Editor’s note: This bibliography was created by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and previously hosted on his website. He has generously allowed us to preserve it here, along with his original introduction. The bibliography serves as a companion to his August 2020 piece “Beyond The End of History” in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Scholars and nonscholars alike are struggling to make sense of what is happening today. The public is turning to the past — through popular podcasts, newspapers, television, trade books and documentaries — to understand the blooming buzzing confusion of the present. Historians are being called upon by their students and eager general audiences trying to come to grips with a world again made strange.
But they face an obstacle. The Anglo-American history profession’s cardinal sin has been so-called “presentism,” the illicit projection of present values onto the past . . .
It is difficult to grasp the force of the prohibition on “presentism” without understanding the political backdrop against which it developed: the Cold War and the liberal internationalism endorsed by most Anglo-American historians.
Read the full piece here.
“Never Forget Your Past,” Buzludzha gate, 2014. Vitali gio, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
History of the Present/Contemporary History courses are becoming more and more popular. And although historical analogies will always be employed to understand contemporary events, the last few years have witnessed a series of political and economic crises on a global scale that have left scholars and non-scholars alike desperately looking to the past in search of answers for understanding the present moment.
There are promises and perils to such an undertaking. A history of the present is by its nature a speculative exercise, not only because using historical analogies to compare the present to the past is rarely convincing, but also because the political assumptions of such histories themselves have an unacknowledged agency. Histories of the present are often histories of fear. These stories are dangerous because, like insecticides, they try to block unpalatable political outcomes, but end up killing off new thought as well. To explain how actual people actually feel and think is anathema to the program.
But some rare histories of the present do ask the public to reconsider the structure and sources of contemporary events. They are not histories of fear, but histories of utopias, sentiments, institutions, and power. Such histories of the present allow, in the words Alondra Nelson, “moments of reckoning for us as a society to think about how we want to live and live better together.”
Books & Articles
On History and the Present
David Armitage, “In Defense of Presentism,” forthcoming in History and Human Flourishing, ed. Darrin M. McMahon (Oxford, 2020).
Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (C.A. Watts, 1964).
Vernon Bogdanor, “I Believe in Yesterday,” The New Statesman, December 17, 2009.
Angus Burgin, “New Directions: Then and Now,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, ed. Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O’Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Oxford: 2016), 343-264.
Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!” New Literary History, Vol 42, No.4 (Autumn 2011): 573-591.
François-Herzog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (Columbia University Press, 2o15).
Patrick Iber, “History in an Age of Fake News,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 2018.
Anton Jäger, “It Might Take awhile before History Starts Again,” Damage, March 25, 2020.
Reinart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Columbia University Press, 2004).
____, Sediments of Time: On the Possible Histories, trans. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford University Press, 2018).
Herbert Lüthy, “What’s the Point of History?” Journal of Contemporary History Vol 3, No. 2 (1968): 3-22.
Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (Verso, 2014).
Jan-Werner Müller, “European Intellectual History as Contemporary History,” Journal of Contemporary History Vol 46, No. 3 (2011): 574-590.
Sophia Rosenfeld, “On Lying: Writing Philosophical History after the Enlightenment and After Arendt,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, ed. Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O’Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Oxford: 2016), 218-234.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr, “On the Writing of Contemporary History,” The Atlantic, March 1967.
Howard Schonberger, “Purposes and Ends in History: Presentism and the New Left,” The History Teacher Vol 7 No. 3 (1974): 448-458.
Marek Tamm and Oliver Laurent (eds), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism, (Bloomsbury Press, 2019).
Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory Vol 5 No.2 (1966): 213-17.
Olivia Waxman, “Professors Are Crowdsourcing a #CoronavirusSyllabus. Here’s the History They Think Should Be Used to Teach This Moment,” Time Magazine, March 27, 2020.
Thomas Zimmer, “Reflections on the Challenges of Writing a (Pre-)History of the “Polarized” Present,” Modern American History Vol 2 No. 3 (2019): 403-408.
“Sentencing the Present: Part 1: Critical Conversations in a Time of Crisis, ” Public Seminar March 7, 2020.
“Sentencing the Present: Part 2: Critical Conversation in a Time of Crisis,” Public Seminar May 14, 2020.
Weimar/Fascism Analogy (Typically used to describe Trump, Brexit, Global turn to populism: Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro, etc)
David Bell, “Not Everything is Munich and Hitler,” The National Interest, April 25, 2017.
Daniel Bessner and Udi Greenberg, “The Weimar Analogy,” Jacobin Magazine, December 2016.
Peter Gordon, “Why Historical Analogy Matters,” New York Review of Books, January 7, 2020.
Udi Greenberg, “The Myth of a New Nazism”, Spiked, August 10, 2018.
Samuel Moyn, “The Trouble with Comparisons,” New York Review of Books, May 19, 2020.
Samoyn Moyn, “Should We Compare Trump to Hitler?” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2020.
Tamsin Shaw, “William Barr: The Carl Schmitt of Our time,” New York Review of Books, January 15, 2020.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty-One Lessons on Tyranny (Random House, 2017).
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (Random House, 2018).
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House, 2018).
World War I/II mobilization, solidarity, welfarism, emergency measures (Covid-19)
Tim Barker, “It Doesn’t Have to be a War,” Dissent, March 20, 2020.
David Bell, “«La guerre au virus», le passé d’une métaphore,” Le Grand Continent, April 7, 2020.
Lizabeth Cohen, “The Lessons of the Great Depression,” The Atlantic, May 17, 2020.
David Edgerton, “Why the coronavirus crisis should not be compared to the Second World War,” New Statesman April 3, 2020.
David Greenberg, “What Trump Can Learn From Woodrow Wilson,” Politico, March 30, 2020.
Jacob Hagstrom, “Stop Calling Covid-19 a War,” Washington Post, April 20, 2020.
Walter G. Moss, “New Deal or Nazism: Historical Comparisons to Trump’s Performance as a Leader in Crisis,” History News Network, April 5, 2020.
Nicolas Mulder, “The Coronavirus War Economy Will Change the World,” Foreign Policy, March 26, 2020.
Mark Wilson, “The 5 WWII Lessons That Could Help the Government Fight Coronavirus,” Politico, March 19, 2020.
Joshua Zeitz, “Why The Trump Administration Won’t Be Able to Make the Stimulus Work,” Politico, April, 4, 2020.
New Cold War (Fight Against new fascisms, new totalitarianisms, new enemies, populism, China)
Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Terror and the Liberal Spirit (Harper, 2009.)
Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2003).
Niall Ferguson, “The New Cold War? It’s with China and it Already has Begun,” New York Times, December 2, 2019.
Carlo Invernezzi Accetti and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Can Christian Democracy Save America From Trump?,” The Guardian, April 7, 2018.
Jan Werner Muller, “What Cold War Liberalism Can Teach Us Today,” The New York Review of Books, November 26, 2018.
The 1970s
Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (Basic Books, 2013).
Simon Henry Reid, Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since The Cold War, 1971-2017 (Simon & Schuster, 2019).
Marxism
Samuel Moyn, “The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme is 100 years Old,” New York Times, November 13, 2018.
Enlightenment/French Revolution
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).
- For a forum devoted to Age of Anger with specific concern about the history of the present see this H-Diplo forum devoted to the book here.
Rebecca L. Spang, “The Revolution is Underway Already,” The Atlantic, April 5, 2020.
Pre-Modern Analogies For Understanding the Present
Brad Littlejohn, “The English Reformation: England’s First Brexit,” The American Conservative, January 15, 2020.
Without Historical Analog/Unprecedented
Nancy Rosenblum, “Why a Philosophy of History in which the Present Moment Is World-Altering Is Not Hubris and Is Politically Necessary,” The Social Science Research Council, November 7, 2014.
Adam Tooze, “We Have Never Been Here Before,” Washington Post, March 25, 2020.
Journals
Journal of Contemporary History
Podcasts/Special Series
History of Now: Cambridge History Faculty puts past and present into dialogue
Washington Post’s Made by History: Historians Enter the Fray
NPR’s Throughline: The past is never past. Every headline has a history
AHR Interview: Podcast of the American Historical Review
Talking Politics: History of Ideas
Syllabi/Courses
Patrick Iber (University of Wisconsin, Madison), History of Now
Kathleen Belew (University of Chicago), History of the Present
Seth Cotlar (Willamette University), History of the Present (Fall 2019).
Bethany Moreton and Matthew Delmont (Dartmouth College), #Everything Has a History: Understanding America Today
Samuel Moyn and Daniel Magaziner (Yale University), The World Circa 2000
Julia Rabig (Dartmouth College), American History Since 1980
Sophia Rosenfeld (University of Pennsylvania), The History of Truth
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, (University of Wisconsin, Madison), The History of Your Parents Generation.
Brandon Schechter, Putin, Stalin and “Friends”: Understanding Eurasia Today through its History and Personalities”
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (Dartmouth College), History of the Present (Course taught at Yale’s Jackson’s Institute for Global Affairs, Spring 2019; syllabus available upon request)
Timothy Snyder, (Yale University), History of the Present: A Contemporary History of Diplomatic Crisis (Spring 2018)
Adam Tooze, (Columbia University), History of the Present ( Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Fall 2013).
#coronavirussyllabus: Initiative of Alondra Nelson and Anne Fausto-Sterling for deepening historical understanding of Covid-19
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