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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history?

I don't know what you think; I gave a proposed definition for how to determine whether academic history is "woke" or not.

It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".

The "overcorrection" isn't happening in the academy; it's happening in public, who as I'm sure you know by and large don't really do actual history. Instead, pop history is a sort of secular cultural catechesis and mythopoetics; pulling together a narrative for the in-group to anchor its sense of identity to, and affirming the moral worth of that narrative.

I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts

The really good ones manage to piece together narratives from those primary documents. Like, no-one ever accused Ferdinand Braudel of being compulsively readible, but he manages to take all the grain prices and trader's manifests and censuses of windmills and meld all of it into fascinating insights into every day life in historical Europe. Biography can be similar, getting you in the subject's head and humanizing them across the centuries and gulfs of cultural differences.

(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)

Agreed, but it needs to be a catholic too.