Why Does Academic History Matter?

‘Why should the things we love be the first things sacrificed to a bleak future no one asked for?’

Martha Vandrei is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter

History is under threat in many universities. All the historians at the University of Exeter, myself included, are being asked to justify our existence. We must ‘strategically align’ with a vision of the future that is – to me – personally and professionally appalling. That vision sees the humanities as dead weight. It sees law, defence, business, and a handful of sciences as future-facing, exportable, and exploitable. AI is a welcome companion in that brave new world, where the product is everything, the process just a hindrance.

Any historian should be quick to point out that nothing is future-proof, but some things are predictable. To quote the 18th-century historian Lord Bolingbroke: ‘The love of history seems inseparable from human nature, because it seems inseparable from self-love.’ History is a constant; the human passion for it is never-ending. Bolingbroke went on to say that history matters because it is, famously, ‘philosophy teaching by example’. Few historians would make the same claim now, certainly not in universities. But what we can say is that history teaches us patience, perseverance, attentiveness; to critique, to understand, to imagine the perspectives of other human beings.

Yet students choose to study history at university for the simple reason that they love history. It is the academic historian’s task to acknowledge and affirm that love, and to help it mature from passion to care. Students engage with method, argue about approach, seek to understand the all-importance of context, and learn to judge evidence. And they come to love that process. It becomes inseparable from the love of history.

This may sound overly romantic. Worries about student debt, employability, and the cost of living are crushingly omnipresent. But why, given that torrid outlook, should the things we love be the first things sacrificed to a bleak future no one asked for?

Academic history matters. It matters for honing critical engagement, for challenging all-encompassing technological vapidity, for strengthening individuality. It matters because it shows us that process cannot be separated from what we produce. I could go on indefinitely. But it matters most because people love it.

‘It teaches us, as few other disciplines can, that we all matter, or none of us does’

Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at Newcastle University

If we ask Google the question ‘Why does academic history matter?’ we are advised that it represents ‘the rigorous, evidence-based study of how human societies change, function, and connect over time. Far from being a useless list of old facts’, Google optimistically assures us, academic history ‘gives us the tools to understand our modern world and make better choices for the future.’

One can detect in this AI summary the faint echo of an argument against an invisible opponent who believes that history may be nothing more than ‘a useless list of old facts’. This is not surprising. What Google is drawing on comprises a plethora of professional and public defences of history, under attack as the subject is in many, if not most, UK universities. And if there lurks in some dark corner of the web, or Whitehall, the view that the study of the past is of little value to society, AI is too well trained to do more than politely hint at this academic apostasy. Its response, instrumentalist as it is, represents the general thrust of the defence of a subject that finds itself on the back foot in the battle over educational resources, the focus of an increasingly bumptious balloon debate imposed upon it by those who, as the cliché has it, know the cost of everything, the value of nothing.

History has long suffered from the fact that, as The Saturday Review recognised in 1894, it is a subject ‘on which every educated man …considers himself competent to form his own judgment’. But history is not, and never has been, a static discipline. It has broken the barriers of its narrow nationalist origins to construct an ever-expanding tapestry of differing approaches: political and diplomatic, medical and military, social and religious, emotional and environmental, among many others. And with each evolution, new players appear upon the stage, new voices are heard, and new patterns emerge. But these are not tools with which to comprehend the present, nor shape the future we desire. The professional study of history reminds us, as Herodotus did, that ‘human prosperity never abides long in the same place’. With that in mind, academic history matters because it teaches us, as few other disciplines can, that we all matter, or none of us does.

‘Market forces alone cannot be relied upon to produce excellent history’

Joy Porter is 125th Anniversary Professor of Indigenous & Environmental History at the University of Birmingham

It matters for a number of reasons. Firstly, because market forces alone cannot be relied upon to produce the sort of excellent history that enables us to respond intelligently to the future and which, incidentally, feeds the popular books, podcasts, and television programmes that the history-loving public adores. The absence of academic history would mean the simple recitation of established chronologies and the retelling of the same comforting stories. It would risk intellectual stagnation and society losing its compass.

But academic history matters far beyond its commercial crossover. Taught well, it provides intellectual capabilities that allow us to evaluate evidence and find truth, arrive at the root causes of things, understand the full complexity of the human past, and be ready and able to constructively participate in pluralist democracies. Academic history gives us access to the human self in diverse contexts over time. The future may teem with robots and artificial intelligence, but we remain products of the past. New knowledge generated by academic history contains warnings and untapped lessons from the past. It shines one of the brightest lights available into the past’s vastness and alone equips us with the single skill that is transcendent: the ability to ask the right questions.

Academic history is made up of ways of knowing with specific rules and methodologies. The professionalisation of history in the early 19th century saw this centre around what was subsequently recognised as an impossible empiricist dream: the ambition to tell the past, as the German ‘father of empirical history’ Leopold von Ranke put it, ‘how it essentially was’. We now use a much broader set of tools and evidence to articulate historical imagination. Ours is an age of disintermediation: in theory, it is possible to learn almost anything anywhere. Yet, despite increasing atomisation and isolation – and at a time when the study of history at UK universities is recognised as being under profound threat – we remain social beings who learn best in dialogue with each other. That is the value of the university: to forget it would be a profound intergenerational and social loss.

‘It produces a democratic polity that can vigorously argue about its collective identity’

David Andress is Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth

Everything that a society does is grounded in its sense of the past, because without that, nothing about the present makes sense. How a society obtains such a sense of the past, what form it takes, and what kind of reflections on the present it prompts, are therefore vital questions. Nobody who has come into direct contact with academic historians could accuse them of addiction to consensus-building, and it is certainly not the case (as long-dead gurus such as E.H. Carr and J.H. Plumb once argued) that historical knowledge can chart an unproblematic course to the future.

So what is distinctive about academic history that might make it something other than mere personal or ideological preferences? History as academic scholarship involves a commitment to originality, significance, and rigour. It involves direct contact with surviving documentation, artefacts, and other historical evidence; it requires the building of new analyses, interpretations, and narratives out of that evidence that meaningfully change our prior understandings; and it requires such innovations to stand up to the scrutiny of experts who may not agree with the conclusions reached, but have to agree that they are a valid response to the underlying evidence.

Of course one does not need to be employed by a university to be capable of this, but since the 1960s the expanding field of history within universities has demonstrated the enormous capacity for deepening our collective understanding that has come from supporting scholarship in such institutions. This answer could be filled simply with a roll-call of the entirely new fields opened up in the last half-century, and made part of ‘history’, through such work. And by being part of history, they are also part of the present, and the future – one where a robustly democratic polity can vigorously argue about its collective identity, grounded nonetheless in recognition of the vast array of experiences that make up such an identity.

We can have something like this, or we can have a politics based in exclusionary nostalgia, demanding allegiance as it drifts ever-further from reality. This is a real choice we now face.