A recent essay in The New Republic examines why historians have assumed a more conspicuous role in public discourse during the Trump era. Katherine Kelaidis points to figures such as Heather Cox Richardson, Jill Lepore, Joanne Freeman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Kevin Kruse as forming a fresh cohort of liberal public intellectuals who translate historical insight into contemporary political commentary. She highlights a genuine phenomenon: historians are appearing in American public life more than they have in many decades. Where I diverge from her is not about the rise of historians, but about what readers expect when they turn to them. Long before Substack newsletters, podcasts, and cable television appearances, historians entered the public arena through anniversaries—moments when publishers, editors, and readers lean on the past to interpret the present.
For generations, editors, publishers, museums, documentary filmmakers, and television producers have relied on historians at centennials, sesquicentennials, and other commemorations to explain why events years or centuries ago still matter. Historians understand these cycles well. Some welcome them; others roll their eyes. Anniversary years can unleash a flood of predictable books and commemorations, grooming familiar narratives for broad audiences. Yet they also create something far more valuable: a rare chance to pose new questions about stories we think we already know.
One enduring misconception about public historians is that they merely distill complex scholarship into comforting lessons. The finest public historians tend to do the opposite. They distill decades of research into prose that remains faithful to the past’s intricacy. They introduce readers to forgotten figures, overlooked archives, and arguments that have circulated within the academy for years but rarely reached a wider audience.
Anniversaries broaden the reach of scholarly work. They prompt historians to revisit familiar topics with fresh questions, and they invite readers to reconsider histories they once thought they understood.
This is scholarship rendered for a broader audience, not a trade in punditry.
Nor are public historians sheltered from critique. Quite the opposite. They face criticism from every side. Political adversaries accuse them of undermining cherished national myths, while fellow historians challenge their interpretations, evidence, or framing. Earlier this month, for example, Stacey Patton publicly criticized Richardson’s Fourth of July newsletter, arguing that her portrayal of slavery and Indigenous dispossession softened the violence at the nation’s founding as a “sticky little problem.” On that precise point, I believe Patton is correct. That doesn’t erase what Richardson’s broader body of work has achieved, but her popularity does not exempt her from the kind of scrutiny any historian’s argument should endure. Public engagement has made debates among historians more visible.
Most importantly, historians such as Kevin Kruse, Jill Lepore, Joanne Freeman, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat have done something the profession has long struggled to achieve: they have persuaded hundreds of thousands of readers that history matters for understanding the present. Kelaidis reads their popularity as evidence that historical scholarship has evolved into a liberal jeremiad, offering moral reassurance through historical analogy. I would argue that readers are seeking something else. They aren’t returning for prophecy or consolation; they are seeking context.
There is a real craft in taking a sprawling, contested historical debate and rendering it legible in a single paragraph without discarding what made it contested in the first place. That is not a lesser form of historical work. It is a distinct—and arguably more demanding—version of the same endeavor. Dismissing it as mere punditry overlooks the intellectual labor that makes public history possible.
Kruse’s explorations of the political history of modern conservatism have helped readers grasp that today’s partisan landscape did not emerge overnight but has a long, traceable lineage. Lepore’s recent writing on the Constitution reframes public conversations around the nation’s 250th anniversary by reminding readers that the framers anticipated amendment rather than preservation in amber. Ben-Ghiat’s comparative studies of fascism do not function as simple morality plays; they work because she moves concretely between cases, from Mussolini’s Italy to Pinochet’s Chile, illustrating how authoritarian consolidation operates in practice rather than declaring that history has pronounced a verdict.
Freeman’s investigations into the constitutional order follow a similar principle. I have shared a platform with her on two occasions—once during a discussion about a book on January 6 and once at a 250th anniversary event—and on both occasions what she offered was not “here is the takeaway” but a genuinely underreported backstory: she uses her visibility to reconstruct the messy political world that produced events—tavern culture, personal and often violent rivalries, informal networks, and the circulation of ideas before the rise of mass media. She has spoken publicly about her own role in this way. In a book on January 6 that I co-edited for my series, History in the Headlines, Freeman in 2021 described why she turns to public platforms the same way, to teach rather than to pronounce verdicts: “One of the reasons I’m on Twitter as much as I am is that, very early on, I referenced something about checks and balances, and a lot of people didn’t know what that meant. And then I said, ‘Oh, okay, well, let me explain what it is.’ And then I got all these people responding saying, ‘Oh, I always wondered what checks and balances meant.’”
Richardson also deserves a fuller reading than Kelaidis allows. While Kelaidis implies that Richardson’s newsletter often veers into contemporary political commentary, Richardson repeatedly anchors her work in the history of the New Deal, the figure of Frances Perkins, and the construction of the twentieth-century administrative state. Whether every analogy lands or not, the substance rests on historical scholarship.
Public historians confront challenges on many fronts. None of the individuals named here reached their current stature because of a newsletter or a cable news appearance. They were already established in their fields, or they left academic positions to pursue another path. Their public writing grows directly from their scholarship, and it has come at a cost. The risk runs in the opposite direction from what Kelaidis suggests: it remains an open question in every history department whether writing for a broad audience harms a scholar’s standing among peers. That stigma is real. Opting to publish a Substack instead of writing exclusively for the Journal of American History means accepting a professional cost, not a windfall. I have never known a historian hired solely for public-intellectual work; if anything, it has often cost them a job. I know of one scholar who earned every major history prize, including the Pulitzer, who was passed over for a post at an Ivy League institution because she was deemed “too popular.”
Kelaidis closes by reminding readers that history is “neither a teacher that rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play.” I agree. But that is not what these historians are doing. When they excel, they are not composing sermons. They are recovering contingency. They demonstrate that institutions were built, contested, revised, and sometimes dismantled by ordinary people making choices under extraordinary circumstances. They render the present less inevitable and restore complexity. In an era saturated with opinion, that form of historical context may be the most valuable contribution historians can offer.
No occasion tests that skill more than a historical anniversary.
My own grasp of anniversaries shifted while researching Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering. As the nation prepared to observe the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I expected, like many historians, another cycle of books about battles, generals, Lincoln, and the political struggle over slavery. Instead, I found myself drawn to a different archive.
Working at the National Archives, I began examining military reports, records from the Freedmen’s Bureau, abolitionist correspondence—including Harriet Jacobs’s writings—and contemporary newspapers. Read together, these sources revealed a history that had received remarkably little sustained attention. It has long been documented that disease killed more Civil War soldiers than combat did. Yet almost no one had systematically asked what emancipation meant for the health of those who had just been freed.
Freedom did not instantly supply food, shelter, medical care, or robust public health infrastructure. Families freed from slavery emerged from generations of deprivation only to confront smallpox outbreaks, cholera epidemics, famine, and widespread malnutrition. I assembled evidence of epidemics sweeping through refugee camps and freedpeoples’ communities, estimating tens of thousands died from smallpox alone, though incomplete records make precise tallies impossible. Emancipation was undeniably a triumph, but it also presented a humanitarian crisis.
Some readers accused me of presenting a “darker” version of emancipation. I never understood that critique. My aim was not to diminish emancipation’s importance but to understand what freedom meant for the people who lived through it. The anniversary opened a door—not to celebration or censure, but to questions historians had not previously explored. The anniversary also led to extensive coverage in The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, and media outlets from Greece to Australia.
Looking back, I realized that the Civil War sesquicentennial did something I hadn’t foreseen. It created permission to ask questions that earlier generations of historians either hadn’t thought to pose or lacked archival evidence to answer. Anniversaries widen the audience for scholarship. They invite historians to revisit familiar subjects with new questions, and they invite readers to rethink histories they believed they understood.
That, I have come to believe, is the true value of anniversaries. They create moments when readers are unusually willing to revisit histories they thought they already understood. They encourage historians to return to familiar events armed with new archives, different methods, and fresh questions. The best anniversary books do not simply reinforce public memory; they destabilize it.
I learned that lesson again a year later.
Anniversaries do not simply ask us to remember the past. They ask us to rethink it. They open the door. What matters is whether historians are willing to walk through it.
In 2013, the nation marked the fortieth anniversary of the Upstairs Lounge fire, then the deadliest attack on gay people in U.S. history. I pitched the piece to Time, hoping to acquaint readers with a historical episode that had largely faded from memory. Although I had uncovered the history and done the research, the magazine assigned a reporter to write the piece and initially planned to credit me only for the research. I insisted on byline credit because historians do more than locate forgotten facts. We discover them, interpret them, and explain why they matter. That experience taught me another lesson about how anniversaries shape public history: they reveal the uneasy relationship between scholarly work and journalism. Once forgotten histories enter public conversation, they quickly take on a life of their own. That’s exactly what historians hope will happen. Yet it also means that years of archival labor can fade behind the stories that those histories helped generate.
That episode stayed with me long after the anniversary passed. A few years later, it became the foundation for my book Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.
Anniversaries, however, carry a further paradox. Once historians recover forgotten histories and bring them into public discourse, those narratives begin to live their own lives. Journalists, filmmakers, podcasters, museum curators, and teachers adopt them. Ideally, that is precisely what historians wish to see: neglected histories becoming common knowledge.
Yet a certain irony accompanies success. The more effectively historians reshape public memory, the easier it becomes to forget the years spent in archives crafting those new narratives. Forgotten histories become familiar histories, and familiar histories start to feel as if they had always existed.
That irony is not a mere abstraction for me. In 2016, I revisited the Upstairs Lounge fire in an op-ed for The New York Times published the day after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, linking a 1973 arson at a New Orleans gay bar that also served as a makeshift church to a later attack forty-three years on. Within hours, journalists began drawing on that history to connect the two tragedies, without citing the archival research. It entered public circulation so quickly that it began to seem like something everyone had always known, rather than something one historian had spent years reconstructing from the archives.
As the United States continues its 250th anniversary commemorations, historians have been asked to interpret the nation’s past. My own contribution is a book I co-edited as part of a series called History in the Headlines, which puts Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and creator of the 1619 Project, in dialogue with a group of historians about the significance of those dates themselves. Do the country’s origins lie in 1619, in Virginia with the arrival of enslaved Africans, or in 1776, in Philadelphia with the signing of the Declaration? Placing that question alongside Indigenous history broadens the frame, since neither date fully accounts for the centuries of Native nations that came before. Latinx historians in the volume raise another possibility: that the nation’s origins run through the West as well, not only through Virginia or Philadelphia. The book does not settle on an answer. It was deliberately designed not to. The historians in it are doing what public history should do at its best: offer context and open questions rather than a verdict.
That is why I remain skeptical whenever historians’ public engagement is dismissed as mere punditry. Public history is not a retreat from scholarship. It stands as one of scholarship’s highest ambitions: to bring rigorous historical research into conversations beyond the academy. Anniversaries do not merely ask us to remember the past. They ask us to rethink it. They open the door. What matters is whether historians are willing to walk through it.
____________________________
University Presses Reflect on the American Semiquincentennial
Association of University Presses (AUPresses) members share a commitment to advancing knowledge and have long published scholarly works that contribute to understanding many complex subjects, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.
As Americans prepare to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this summer, AUPresses members are drawing attention to work by their expert authors that offers fresh insights on Founding and Revolutionary-era history as well as the broader American experiment, 250 years on. They have curated a:
– a collection of more than 100 new and recent books, available for purchase on Bookshop.org, and
– a reading-list round-up, featuring even more publications, teaching materials, and commentary.
We invite curious readers everywhere to explore this essential reading from a broad range of expert authors.
