A few passages that didn’t make it in to the recent pieces I wrote for the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/beyond-the-end-of-history

1) If historians can say nothing about how history can enhance human life in the present “then we are at a loss,” says Darrin McMahon—a Professor of History at Dartmouth College— “both to ourselves and to our students, to say nothing of the public writ large.” @darrin_mcmahon

2) “McMahon points out to me that Cicero called history the “magistra vitae,” the teacher of life, and posits that history has long played a formative role in liberal arts education, helping students understand who they are as persons, articulating their desires and their goals”

3) Think of the massive courses on happiness or meaning offered by psychologists and behavioral economists,” McMahon notes. Such courses seem to offer insight about problems the students confront directly in their lives or read about in the news,

4) but, according to McMahon, “their wisdom is often the wisdom of the moment.” Historians and other humanists can cull the wisdom of the ages. “We should share more of that,” he concludes.

5) “The History Department at Brown University replaced traditional survey courses (US since 1865; Modern Europe since the Renaissance) with thematic courses, based on compelling contemporary themes such as incarceration, refugees, Great Trials and capitalism...”

6. “These courses, some taught by medievalist, explored the roots of these subjects in the deep past as well as across geographic boundaries. In this way, contemporary themes provided a springboard for turning away from present and into the distant past....”

7. “This, among other factors, played a key role in bring back enrollment number to their pre-2008 levels.”

8. “Regarding Lynn Regarding Hunt’s concern that presentism will lead to history going out of business, it could be that the recent drop in history majors has instead been the result of historians closing themselves off from contemporary concerns...”

9. David Armitage, for example, sees history’s diminishing stature in the university as being inseparable from its relinquishing iresponsibility to speak to the present. If the discipline is to thrive, or even just survive, it should contribute to the service of human betterment.

10. Otherwise, “we put ourselves out of business by failing to justify our craft and our profession to publics starkly confronted with the challenges of the present.” @DavidRArmitage https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/armitage/files/in_defence_of_presentism.pdf

11. if we turn to Lynn Hunt’s 2002 essay, what is clearly on display is the presumption of liberal values, and her concern that presentism would engender a sense of this moral superiority in students. Today, though, liberalism can no longer be assumed, but must be fought for.