The Suicide of the American Historical Association

Author’s Note (Aug 19, 2022)

My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused.

> One day after the offending article went live, the AHA tweeted out a “public apology” from Sweet. It reads like a forced confession statement, acknowledging the “harm” and “damage” allegedly caused by simply raising questions about the politicization of scholarship toward overtly ideological activist ends.

While you didn’t have the twitter hive mind then, did public institutions capitulate to the activists from the right this way in the past? 50s, 60s, 70s?

It's important to note who/what the AIER is and what biases they might have in this "reporting""

"The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is a libertarian think tank"

Almost none of the things in this article is backed up with any sources, the few tweets linked don't reflect the reporting in this article. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the AIER is throwing around a lot of terms/phrases/generalizations without backing it up other than gesturing at twitter.

Personally I despise most twitter reporting because you can find someone saying just about anyone on twitter and quoting random users that fit your story is cherry-picking at it's finest. That said they don't even do that for this article which, couple with who they are, makes me take this was a massive grain of salt.

Oh boy, another cancel culture article.

The first two links to the responses are broken, so we can't actually see if the responses were in or out of proportion. The link to Jamie Bouie's response works, which reveals that it not just a "casual dismissal" of "concerns over the politicization of scholarship" as the article claims, but a mockery of the implied claim that race, gender, sexuality, nationalism and capitalism are just “contemporary social justice issues” instead of major throughlines of modern history.