A. executive director, has pushed for the expanded guidelines on the principle that the diffusion of knowledge is just as important as its creation. On this point, the two Jims are at odds: Sweet worries about these new kinds of materials replacing monographs, in large part because he is unsure of how they can be rigorously peer-reviewed. “The odyssey of researching and writing a monograph endows us with the expertise and gravitas that define us as historians,” Sweet wrote in a column in the February, 2022, issue of Perspectives. “Absent this high standard, we lose intellectual authority and political credibility. Indeed, without it, I fear we run the risk of becoming the same as the trolls and amateur hacks who challenge our expertise.”
Rita Chin, a history professor at the University of Michigan who led the ad-hoc committee, told me she thinks the new guidelines simply reflect the life of academics at universities with heavy teaching loads. Some scholars don’t have time to write fully researched books, but they might still be able to contribute valuable scholarly work in other forms. She said that some of the resistance to broadening the definition of scholarship comes down to gatekeeping: the monograph is an easy way to distinguish the work of academic historians from that of other civilians who love history, such as Civil War reënactors or amateur bloggers. “That line is more blurry in the discipline of history, because we are a discipline that feels more accessible to ordinary, non-professionally trained people,” she said.
In early January, at the A.H.A.’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, every member of the association’s council—including Sweet—voted in favor of the new scholarship guidelines. That evening, I found Grossman holding court, wineglass in hand, elated and punchy. “This might be my biggest accomplishment,” he confided in a friend.
Despite the celebratory mood, the Sweet affair was still in the back of people’s minds. Sweet had been charged with putting together a series of panels for the conference, and one was on movements to defund the police. In December, one of the speakers, Davarian Baldwin, an urbanist and historian at Trinity College, tweeted that he had resigned from the panel: “This would have been an amazing conversation. However, this is a presidential session for someone who would caricature my work as ‘presentist.’ ” When I asked Baldwin later, by phone, why he declined to participate in the conversation, he told me it was a matter of integrity. “I’m Black and I’m trained in African American history, and that compels me to say that the idea that politics is just now entering history is a perspective of extreme white privilege,” he said. “When you bring a critical lens to the story—particularly being from a marginalized community—it’s, like, ‘O.K., you’re using identity politics and presentism,’ as if identity politics hasn’t always been present when it was all white historians.” He felt that Sweet’s decision to call out a Black tourist family and Nikole Hannah-Jones was “nasty,” especially given that Sweet’s entire academic career has focussed on the African diaspora. “He must know the way in which African historians and African experiences have been politically marginalized from the historical profession,” Baldwin said. He was impatient with Sweet’s implicit warning to historians against getting too involved in political debates where history is used and abused. “We fight that by coming together and producing good history, good knowledge—not by turning inward and saying, ‘I’m going to go away and write my book.’ ”
The panel went on without Baldwin. At times, they seemed to be arguing with Sweet, even though he was not there; they described why they’re not afraid to be called “presentist.” Everyone nodded along as Elizabeth Hinton, a professor of history, African American studies, and law at Yale, laid out a vision for the field: “It’s not just about doing history. It’s necessarily part of this larger political, social project to help us achieve a more egalitarian and just society.”
Historians are the first to point out that there are no new debates. Members of the profession have always argued about the role politics should play in the writing of history. Old debates can have new chapters, however, and Sweet has become a stand-in for the fight over how historians should meet the urgency of this current moment in American life—the risks of sitting battles out, and the risks of getting too invested. Blight, the Yale historian, warned that scholars who focus too much on winning today’s political battles may lose the war over history. “The best history, the history that will hopefully stand up over time, is going to be deeply researched,” he told me. “Otherwise, the profession will lose its authority. Otherwise, we won’t really be listened to.”
The stakes of these debates are even higher because of the current state of academic history. There are few jobs to go around—according to the A.H.A., only about a quarter of students who got their Ph.D. in 2017 got a tenure-track gig within four years. State schools, including the University of Wisconsin system where Sweet works, have faced steep budget cuts, and a few big foundations have recently ended long-standing grant programs that benefitted early-career historians.
Sweet’s column wasn’t just about the politicization of history. He was also worried about a temporal and geographical narrowing in academic history: as questions of contemporary American life loom so large, history scholarship gravitates toward the twentieth-century United States. This was what Sweet was alluding to with his mention of Elmina Castle in his essay; his subfield, African history, is one of many often pulled into the vortex of American history. Sweet attributes this to ideology, but others see structural causes. History majors have declined significantly throughout the past ten years, and students who do take history courses favor classes that seem relevant to contemporary issues. “Your dean calls you in and says, ‘Your department is too big, you need to cut something—and you need to continue to keep butts in seats,’ ” Dillard, the Michigan historian, explained. “What are you going to cut? It’s probably going to be those earlier periods, where there’s just less student interest.”
One postdoc, Elise Mitchell, a scholar of slavery and medicine in the early-modern Atlantic world, tweeted about Sweet last fall, “I was once someone who greatly admired Sweet’s scholarship. . . . I am having to question that admiration.” Students who want to work on ancient or early-modern history may need extra training in languages and manuscripts, which requires time and financial support. Sweet’s column “seemed like such a missed opportunity to talk about the real conditions of austerity that are going on in academia,” she told me by phone. To her, the Sweet affair has already taken up too much oxygen. “Is talking about what one scholar wrote in Perspectives on History the best use of our time and resources right now?” she asked. “Or is that better spent doing the work that we want to see in the world?”
Sweet’s experience with the essay has fundamentally changed the way he sees some of his colleagues. It was little things: a fellow volunteer leader at the A.H.A., whom Sweet knew well, bad-mouthed him on Twitter and then greeted him breezily in a Zoom committee meeting as though nothing had happened. Sweet heard secondhand that members of the board of editors at The American Historical Review, a journal published by the A.H.A., had expressed concerns about his piece, but, when he reached out to the journal’s editor to talk about it, Sweet received a reply he found icy. And the A.H.A. council effectively killed Sweet’s planned November Perspectives column, in which he responded to his critics. “That, in particular, is one that sticks in my craw,” Sweet told me.
But, in the end, nothing truly bad has happened to him as a consequence of his essay. He still has his job at Wisconsin, and his term as A.H.A. president came to a natural end in January without anyone mounting an effort to impeach him. He told me that he regrets creating a stressful situation for A.H.A. staffers, though he also regrets apologizing for an essay that he still believes in. And, as someone who cares a lot about history, he has become preoccupied with whether this will be the thing for which he is remembered.
In December, for his final column in Perspectives as the president of the A.H.A., Sweet decided to write about his son, Aidan. Two and a half years ago, Aidan died at the age of seventeen, after he accidentally overdosed on fentanyl. He had been dealing with a lot: anxiety and depression related to the pandemic, his parents’ divorce, and the homicide of a close friend. According to Sweet, Aidan—whose mother is a Black South African woman—was also frequently harassed by the police because of his race.
In his column, Sweet described how, after Aidan’s death, he retreated into work on a manuscript about a mutiny on an eighteenth-century British slave ship. One day, as he was looking through his archival materials, he caught a reference to the use of laudanum, an opiate. His breath caught. He read further, discovering that ship captains at times used laudanum to drug and enslave Africans or kill those aboard their ships who suffered from disease. “Aidan pushed me toward these revelations,” Sweet wrote. “The day I sat down to write this one-paragraph section of the chapter, I sobbed.”
I asked Sweet why he would share this part of his life in Perspectives. He said that, in some small way, he saw it as an opportunity to answer the critics of his September column. “We’re always shaped by our present,” he told me. “The question is: what do you do with it?” He didn’t turn the paragraph on laudanum into a reflection on the opioid crisis or the Sackler family. “It just sits. It’s one paragraph, and it moves on,” he said. “It has meaning to me. But there’s nothing in that book that intimates that I have suffered.”
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Very interesting