Historians as Pundits
I absolutely love The New Republic's manifold, occasionally controversial articles. This weekend's analysis--a near Op.Ed.--on the elite class of liberal, left of center historians apparently hijacking we leftists on what the (still unfinished) 250 year project of America actually means caught my attention.
Is the piece a slur on public intellectuals such as Tim Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson (the latter putatively has 3 million subscribes on Substack)? To me Snyder is a god-send in this era's upending of the supposed virtues of the founding of the republic vision of democracy of America. Snyder's open, often free lectures to his students at the University of Toronto, on what history does or does not actually mean--and pragmatically reveals in order to understand--is a gift.
At least to me and thousands of other readers, though nowhere near the height of Cox Richardson.
The NR's major question--an enigmatic dilemma?--seems encapsulated in the phrase that comes to me after reading: does history even matter today in an era of the systemic dismantling of our democracy's institutional safeguards"?
My 2022 book boldly yet perhaps wrongly suggests a new re-written understanding of the buried dark underbelly of America has now been exposed for what we as a nation of freedom lovers were led to believe; the United States of America is UN-United, and always wars since the beginning of the Civil War; and prior to that as the self freed slave, the non-historian Frederick Douglas incisive narrative reveals: the treatment of African slaves and their descendants in our country were caricatured if not legally classified, as real estate."
A complex read indeed, albeit a bit troubling.
Is the piece a slur on public intellectuals such as Tim Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson (the latter putatively has 3 million subscribes on Substack)? To me Snyder is a god-send in this era's upending of the supposed virtues of the founding of the republic vision of democracy of America. Snyder's open, often free lectures to his students at the University of Toronto, on what history does or does not actually mean--and pragmatically reveals in order to understand--is a gift.
At least to me and thousands of other readers, though nowhere near the height of Cox Richardson.
The NR's major question--an enigmatic dilemma?--seems encapsulated in the phrase that comes to me after reading: does history even matter today in an era of the systemic dismantling of our democracy's institutional safeguards"?
My 2022 book boldly yet perhaps wrongly suggests a new re-written understanding of the buried dark underbelly of America has now been exposed for what we as a nation of freedom lovers were led to believe; the United States of America is UN-United, and always wars since the beginning of the Civil War; and prior to that as the self freed slave, the non-historian Frederick Douglas incisive narrative reveals: the treatment of African slaves and their descendants in our country were caricatured if not legally classified, as real estate."
A complex read indeed, albeit a bit troubling.
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