Sh!t Bad Historians Say: On Presentism

Real talk from a real Texas historian.

“Yuh know, folks back then were just like us.”

No. No, they weren’t.

How could they have been? They didn’t have the internet, ATMs, microwaves, or penicillin. Sure they loved their children, had personal ambitions, and, like those of us still above the grass, struggled to do the best they could with what means they had. But, in the main, it is the dissimilarities that characterize the people of the past. For me, that’s what makes them so interesting.

Every person who ever lived breathed the air of his or her times. They possessed different values and interests. The historian’s job is to immerse oneself in the documents of a particular period to better understand—not condemn, not criticize, not scold—and then explain those differences. To do otherwise is ahistorical, present-minded, and, finally, damned unfair.

We don’t have the right to sit in judgement of people who didn’t enjoy the many advantages of the twenty-first century and who are no longer present to offer a defense.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect historians to be mute observers of the past. Nevertheless, when analyzing people and events they should apply the standards of their times, not ours.

Here’s the rub. It requires years in the libraries and archives, the examination of thousands of period letters, newspapers, court documents, diaries, census records, and the like, to be able to occupy a period headspace. We will never know exactly how they thought and felt, but we can come close.

Many of today’s newly hatched historians immediately jump to judgement without putting in the years of hard-chair time necessary to place people in the context of their times.

Some folks nowadays feel threatened by the past. Hence, the rejection of “traditional values.” Since they have so little understanding of history, they find it easier to demonize it. Because long dead people owned slaves, didn’t respect the environment, raised tobacco, were homophobic—enter your own cause du jour—they were, ipso facto, EVIL.

Some of them may have, in fact, been evil.

But it is insidious to tear down their statues and proclaim them so merely because they comported to the societal norms of their own time and place. We used to understand that.

We used to be smarter.