The prolific University of Texas historian H.W. Brands has a Substack, and it is well-worth the time of anybody who enjoys the History of the Americans Podcast. His recent post, “Just the facts, ma’am” — an allusion to Joe Friday which Brands explains, but I refuse to do — looks at the balance historians must make between the discovery and elucidation of facts and the interpretation of them. Brands describes how historians in recent times have assigned greater prestige to the interpretation of facts, rather than their discovery and elucidation, and then asks if historians haven’t gotten upside down.
But what if the interpreters and the arguers have things backwards? What if the facts of history are its essence and the arguments the froth? What if the most sophisticated historical thinkers and writers are not the theorists but the narrativists? What if history consists first and foremost of story, and only secondarily of interpretation?
Brands analogizes the practice of history to science, where the primacy of facts remains largely unchallenged – there is a little room to quibble there, but that is a topic for another time – and concludes that historians would be well-served to leave the interpretation to others.
Let historians accumulate their facts and craft them into stories as true to life as possible. Then let them leave the arguing to politicians and others who make their living from opinions. When historians of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency write about the 1930s, let them explain what made the New Deal a big deal, but let them leave to others the arguing about whether it was a good deal or a bad deal.
If they must engage that argument, let them make clear that they are doing so not as historians but as concerned citizens or political partisans or in some other capacity that involves the application of personal beliefs to historical facts. Some scientists believe in God, others do not. But scientists as scientists don’t invoke God to answer their scientific questions.
Brands is being delicate – I will not be. When professional historians blur the distinction between the elucidation of facts and the interpretation of them, when they convert their academic work into partisan argumentation, when they weaponize history, they erode the institutional credibility of their own profession. Why? Because history can always supply facts that can be bent into propping up any partisan talking point, and everyone who loves history knows it. It is a cheap trick. Any huckster preacher can find a line in the Bible to do exactly the same.
An historian who evokes his or her own status as an historian to amplify partisan arguments is no different than a medical doctor who shills for a vitamin company. In both cases, such people debase the coinage of their profession even if they believe what they are saying is true.
The number of undergraduates who major in history has declined more than 75% since I was in college. Well, if young people are under the impression that history is the practice of cherry-picking facts to make contemporary political arguments, why on earth would they devote their undergraduate years to the study of it? Yet that is exactly the impression that highly politicized historians promote.
Institutional credibility is hard to build and easy to destroy. There is no faster way to erode institutional credibility than to deploy it frivolously. Stay in your lane, folks.
