Mark R. Stoneman

  History Profession

Apr 2, 2025 ∞

Chris York of the Kyiv Independent interviews historian Marci Shore on why she’s leaving Yale University for the University of Toronto: youtu.be….

See also “Three prominent Yale professors depart for Canadian university, citing Trump fears” by Ariela Lopez and Yolanda Wang for the Yale Daily News yaledailynews.com….

Mar 29, 2025 ∞

Timothy Snyder and the Existential Significance of History

Timothy Snyder posits an important nexus between our current political moment and how we as a society understand history.¹ When communist states proved unable to achieve their Marxist-Leninist ambitions, we did not feel the need to look too closely for an explanation in the histories of these states and their peoples. The communist project didn’t succeed because it was wrongheaded. Its failure lay in its problematic view of human development, that is, in its false, teleological philosophy of history.²

We didn’t see a problem with teleological thinking as such, despite historians' emphasis on provable historical causality over imagined directions that history is somehow destined to take. Instead, we assumed that the failure of their philosophy of history proved that our own was right. The world was on an inexorable path toward mutually reinforcing free trade and free societies. Why sweat the details?

Writing at the beginning of the first Trump administration, Snyder argued the need for a genuine historicization of our world.

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.…

The acceptance of inevitability stilted the way we talked about politics in the twenty-first century. It stifled policy debate and tended to generate party systems where one political party defended the status quo, while the other proposed total negation. We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things…³

Our tunnel vision, our focus on everything supposedly going the way it was supposed to, left us complacent. Trump’s 2016 election blindsided us, and the contingency of history continues to punch us in the face.

The enemies of democracy are guided by an equally ahistorical or “antihistorical” notion of human development. Snyder uses “eternity” to describe their image of history and politics.

Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concern with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous.…⁴

Of course, this view includes enemies and grievances, which can make nostalgia and an antihistorical worldview of unending merit dangerously aggressive. Consider the Lost Cause interpretation of the American Civil War, the poisonous stab-in-the-back myth in Weimar Germany, or the giant chip on Putin’s shoulder left by the USSR’s dissolution.

In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems. Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for the future seems impossible or even disloyal. How can we even think of reform when the enemy is always at the gate?

The stakes of such a worldview for our culture and our development are existential.

If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders.⁵

What we need, argues Snyder, is to be better grounded in history so that we can understand what was and what is. In resisting the coma and the trance, we might imagine other futures and look for opportunities to shape the way history develops.

Historicizing our world includes applying historical analysis to our immediate past. Snyder’s 2018 The Road to Unfreedom considers a period less than a decade old at the time.

As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair.…⁶

The project of this contemporary historian is as urgent as it is ambitious.

---

1. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (Tim Duggan Books, 2017), chap. 20; Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), prologue. ↩︎

2. Marxism is nothing if not a philosophy of history itself, a scientific description of how and why human societies develop as they do. It also propagates worker consciousness, worker knowledge of their historical role. See, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Lenin, impatient to move things along, developed the notion of a cadre of professional revolutionaries. Revolution and communism wouldn’t just happen. They had to be wrought from above. See V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902). ↩︎

3. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

4. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

5. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

6. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, prologue. ↩︎

Feb 17, 2025 ∞

The federal government is now using force to suppress knowledge of the history of violence against Black people. Remembering the past is too painful for these weak tyrants, so they tyrannize the brave who would teach or learn it.

Jan 31, 2025 ∞

The AHA’s members and their colleagues teach students how to think, not what to think. Preparing future generations to read, think, and analyze provides a much stronger foundation for informed patriotism and civic participation. This executive order does just the opposite, providing a blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy.…

– James Grossman, “On the K–12 Education Executive Order,” American Historical Association.

Dec 20, 2016 ∞

'Kill the Historians'



Source: @NewYorkerCartoons, Instagram.

Jun 27, 2016 ∞

Experts <—> Public

In most of today’s university disciplines, professional training serves to distance an individual from the public, to refine them into an ‘expert’ whose speech and writing are marked by incomprehensible formulae and keywords. But history-telling came out of an age before the era of experts, and its form is inherently democratic.

– Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (2014; Cambridge UP, 2015), 56.

Jul 22, 2008 ∞

Blogging and Myth-Busting

Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory has posted good material to his academic blog under the category, myth of black Confederates. Several recent posts include criticism of efforts by modern-day Confederate patriots and would-be historians who want to appropriate Weary Clyburn, a slave, as a defender of Southern liberty. In one he points out that writing good books to debunk myths is all well and good, but on the subject of black Confederates "the real fight must take place on the web."

In the same post he points to an earlier one he made in late March: "Should Civil War Historians Blog (academic that is)?" In it he observes how vast the public discourse about the American Civil War is, while the discourse in which professional historians participate is relatively narrow. Historians need to continue their current research and publishing mission, but they also have "a responsibility to engage a wider audience and contribute to the public discourse." Since much of the public turns to the internet for ready answers, historians need to offer these answers in an accessible format, especially for highly sensitive questions that shape American identity.

I agree with Kevin about the need for Civil War historians to blog. I have also observed a similar need with respect to Holocaust denial, since I have found that Google can get it wrong. Until now I have used this blog mainly to reflect on what I do and to communicate with other historians, but as Kevin points out, Google brings him search engine traffic for important topics such as black Confederates, so his blog posts reach a wider audience. I have written a few of my posts with that awareness, but his arguments make me think I could do much more. So could other historians.

Jan 21, 2008 ∞

When Experts Are Forced to Talk to Outsiders

Teaching undergraduate students forces me to deliver narratives and explanations to people who do not share my professional assumptions about how the world works and the way history should be told. It challenges me to think about how I can retell old stories with a different vocabulary. In the process I might even learn something. This is especially likely to happen when students ask me questions or express strong feelings about a major event. I last noticed this phenomenon in the fall, when I had my students visit the Holocaust Museum and discuss their experience in the course's online forum. I got to thinking about it again today because of an article about innovation in the New York Times last month. Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike, by Janet Rae-Dupree, points to the benefits that can accrue to experts when they open themselves up to the perspectives of outsiders.

Continue reading →

Jan 14, 2008 ∞

Historians Speak about the Profession

Producing Knowledge

Mills Kelly of Edwired responds to the notion that the historical profession is about writing and therefore about publishing in traditional academic print media:

It seems to me that the essence of scholarship is the circulation of knowledge and the discussion of that knowledge among both peers and other interested parties. How is knowledge circulated? Print, the Internet, a museum exhibit, film, radio, are all methods for circulating knowledge and all of them require some sort of writing–even if that writing doesn’t result in yet another monograph or journal article. Just as one example–this blog had more than 75,000 unique visitors in 2007. If I’m lucky, my book will sell 1,000 copies. So how is more knowledge circulated?

Teaching Survey Courses

In The AHA Guide to Teaching and Learning with New Media, John McClymer makes an interesting point about one major difficulty of teaching introductory history classes:

I routinely begin our explorations of topics by asking students to come up with questions. There are several reasons. The most important is that it legitimates confusion. All learning begins in puzzlement, but teachers and students routinely connive in the illusion that students understand the causes of the French Revolution and any number of equally complex developments. The first and second year students in my “Modern Europe and U.S.,1815 to the Present” do not. This is not a failure on their part or mine. A good undergraduate math student can learn to integrate equations in a Calculus I course. An equally good history student cannot master the causes of the French Revolution in an introductory history course.

Nov 23, 2007 ∞

Military Studies in Liberal Arts Education

Samuel R. Williamson Jr and Russel Van Wyk make an interesting point on the last page of an undergraduate documentary history of the Great War's causes.

At the start of the new millennium, and after September 11, 2001, there is an urgent need for civilian understanding and control of the military forces of the state. Yet paradoxically, this need comes at a time when very few civilians in western society have had any direct experience in the military, either as members of the uniformed services or as students of strategic issues. Conversely, recent studies also show that many in the military have little appreciation of the American traditions of civil-military relations and even of the assumed tenets of civilian control.

I am unable to comment on their final assertion, but the rest of their comments speaks to a problem that has long bothered me. Why do we not teach more military history in our liberal arts programs? How can we expect our civilian leadership and the electorate more generally to make informed decisions about war and peace if we do not teach these questions in our institutions of higher learning?

Oct 9, 2007 ∞

Historians and Politics

Originally posted on Clio and Me on this date.

Yesterday I wrote about the present in this blog about my work with the past. What possible justification could I have for doing that? (I mean besides the obvious point that this is my blog.)

I wrote about outsourcing military functions in Iraq not because I possess special knowledge of the subject, but because my expertise in history makes me frame the issue in ways that are different from what I find in the media. I do not possess any special insight into what we should do about the Iraq War now, but I know that there are some issues from past wars that I am not seeing raised today. Historians are on solid epistemological ground when they raise such issues.

On the other hand, I find the American Historical Association's official condemnation of the war last year problematic. An organization of historians has no business claiming expertise in making war and peace. Instead I wish it would devote more attention to the study of war and society in the past. Then its individual members could participate in the framing of debates about war and peace in our own times, if they so desire.