Why Historians Have Become America's New Public Intellectuals in the Trump Era

Full text

A recent essay in The New Republic asks why historians have become such visible public voices during the Trump era. Katherine Kelaidis argues that figures such as Heather Cox Richardson, Jill Lepore, Joanne Freeman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Kevin Kruse have become a new class of liberal public intellectuals, translating the past into political commentary. She identifies a real phenomenon. Historians have become more visible in American public life than they have been in decades. Where I part company with her is not over the visibility of historians, but over what readers are seeking when they turn to them. Long before Substack newsletters, podcasts, and cable news appearances, historians entered the public conversation through anniversaries, moments when publishers, editors, and readers turn to the past to make sense of the present.

For generations, editors, publishers, museums, documentary filmmakers, and television producers have turned to historians during centennials, sesquicentennials, and other commemorations to explain why events from decades—or centuries—ago still matter. Historians know these cycles well. Some welcome them; others roll their eyes. Anniversary years can produce a flood of predictable books and commemorations, encouraging familiar narratives polished for public consumption. But they also create something much more valuable: a rare opportunity to ask new questions about stories we think we already know.

One of the persistent misconceptions about public historians is that they simply reduce complicated scholarship to comforting lessons. The best public historians do almost the opposite. They synthesize decades of research into prose that remains faithful to the complexity of the past. They introduce readers to forgotten people, overlooked archives, and arguments that have long circulated within the academy but rarely reach a broader audience.

Anniversaries widen the audience for scholarship. They encourage historians to revisit familiar subjects with new questions, and they invite readers to reconsider histories they thought they already knew.

This is scholarship translated for a wider audience, not traded for punditry.

Nor are public historians insulated from criticism. Quite the opposite. They are criticized from every direction. Political opponents accuse them of undermining cherished national myths, while fellow historians often challenge their interpretations, evidence, or framing. Earlier this month, for example, Stacey Patton publicly criticized Richardson’s Fourth of July newsletter, arguing that her characterization of slavery and Indigenous dispossession softened the violence at the nation’s founding as a “sticky little problem.” On this specific point, I think Patton is right. That doesn’t erase what Richardson’s larger body of work has accomplished, but her popularity doesn’t put her above the kind of scrutiny any historian’s argument should face. Public engagement has made debates among historians visible.

Most importantly, historians such as Kevin Kruse, Jill Lepore, Joanne Freeman, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat have done something the historical profession has struggled to accomplish for decades: they have persuaded hundreds of thousands of readers that history matters to understanding the present. Kelaidis reads their popularity as evidence that historical scholarship has become a kind of liberal jeremiad, offering moral reassurance through historical analogy. I think that misses what readers are seeking. They are not returning because they want prophecy or consolation. They are returning because they want context.

There is a real craft in taking a sprawling, contested historical debate and rendering it legible in a paragraph without losing what made it contested in the first place. That is not a lesser form of historical work. It is a different—and arguably more difficult—form of the same work. Dismissing it as punditry overlooks the intellectual labor that makes public history possible.

Kruse’s work on the political history of modern conservatism has helped readers understand that today’s partisan landscape did not emerge overnight but has a long, traceable history. Lepore’s recent writing on the Constitution has reframed public discussions surrounding the nation’s 250th anniversary by reminding readers that the framers expected the Constitution to be amended rather than preserved in amber. Ben-Ghiat’s comparative work on fascism does not function as a morality play either. It works because she moves concretely between cases, from Mussolini’s Italy to Pinochet’s Chile, showing the actual mechanics of authoritarian consolidation rather than declaring that history has rendered a verdict.

Freeman’s work on the constitutional order follows the same principle. I have shared a stage with her twice, once around a book on January 6 and once at a 250th anniversary event, and both times what she offered was not “here is the lesson” but a genuinely underreported backstory: She uses her platforms to reconstruct the messy political world that produced it: tavern culture, personal and often violent rivalries, informal networks, and the circulation of ideas before the rise of a mass press. She has said as much about her own public role. In a book on January 6 that I co-edited for my series, History in the Headlines , Freeman in 2021 describes why she turns to a public platform the same way, to teach rather than to pronounce verdicts: “One of the reasons why I’m on Twitter as much as I am is that, very early on, I referenced something about checks and balances, and a lot of people didn’t know what that meant. And I said, ‘Oh, okay, well, let me explain what it is.’ And then I got all these people responding saying, ‘Oh, I always wondered what checks and balances meant.’”

Richardson likewise deserves a fuller reading than Kelaidis allows. While Kelaidis suggests that Richardson’s newsletter often slips into contemporary political commentary, Richardson repeatedly grounds her work in the history of the New Deal, Frances Perkins, and the construction of the twentieth-century administrative state. Whether one agrees with every analogy she draws is beside the point. Her work rests on historical scholarship.

Public historians are fighting on multiple fronts. None of the historians named here climbed the academic ladder because of a newsletter or a cable news appearance. They were already established in their fields, or they left an academic position they already held to do something else. Their public writing grows directly out of their scholarship, and it has not been rewarded without cost. The risk runs in the opposite direction from the one Kelaidis describes. It is a live question in every history department whether writing for a general audience costs a scholar standing among peers. That stigma is real. Choosing to write a Substack instead of writing only for the Journal of American History means absorbing a professional cost, not cashing in a windfall. I have never known of a historian hired based purely on their work as a public intellectual; if anything, it has often cost them the job. I know of one scholar who won every major history award, including the Pulitzer, and was denied a job at an Ivy League school because she was “too popular.”

Kelaidis closes by reminding readers that history is “neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play.” I agree. But that is not what these historians are doing. At their best, they are not writing sermons. They are recovering contingency. They show readers that institutions were built, contested, revised, and sometimes dismantled by ordinary people making choices under extraordinary circumstances. They make the present appear less inevitable and they restore complexity. In an era saturated with opinion, that kind of historical context may be the most valuable thing historians have to offer.

No occasion tests that skill more than a historical anniversary.

My own understanding of anniversaries changed while researching Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering . As the nation prepared to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I expected, like many historians, another cycle of books about battles, generals, Lincoln, and the political struggle over slavery. Instead, I found myself drawn into a different archive.

Working in the National Archives, I began reading military reports, Freedmen’s Bureau records, abolitionist correspondence—including the writings of Harriet Jacobs—and contemporary newspapers. Read together, these sources revealed a history that had received remarkably little sustained attention. Historians had long documented that disease killed more Civil War soldiers than combat. Yet almost no one had systematically asked what emancipation meant for the health of formerly enslaved people.

Freedom did not immediately provide food, shelter, medical care, or functioning public health. Formerly enslaved families emerged from generations of deprivation only to confront smallpox epidemics, cholera outbreaks, famine, and widespread malnutrition. I pieced together evidence of epidemics that swept through refugee camps and freedpeople’s communities, estimating that tens of thousands died of smallpox alone, though the uneven records make precise numbers impossible. Emancipation was unquestionably a triumph. But it was also a humanitarian crisis.

Some readers accused me of telling a “darker” history of emancipation. I never understood that criticism. My purpose was never to diminish emancipation’s significance but to understand what freedom meant for the people who experienced it. The anniversary had opened a door—not to celebration or condemnation, but to questions historians had not previously asked. The anniversary also led to widespread coverage in The New York Times , BBC, The Guardian , and media outlets from Greece to Australia.

Looking back, I realized that the Civil War sesquicentennial had done something I hadn’t anticipated. It created permission to ask questions that previous generations of historians either had not thought to ask or had lacked the archival evidence to answer. Anniversaries widen the audience for scholarship. They encourage historians to revisit familiar subjects with new questions, and they invite readers to reconsider histories they thought they already knew.

That, I have come to believe, is the real value of anniversaries. They create moments when readers are unusually willing to revisit histories they thought they already understood. They encourage historians to return to familiar events armed with new archives, different methods, and fresh questions. The best anniversary books do not confirm public memory; they unsettle it.

I learned that lesson again a year later.

Anniversaries do not simply ask us to remember the past. They ask us to rethink it. They open the door. What matters is whether historians are willing to walk through it.

In 2013, the nation marked the fortieth anniversary of the Upstairs Lounge fire, then the deadliest attack on gay people in U.S. history. I pitched the story to Time , hoping to introduce readers to an event that had largely disappeared from public memory. Although I had uncovered the history and done the research, the magazine assigned a journalist to write the piece and initially planned to credit me simply for the research. I insisted on a byline because historians do more than locate forgotten facts. We discover them, interpret them, and explain why they matter. That experience taught me something else about the role anniversaries play in public history. They expose the uneasy relationship between historical scholarship and journalism. Once forgotten histories enter public conversation, they quickly take on lives of their own. That’s exactly what historians hope will happen. Yet it also means that years of archival work can disappear behind the stories they helped make possible.

That story stayed with me long after the anniversary passed. A few years later, it became the foundation for my book Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation .

Anniversaries, however, carry another paradox. Once historians recover forgotten histories and bring them into public conversation, those stories begin lives of their own. Journalists, filmmakers, podcasters, museum curators, and teachers adopt them. Ideally, that is exactly what historians hope will happen. We want neglected histories to become common knowledge.

Yet success comes with a peculiar irony. The more effectively historians reshape public memory, the easier it becomes to forget the years spent in the archives making those new narratives possible. Forgotten histories become familiar histories, and familiar histories begin to seem as though they had always been there.

That irony is not abstract to me. In 2016, I wrote about the Upstairs Lounge fire again, this time in an op-ed for The New York Times that ran the day after the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, connecting a 1973 arson at a gay bar in New Orleans that had doubled as a makeshift church to an attack forty-three years later. Within hours, journalists were drawing on that history to link the two tragedies, without citing where the research had come from. It moved into public circulation so quickly that it started to look like something everyone had always known, rather than something one historian had spent years reconstructing from the archive.

As the United States continues the commemorations surrounding its 250th anniversary, historians have been asked to explain the nation’s past. My own contribution is a book I co-edited as part of a series called History in the Headlines , one that puts Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and creator of the 1619 Project , in conversation with a group of historians about the significance of the dates themselves. Does the country begin in 1619, in Virginia, with the arrival of enslaved Africans, or in 1776, in Philadelphia, with the signing of the Declaration? Setting that question alongside Indigenous history opens it further, since neither date accounts for the centuries of Native nations that preceded both. Latinx historians in the volume raise another possibility, that the country’s origins run through the West as well, not only through Virginia or Philadelphia. The book does not settle on an answer. It was built, deliberately, so that it would not. The historians in it are doing what public history should do at its best: offering context and open questions rather than a verdict.

That is why I remain skeptical when historians’ public engagement is dismissed as punditry. Public history is not a retreat from scholarship. It is one of scholarship’s highest ambitions: to bring rigorous historical research into conversations far beyond the academy. Anniversaries do not simply ask us to remember the past. They ask us to rethink it. They open the door. What matters is whether historians are willing to walk through it.

____________________________

University Presses Reflect on the American Semiquincentennial

Association of University Presses (AUPresses) members share a commitment to advancing knowledge and have long published scholarly works that contribute to understanding many complex subjects, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.

As Americans prepare to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this summer, AUPresses members are calling attention work by their expert authors that offers new insights on the Founding and Revolutionary-era history as well as into the American experiment, 250 years along. They have curated a:

– a collection of more than 100 new and recent books, available for purchase on Bookshop.org, and

– a reading list round-up, featuring even more publications, teaching materials, and commentary.

We invite the curious everywhere to examine this essential reading from a wide range of expert authors.