History Books in a Political Season
When historians write about the past, they are always partly writing about the present. The current wave of popular history reveals what we are most anxious about — and what we are most determined to avoid seeing.
The books that historians write, and the books that readers buy, are in a period of acute anxiety. Not since the late 1930s — when the examples of fascism in Europe were driving both serious scholarly work and urgent popular history about the fragility of democracy — has historical writing been so openly, anxiously political in its ambitions. The implicit question that runs through the most commercially successful history books of the past decade is not "what happened?" but "is it happening again?"
Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, and their successors in the genre have sold in the millions because they address, in the register of historical scholarship, the question that is most urgently on the minds of readers who are watching democratic institutions under stress in real time. They are useful books. They are also, in ways that are worth examining, books that tell their readers primarily what they already believe, in the historical idiom that those readers find most authoritative.
What popular history is doing right
The popular history boom of the past decade has produced some genuinely important work. Adam Tooze's Crashed and Shutdown brought rigorous economic history to bear on the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 response in ways that significantly improved the quality of public understanding. Heather Cox Richardson's daily newsletter-turned-book Democracy Awakening has given millions of Americans a usable framework for understanding the ideological roots of the current political crisis. David Grann's The Wager found a genuinely gripping story of survival and betrayal that illuminated something true about institutional failure and its human costs.
These books share a quality that the best popular history has always had: they refuse to separate the interesting story from the serious analysis, insisting that the human drama and the historical significance are aspects of the same thing. They are works of literary skill and intellectual substance simultaneously.
What popular history is avoiding
The genre has a tendency to avoid the stories that don't fit its preferred narrative — not by omitting them but by not writing them. The political crisis of the current moment has generated an enormous volume of historical writing about the sources and precedents for authoritarian populism; it has generated much less writing about the legitimate grievances that authoritarian populism has exploited, the failures of liberal democratic governance that created the conditions for its appeal, or the ways in which progressive governance has produced its own failures of legitimacy and competence.
This is not dishonesty; it is selection. Writers choose subjects they find interesting and important; readers select books that confirm and extend what they already believe; publishers respond to market signals. The result is a popular history that is, in its commercial center of gravity, predominantly addressed to a liberal audience that is anxious about democracy and looking for historical validation of that anxiety.
The books being written and read on the other side of the political divide have a symmetric problem: they confirm the anxieties of conservative readers about cultural change, immigration, and institutional capture, while avoiding the parts of the historical record that complicate those anxieties.
The tradition of historical writing that the best of the genre aspires to — the tradition of Tocqueville, of Henry Adams, of Richard Hofstadter — is distinguished precisely by its refusal to serve a political clientele, by its willingness to follow the evidence into uncomfortable places, by its recognition that the past is more ambiguous than the present needs it to be. This tradition is alive; it is not the tradition that the commercial popular history market is primarily rewarding right now.
The revisionism question
The debates over historical curriculum that have animated the culture wars of the past five years — the 1619 Project, critical race theory in schools, Confederate monuments, the curriculum requirements passed by numerous state legislatures — reflect a genuine and important dispute about what history education should accomplish and whose experiences it should center.
The dispute is conducted mostly in bad faith on both sides. The case for revising historical narratives to include experiences that have been systematically marginalized — the experiences of enslaved people, of Native Americans, of women, of immigrant and working-class communities — is well-founded; the historical profession's own internal revisions have been moving in this direction for decades, driven by the normal mechanisms of scholarship rather than political mandate.
The opposition to these revisions, when it is not simply defensive white identity politics, often makes a genuine argument: that historical narrative requires a principle of selection, that emphasizing America's failures without adequate attention to its achievements produces historical education that cannot sustain democratic commitment, and that the transmission of civic identity requires some version of a shared story that children can identify with.
Both of these things are true. The fact that they are true does not tell us what the right balance is; it tells us that the balance is a genuine question that deserves to be addressed seriously rather than resolved by legislative mandate or cultural performance.
What the next wave of important history will be
The most important historical work of the next decade will not be the work that addresses the immediate political anxieties of the current moment — those books are being written and will sell well and will be important in the short term. It will be the work that takes the perspective that the current moment makes most difficult: the long view.
The really consequential questions about the current period — whether the institutional fraying of the past decade is an episodic disruption or a structural change; whether the geopolitical order that emerged from the mid-twentieth century can adapt or will collapse; whether the technological transformation underway represents a historical acceleration comparable to the industrial revolution or something more disruptive — require the kind of deep structural analysis that the immediate political crisis crowds out.
The books that will be most important in twenty years are probably not on the bestseller lists today. That has been true of the most important history books in every previous era; there is no reason to expect the current moment to be different.
Aiko Tanaka is a contributing writer at The Auguro covering books, literature, and the literary arts.