New York Times article on the Historical Society

Saturday, May 2, 1998
Back to Fact: Historians Fight a Fuzzy Future

More than 200 historians, from the left and right alike, say a culture of
conformity is stifling the academy. They say their profession is riven by
the politics of race and sex, a reliance on theory instead of evidence,
rampant navel-gazing, obscurantism, and writing that reads like badly
translated German. They are bolting from the American Historical
Association and the Organization of American Historians, which are the
National League and American League of professional history, to form their
own group, the Historical Society.

The founders held a news conference in Washington on Tuesday and spoke
with Tim Weiner of The New York Times. Gary Nash, professor of history at
UCLA and director of the National Center for History in the Schools, was
asked to respond to their views. Their comments are excerpted below.

EUGENE GENOVESE, president, the Historical Society, and former president,
Organization of American Historians:

The history profession is in disarray. It is clear that the disaffection
is wide and deep. It cuts across political lines, from the Marxist left to
the traditional right. The trivialization of subject matter is a widespread
complaint. We are very deep into something called identity politics: the
attempt to impose a particular ideological line and to compartmentalize the
work so that it becomes a search for identity and self-expression rather
than dealing with objective reality. These people are all for diversity,
but if you don't take their line, forget it. We've had it with that stuff.

ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE (who is married to Genovese), Eleanore Raoul
Professor of the Humanities, Emory University:

We're responding to a growing emphasis on personal identity as the
measure of historical experience. This comes out of the rising tide of
post-modernism in the humanities. Its salient features are: There are no
facts, the notion of reality is a swindle, each reader creates his or her
own text, whatever I think or feel becomes the canon. What we're looking at
in the academy is the most extraordinary vulgarization that brings it to
the comfort level of the beginning undergraduate student who doesn't want
to do any work. What you get at the higher levels is historical work that
focuses upon increasingly narrow subjects. We are responding to that
personalization and trivialization. We feel very strongly that there are
canons of evidence that we can observe. If we do not agree upon that, we
are not a profession. If there is no common ground on which we can meet and
no standard according to which we can evaluate our work, then we are in
Hobbes' world of the war of all against all.

MARC TRACHTENBERG, executive director, the Historical Society, and
professor of diplomatic history, University of Pennsylvania:

You see so much work that's just trival nowadays. We had this sense of
history as an intellectual enterprise. If you did it well, you could see
beyond your own preconceptions, your own personal politics. The answers
turned on what you saw in the documents, in the empirical evidence. You
could engage each other intellectually, you could be part of a community.
There was something in common -- the test of evidence, the test of logic.
That was the dream. The reality is: they know the answers in advance. It's
given to them by a political ideology. You don't accomplish anything that
way. We want a profession where people can talk to each other and engage
each other intellectually, that brings together serious historians doing
all kinds of different work. And what do we see around us? Exactly the
opposite. They talk diversity. But what goes on is highly parochial, highly
exclusionary.

SHELDON AVERY, chairman, history department, Harford College:

Another problem is the way it's written. There's been a linguistic sea
change. They have created a language that's totally uncommunicative.

EUGENE GENOVESE:

All that jargon, and the passive voice, which marvelously destroys the
notion of responsibility, became a fad. This stuff is written by people
flying the banner of anti-elitism, but nobody except each other can
understand what they're talking about.

GARY NASH:

Is the history profession in disarray? Hardly. Is it in ferment?
Decidedly. Any profession worth its salt is in the process of innovation,
renewal and fermentation. Contrary to this group's view, I believe the
profession is less parochial, less doctrinaire and less exclusionary than
ever before. Of course, trivial work and even rogue scholarship can be
found now, as always. But the standards of the profession remain high. The
profession is building bridges to the schools, to museums, to documentary
filmmakers, in ways that I find exhilarating, and that speak to the more
open and democratic character of the profession than in what this group
remembers as the Good Old Days.