Does History Need a Reset?

Lynn Hunt

Essays that aim to reset the agenda for a discipline usually employ the same
timeworn rhetorical strategy. First the authors identify a “crisis,” then they offer
a narrative of how the crisis came about, and finally they propose their own
approach as a solution to the crisis.1 The essay by David Armitage and Jo Guldi
certainly fits this mold. The crisis currently afflicting research, “not just within the
humanities but across the global system as a whole,” is one of “short-termism.” In
history this has been accompanied by an “inward-looking, almost blind-eyed retreat
from commenting on contemporary global issues,” an inability to influence policy-
making elites, and even an inability to influence each other as scholars (“many
short-range histories have only a limited impact on the surrounding discipline, let
alone among non-historians”). The blame is laid on the shoulders of “microhistory,”
meaning here not just microstoria as imported from Italy but any “extremely short
time-span” using “local detail,” which supposedly also entails “exploiting an arcane
archive.” The solution proposed is a return to the longue durée, the only way, appar-
ently, to overcome the “moral crisis” created by the last forty years of anglophone
historiography and bring history back into dialogue with “institutions of international
governance” and with “policy-makers and activists” on issues such as climate change
or the injustices of capitalism.2

1. I have done this myself on at least two occasions: Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural
History: Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Hunt, Writing History in
the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).
2. David Armitage and Jo Guldi, “The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American
Perspective,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 70, no. 2 (2015): 219–47, citations at 238,
221, 227–28, 234, and 244. 249

Annales HSS, 70, no. 2 (April-June 2015): 249–254.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 189.193.237.229, on 09 May 2017 at 21:42:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2398568200001138

608083 UN05 22-12-16 07:30:56 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 249

 LYNN HUNT

A Crisis of Short-Termism?
These arguments depend, unfortunately, on assertions about the nature of the
crisis that have little or no factual basis. For historians who want everyone to turn
to big data, it seems especially surprising that Armitage and Guldi do such a bad
job of reading their own big evidence. Their Ngram on “more and more about
less [and less]” shows that concern about short-termism reached its height in the
1940s and has steadily declined ever since. Concerns about specialization did not,
therefore, track the process of professionalization, which has only increased apace
since the 1940s and which historians apparently failed to notice until the 1980s.
The reference to Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the average period of time analyzed
in history dissertations in the United States is even more misleading. Schmidt
himself concludes from his data that “since about 1965, dissertations have covered
longer and longer periods.”3 What has in fact characterized these dissertations,
according to Schmidt, is their drift toward the present: more and more disserta-
tions are written about more and more recent times. By this account, the problem
faced by history is one of presentism, not short-termism.
Since the nature of the crisis is very much in doubt, it follows that the authors’
narrative of its causes must also come into question. “Microhistory” appears as
the villain in the piece only because “micro” suggests smallness; the authors’ real
target is the “cultural turn,” which has been more influential in the anglophone
world than microhistory properly speaking. Cultural historians insist on the separate
logic and formative power of culture, whereas microhistorians focus on a particular
event in order to reveal broader processes that would be invisible at a larger scale
of analysis. While cultural historians sometimes employ the methods of micro-
history, as Robert Darnton did, for example, in his essay on the “great cat massacre”
of late-1730s Paris, they do not do so consistently. And even when they do, the
stakes are never “small.”4 Darnton focused on the cat massacre in order to analyze
labor relations, but in other works he used very different methods to uncover the
publishing history of the Enlightenment.
The conflation of cultural history with microhistory explains why Armitage
and Guldi so often misfire. Most striking in this respect is their targeting of William
Sewell, who is mentioned in their article more often than anyone else. Sewell’s
Work and Revolution in France is in no way a microhistory, even if it does cover
“only” decades rather than centuries. What is more, his recent book, Logics of History,
makes similar criticisms of the cultural turn, though without suggesting that historians

3. Benjamin M. Schmidt, “What Years do Historians Write About?” Sapping Attention:

Digital Humanities; Using Tools from the 1990s to Answer Questions from the 1960s about
19th Century America, May 9, 2013, http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-
years-do-historians-write-about.html.
4. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
250 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 189.193.237.229, on 09 May 2017 at 21:42:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2398568200001138

608083 UN05 22-12-16 07:30:56 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 250

 DEBATING THE LONGUE DURÉE

jettison it altogether.5 He, perhaps more than any other US historian of Europe,
has tried to turn attention back to the supposedly “big” questions of capitalism,
so it is hard to see why he should be singled out for having “imported from sociology
habits of attention to individual actors and details” (even if one grants the question-
able assumption that this characterizes sociology as a method).6
It is, moreover, absurd to say that the works of Natalie Zemon Davis,
Darnton, and Joan Wallach Scott have abandoned the ambition of “moral instruc-
tion in favor of focus on a particular event.”7 Their works have had so much
influence because they have compelled readers to think differently about history,
whether of women, printers, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French
Revolution, or, as in Davis’s recent book, the experience of Muslims in Europe.8
These are not “small” subjects.
It is not even true that cultural historians have shied away from influencing
experts, activists, or international institutions. Darnton has led the way in question-
ing the impact of Google on digital publishing and reading; Scott has recently
turned her attention to French laws about the Islamic headscarf and parity for
women in politics; and Davis has repeatedly been involved in such contemporary
questions as film representation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.9 How do these
historians in any way reflect an “almost blind-eyed retreat from commenting on
contemporary global issues”?10 Other examples abound. Brenda Stevenson recently
analyzed one murder, that of Latasha Harlins, in order to approach the Los Angeles
riots of 199211—does anyone really imagine that race relations in the United States
are not a “big” subject of contemporary importance?
Yet Armitage and Guldi repeatedly argue that the microhistories of race,
class, and sex have led to the abandonment of such issues as famine and poverty.
They make the same case about identity history more generally, which they disdain
as “sentimentalist.” And yet identity history has transformed attitudes in the
United States, for example by influencing the recent decision of the Supreme
Court to throw out a key part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, thus opening
the way to same-sex marriage. Historians of “identity” such as Nancy Cott and

5. William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the
Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Sewell, Logics of
History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005).
6. Armitage and Guldi, “The Return of the Longue Durée, 227.
7. Ibid., 229.
8. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
9. Robert Darnton, “Google and the Future of Books,” New York Review of Books, Febru-
ary 12, 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/02/12/google-the-future-of-books/;
Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
Nathalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
10. Armitage and Guldi, “The Return of the Longue Durée, 238.
11. Brenda E. Stevenson, The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the
Origins of the LA Riots (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 251

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 189.193.237.229, on 09 May 2017 at 21:42:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2398568200001138

608083 UN05 22-12-16 07:30:56 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 251

 LYNN HUNT

George Chauncey have given freely of their time to help prepare amicus curiae
briefs that have arguably done more to transform public policy than the approaches
proposed by Armitage and Guldi ever will.12

A Moral Crisis or a Profession in Crisis?

Although Armitage and Guldi are wrong about the nature of the crisis and wrong
about who is responsible for it, they are nonetheless right to provoke discussion
about the purposes, methods, and ethics of historical research. Since the language
of “turns” and constant innovation (for instance the “new histories”) has now
reached a kind of reductio ad absurdum, it does seem a good moment to “return”
to fruitful developments in the past in order to revitalize history as a discipline.
The longue durée is one of them, no doubt, but it seems unnecessary to bash other
approaches in order to promote this one. History as a discipline always gains from
the tensions and even conflicts between approaches.
An alternative way to return to the past is to look at previous moments of
perceived “crisis.” In 1926, the American Historical Association released a report
on “The Writing of History” that was meant to address the decline in the influence
of history. “From the librarians who hand out the books which the people read,
from the publishers and booksellers who distribute the books that are published,
and from all other competent observers of actual conditions comes unvarying testi-
mony that history is less read to-day than formerly, and that it is not in strong
demand at this time with the people we are accustomed to call the ‘educated class.’
Such was not the case forty years ago.”13 The authors of the report offered various
explanations for this state of affairs: professors of history spent too much time
teaching; a lower class of person now wrote history as compared to the great histori-
ans of the past who were men of means, leisure, and aesthetic sense; and graduate
study took too long (four or five years), was too specialized, and its only object
was training “irrespective of the interest, the importance, the possibility of future
development, the wider bearing, the real importance of the work done.”14
Some ninety years later, the diagnosis given in Armitage and Guldi’s essay
is not precisely the same, but it is surprisingly similar. In their rush to find culprits
for history’s present “moral crisis,” Armitage and Guldi overlook the kinds of

12. Numerous historians collaborated, for instance, in the amici curiae, or “friends of
the court” reports in the cases Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor. See,
for example: Respect for Marriage Coalition, http://www.respectformarriage.org/news/
entry/amici-briefs-filed-in-windsor-and-perry-marriage-cases/.
13. John Spencer Bassett, “The Present State of Historical Writing,” in “The Writing of
History,” 1926, http://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-
archives/archives/the-writing-of-history/the-present-state-of-historical-writing.
14. Wilbur C. Abbott, “The Influence of Graduate Instruction on Historical Writing,” in
“The Writing of History,” 1926, http://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-
history-and-archives/archives/the-writing-of-history/the-influence-of-graduate-instruction-
252 on-historical-writing.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 189.193.237.229, on 09 May 2017 at 21:42:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2398568200001138

608083 UN05 22-12-16 07:30:57 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 252

 DEBATING THE LONGUE DURÉE

structural changes in the discipline that the 1926 report took more seriously. In
his section of the report John Spencer Bassett, a professor of history at Smith
College, made a comparison between 1884, the date of the American Historical
Association’s foundation, and the situation forty years later: “In 1884 the big univer-
sities had one or two professors of history where they now have ten or more. Most
colleges had one professor of history, but he usually taught it in connection with
political economy, political science, or public speaking. To-day the average college
has from two to five teachers of history, and political economy and political science
have been made separate departments.”15
The structural problems facing the discipline ninety years later are of an
entirely different order and even more crucial to the sense of crisis. The number
of historians in the United States (as in many, if not all, Western countries) has
exploded. From just 1999 to 2012, student enrolment in US colleges and universi-
ties increased by approximately 40 percent, while the number of humanities faculty
increased by 50 percent.16 In history, the overall size of the faculty rose by about
one-third to 23,640, of whom three-quarters were employed in four-year colleges
and universities.17 The class structure of the student body continues to change, as
does that of the faculty, with many implications for the study of history. In 2013
my own university, the University of California at Los Angeles (twelfth in the world
according to the Shanghai university rankings), had an undergraduate population
of some 29,000 students of whom only 28 percent were white, 35 percent were
Asian-American, 18 percent were Hispanic, 12 percent held foreign nationalities,
and 7 percent either held dual nationality or declined to provide this data. Of
incoming first-year students in 2013, 58 percent were female. The faculty is less
diverse than the students but it is also evolving; in the United States the proportion
of women in history faculties has gone from 15 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in
2007.
It is impossible to make sense of any current crisis in history, especially
one associated with anglophone historiography, without considering the profound
influence of the democratization of higher education. More and more students
from disadvantaged families now attend universities, but they are taught more and
more often by temporary or part-time instructors. In 1975, 30 percent of faculty in
US universities worked part-time; by 2005 the figure had risen to 48 percent.18
Even as the public has gained greater access to universities, public esteem for
universities and professors has declined. Moreover, inequalities in the profession
are increasing in line with those in American society as a whole. The richest univer-
sities have stupendous endowments while the poorest are barely able to balance

15. Bassett, “The Present State of Historical Writing.”

16. Humanities Indicators, “Number of Humanities Faculty Members,” fig. III-9c:
“Numbers of Postsecondary Faculty Teaching in Humanities Disciplines, 1999–2012,”
http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=71#fig321.
17. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2014, 25-
1125, History Teachers, Postsecondary,” http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes251125.htm.
18. James Monks, “Who Are the Part-Time Faculty?” Academe 95, no. 4 (2009): http://
www.aaup.org/article/who-are-part-time-faculty#.VF6VbofkwpI. 253

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 189.193.237.229, on 09 May 2017 at 21:42:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2398568200001138

608083 UN05 22-12-16 07:30:57 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 253

 LYNN HUNT

their slim budgets. There is now almost nothing in common between the experi-
ence of a history professor at Harvard, Brown, or UCLA and the experience of
someone teaching hundreds of students part-time for a miniscule salary at a
community college or impoverished state university. The median pay for a
course taught by a part-time instructor is $2,700 (with no insurance coverage or
pension plan), while the average assistant professor with a regular appointment in
a history department earns $52,000 for teaching four to six courses and receives
full benefits.19
Neither microhistory nor cultural history created these structural problems;
in fact they were methods taken up with particular enthusiasm by researchers
eager to recover the voices of those who had been excluded from history in the
past, such as peasants, workers, women, and racial and sexual minorities. Like
social historians before them, cultural historians were themselves often products
of the changes in the student body that took place from the 1960s on. What role
will the return of the longue durée play in this still developing narrative? Will it
serve to reassert the priorities of political elites and the methods of diplomatic,
political, military, and economic history? Will it function as yet another excuse for
cutting the size of the history faculty, since if one person can write about the
history of British agriculture, war through the ages, famine, poverty, or the entire
history of the planet, how many history professors would any university require?
Will it revitalize interest in history among elites, activists, and international institu-
tions, or at least get historians to talk about the purpose of their work? Only time
will tell. In any case, if we are in crisis, it is one with its own relatively longue durée,
reaching back into the past and almost certainly forward into the future.

Lynn Hunt
UCLA

19. For median pay, see “The Just-In-Time Professor,” 2014, http://democrats-
edworkforce.house.gov/imo/media/doc/1.24.14-AdjunctEforumReport.pdf; for assistant
professor salaries in history, see Robert B. Townsend, “New Report Shows Little
Growth in Salaries for History Faculty,” 2010, http://www.historians.org/publications-
and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2010/new-report-shows-little-growth-in-
254 salaries-for-history-faculty.

Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 189.193.237.229, on 09 May 2017 at 21:42:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,
available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2398568200001138

608083 UN05 22-12-16 07:30:57 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 254