Examples of past historians projecting the issues of their day onto the past

[DC Al Fine]

I've noticed that a lot of pop historians have this annoying habit of projecting the politics or issues of the 21st century onto past figures, when it really isn't relevant. Of particular note is the book I'm currently reading about Genghis Khan, where the author keeps talking about Khan like he's a 21st century American liberal.

Are there any examples of past historians doing this? e.g. Is Edward Gibbon putting 18th century issues into his 'Decline and Fall'?

[Lumine]

It may be a pessimistic outlook, but I'm not sure that many historians manage to avoid projecting present into the past they write about, even the more serious ones. What I've experienced during three years of university being forced to read from an array of historians that range from the fantastic and enjoyable to read to quite a few nonsensical ones is that said bias is actually more extended than what one thinks. Indeed, I think I've become cynical enough to distrust the ability of historians not to do this sort of projection whether it is intentional or casual.

For example, one of the most popular historians in Chile, Gabriel Salazar, can't stop judging the main figures of our independence period as European style democracy was something possible in Chile at the time (and therefore many of them qualify as bloodthirsty, authoritarian, semi-fascistic tyrants to his eyes), and yet he's considered one of the most serious authors we have (which is rather depressing). I tend to find some Medieval and Renaissance historians as an aversion of this, as many of them have studies on the conceptual differences one has to take into account to understand the period, and more importantly, the sources (because we read so many words in a different way to what they used to mean).

Making Genghis Khan look like a modern liberal or arguing that he is a symbol of "modernity" sounds ludicrously awful and cringe-worthy, but the example I probably loathe the most is marxist historiography (along with its many children) and its tendency to apply economic, social or historical theories to historical periods in which these have no bearing. It is utterly ridiculous, for example, to try and explain the Roman Republic from a marxist view of society, and yet there's countless revisionist works on the issue.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It may be a pessimistic outlook, but I'm not sure that many historians manage to avoid projecting present into the past they write about, even the more serious ones. What I've experienced during three years of university being forced to read from an array of historians that range from the fantastic and enjoyable to read to quite a few nonsensical ones is that said bias is actually more extended than what one thinks. Indeed, I think I've become cynical enough to distrust the ability of historians not to do this sort of projection whether it is intentional or casual.

For example, one of the most popular historians in Chile, Gabriel Salazar, can't stop judging the main figures of our independence period as European style democracy was something possible in Chile at the time (and therefore many of them qualify as bloodthirsty, authoritarian, semi-fascistic tyrants to his eyes), and yet he's considered one of the most serious authors we have (which is rather depressing). I tend to find some Medieval and Renaissance historians as an aversion of this, as many of them have studies on the conceptual differences one has to take into account to understand the period, and more importantly, the sources (because we read so many words in a different way to what they used to mean).

Making Genghis Khan look like a modern liberal or arguing that he is a symbol of "modernity" sounds ludicrously awful and cringe-worthy, but the example I probably loathe the most is marxist historiography (along with its many children) and its tendency to apply economic, social or historical theories to historical periods in which these have no bearing. It is utterly ridiculous, for example, to try and explain the Roman Republic from a marxist view of society, and yet there's countless revisionist works on the issue.

Marxist works can be bad in that sense, but in some others they do ensure a degree of context by necessity for the events described that otherwise wouldn't be adequately factored in with historical events.

The key is always to take the context as it is and not shape it first to fit their narrative, which is where they get into trouble.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Are they talking about "why Rome fell?"

Then there's a high chance they are doing this.

[Lumine]

Are they talking about "why Rome fell?"

Then there's a high chance they are doing this.

This is painfully true as well. I once read a book that pretty much attacked Justinian for not behaving like a modern sovereign would and thus he ruined the Byzantine Empire by not being nicer to the Persians.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It may be a pessimistic outlook, but I'm not sure that many historians manage to avoid projecting present into the past they write about, even the more serious ones. What I've experienced during three years of university being forced to read from an array of historians that range from the fantastic and enjoyable to read to quite a few nonsensical ones is that said bias is actually more extended than what one thinks. Indeed, I think I've become cynical enough to distrust the ability of historians not to do this sort of projection whether it is intentional or casual.

Bias is unavoidable; it is not possible to write objective history as much as Ranke, the father of the profession, would have wished otherwise. After all even his own attempts write "wie es eigentlich gewesen" positively reek of the assumptions of his own era...

...of course we can acknowledge that Ranke was wrong to demand unobtainable objectivity while also accepting that he was right to insist that the writing of History should be subject to extremely high standards of professionalism and general intellectual rigour.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Are there any examples of past historians doing this? e.g. Is Edward Gibbon putting 18th century issues into his 'Decline and Fall'?

I'm not sure if Gibbon really counts as a historian in a modern sense...

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

"Rome feel because of their own hippies" was an annoying reccuring theme in the 60s and 70s.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

https://web.archive.org/web/20150424072716/https://www.utexas.edu/courses/rome/210reasons.html

[Cassius]

A particularly good example of this is the work of Mikhail Rostovsteff on the late Roman empire. Whilst Rostovsteff was a fine historian who made a lot of valuable contributions to the study of late antiquity, he did go rather overboard in his attempts to inject the politics of the Russian Revolution into the study of the late Roman empire, going so far as to imply that Diocletian was some sort of proto-Bolshevist!

Also here's a very amusing article from the Cato Institute about the same topic https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1994/11/cj14n2-7.pdf