History: Why It Matters by Lynn Hunt (review)

Hunt's History: Why it Matters takes on the challenge of explaining, in a little more than 100 pages of text, why anyone should consider studying a subject that does not obviously pave the way to a practical career in an occupation like, say, business or medicine. Hunt is an ideal choice for the task both because she has already penned various influential statements about the discipline, most recently Writing History in the Global Era (New York, 2014), and because she brings to these exercises her trademark qualities of clarity, common sense, and fairness.

The book does extremely well what it is designed to do, namely, to lay out in the clearest of terms some of the discipline's basic epistemological and political issues, making the case for their importance. Its four chapters address, respectively, the current importance of history in the public arena, the question of historical truth, the politics of history in academia and beyond, and how the discipline's framework will likely evolve in the near future.

Those new to the discipline will probably connect most easily with the first two chapters, which examine issues surrounding the notion of truth and the mining of facts, and the many ways in which controversies about the past erupt in public life. Right out of the gate Hunt galvanizes readers' attention by evoking Donald Trump and "birtherism"—asking, How do we know Barack Obama's birthplace as a fact?—before moving quickly to recent controversies about the fate of statues of controversial historical figures. After a quick tour of other history-related, public flashpoints throughout the world—involving textbooks, memory wars, and truth commissions—Hunt shifts into a thought-provoking chapter about "Truth in History." The third chapter, "History's Politics" deals mostly with the ways in which the changing composition of the historical profession, primarily in the United States, Britain, and Australia, has driven new agendas. The final chapter, "History's Future," mounts an argument about how conceptions of historical temporality have shaped the field in the past and will do so differently in the future.

The last two chapters might be less engaging for beginners, such as undergraduates. The matter of the changing demographics within the profession—the theme of Chapter 3—is certainly vital to understanding how the profession has evolved during the last couple of generations. But how much does an audience oriented largely toward the present want to know about the successive waves of working-class, women, and minority scholars who have entered the field since the 1960s, especially given all of the quantitative material in this chapter?

Hunt's final chapter, which examines changing conceptions of historical time—the subject of another of her books, Measuring Time, Making History (New York, 2008)—is extremely thought-provoking, though possibly daunting for beginners. What is the alternative, she asks, to modern teleological understandings of history, increasingly viewed as problematical owing to their Eurocentric origins? Hunt envisions a globalized longue durée, a "whole earth time," as a future context for historical work to break free from "progress" narratives based on a limited purview. Thinking of ourselves historically as a species, she proposes, will enhance solidarity and promote an "ethics of respect" toward the other elements of our anthropocene environment.

Although much of Hunt's short text covers ground familiar to most academic historians, her work is, as usual, studded with stunning insights and formulations: "Conspiracy theories arise in the space created by the provisional nature of historical facts" (32); "The truest history is often written by people with deep commitments … Blandness is not the same thing as truth" (40); "Would a non-teleological history, a history without an inner impulse, even be interesting?" (96). As a primer on what should matter to all of us today, Hunt updates the argument that first appeared in her book, co-authored with Joyce Appleby, Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1994). Whereas back in the 1990s, historians had to reckon only with the solvent...