Tag Archive

usable past

The Stories We Tell: The Liberal Historical Narrative, and the Myth of the Nation

All knowledge is political. How we think about the past, and our relationship to it, reveals profound assumptions on the subject of how we treat one another, how we govern society, and what obligation we have to institute change in our present societies. In this fashion, the post-2016 landscape has produced no shortage of historians thinking (and arguing) as to what the exact role of historians should be in American democracy. The Harvard historian and public intellectual Jill Lepore is one such thinker. Lepore has now written a series of books and articles arguing that Donald Trump represents a broader Read more