The Bar for White Male Historians is Subterranean
Professor Meredith is on her soap box
A friend of mine got this comment on a TikTok she posted and this took me down a rabbit hole because I wanted “know the lore behind Dr. Guelzo” as I said in our group chat.
Turns out Dr. Guelzo is actually kind of famous???
Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.
Probably has tenure too, ugh.
But here’s what I mean the bar is so low that white male historians could play limbo with the devil in hell.
Allen Guelzo has a job at Princeton. He’s published numerous books. His articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Atlantic, National Interest, Weekly Standard, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He’s been featured on NPR and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
He’s also about 2 steps away from being a full-on Moms for Liberty member.
In 2020 he was a guest at the White House Conference on American History. This was event where, then President, Donald Trump had this to say:
Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character. We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.
Today, I am also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an Executive Order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education. It will be called the “1776 Commission.” (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding. Think of that — 250 years.
-Remarks by President Trump at the White House Conference on American History
Deborah Yaffe at the Princeton Alumni Weekly describe Guelzo’s appearance in a March 2021 article:
On a drizzly afternoon last September, the Princeton-affiliated historian Allen C. Guelzo told listeners at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., that left-wing influences on the teaching of American history were endangering the welfare of the United States, a nation founded on an idea, not a bloodline.
“We have no ethnicity, no tribe, to fall back upon — only our vivid dedication to an Enlightenment ideal ‘stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone,’” Guelzo said, quoting Abraham Lincoln, his most frequent research subject. “If we wish to imperil the American experiment, we can find few more sinister paths to that peril than by forgetting, obscuring, or demeaning who we were.”
Yaffe asked an important question in her article: “In the age of Trump, can a serious scholar moonlight as a conservative pundit without tarnishing his reputation in the academy?”
Well, I suppose the answer depends on what you mean by having a tarnished reputation in the academy? Guelzo was certainly criticized for his participation, but he’s still raking in the cash. He’s still a respected “historian” at Princeton. He’s still publishing his books and articles. He’s suffered nothing, except a little “shame on you” from the rest of the historical community.
Guelzo is pushing a dangerous mythology of American history. In October of 2020 he defended his appearance at this event, writing:
I complained, in my panel comments, that to look through the tables-of-contents of our flagship quarterlies is frequently to encounter a witches-sabbath (and Night on Bald Mountain was thrumming in the back of my mind as I wrote that) of complaint about injustices, deportations, genocides, failures, co-optations, and miseries.
He goes on to say that “the myths of the mindless patriots on the Right are not worse than the myths of the mindless cynics on the Left.”
Except this is false. One is a myth, the other is an honest and necessary deconstruction of a mythology that has been built up by politicians and private organizations (among them the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Daughters of the American Revolution, and many others). It is a dangerous myth that perpetuates the idea that there is no systemic racism in America, that America is truly built on the idea that “all men are created equal” (even though those words were written by a slave owner who thought women were only suited to “soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning from political debate.”)
Any historian advocating for a return to teaching American history with the same level of critical thought that Elon Musk fanboys have for the Cyber Truck is nothing less than historical malpractice and the fact that the only professional backlash Guelzo and other historians like him (nominally old white men who are terrified at the idea that their crush on the Founding Fathers Boy Band might be something they need to actually critically reconsider) face is the occasional op-ed telling them off (like this one) is a sure sign of how subterranean the bar is for the old-guard in the field of history.
The fact that in his defense of his appearance at the event, Guelzo ends his article with this sentence - And the last word should be from Sgt. William Carney: “The old flag never touched the ground, boys.” - is almost comically ironic.
These words were from an African-American soldier during the Civil War whose contributions were not recognized in America until May 23, 1900, when he was awarded the Medal of Honor — the first African American to receive the award. A man who many people had no idea existed until 1989 when director Edward Zwick made the history of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry into the film “Glory.”
The reason these stories began to filter into the public eye was because of the Critical Race Theory approach to history that Guelzo derides. The history of women, people of color, queer people, and many other minorities were not standard parts of the average historical curriculum until we began to realize the flaws inherent in teaching the Great Man Theory of history that seems to be Guelzo’s preference.
If the only history you can stomach is the one that leads you to write books with titles like “Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President” then you should perhaps reconsider your career, because you aren’t a historian. You’re a professional fanboy.
Hi there! It seems I'm not exactly your target audience, but I saw this article on a LinkedIn post and was super intrigued by the title. I think it's difficult for me to connect with your main argument here. You're saying the bar is so low that even someone like Allen Guezlo could become a senior research scholar at Princeton. So the reader is meant to understand that Guezlo is undeserving of his professional accomplishments. And he just happened to land a position at Princeton, a university famous for... hiring underachievers? I had never heard of Guezlo before but you're right to point out his lengthy and accomplished career in academia. So then I wanted to know more about you, and I see that you have a master's degree in history, worked for some time as an adjunct, but now do consulting, presumably because more permanent gigs in academia are really difficult to get these days. So the author with a master's in history is telling me that the Princeton professor is a loser who has only achieved such levels of success because he can fall back on being a white male. This article reminds me of a conversation with an undergraduate who was heavily criticizing the contributions of a particular medieval history scholar, completely unaware of his own place in the academic food chain. "[Eminent historian] has no idea what he's talking about!" says the sophomore history major.