Author: Georg Gangl

Georg Gangl – Historians find themselves in a peculiar position: They employ the tools available to them in their own present to acquire knowledge about the past, a past that is over and done with and cannot be (experimentally) reinstated, and must therefore be reconstructed and inferred through the traces it left behind. Here the issue of our “existential presentism” and the accompanying issue of anachronism become salient. Whether we have our historian’s cap on or not, we cannot shed our temporal positioning in our own present and, with that, in the future of the past.
Read part 1 here

Georg Gangl – James H. Sweet is the current president of the American Historical Association (AHA), the largest scholarly organization of historians worldwide, and he recently found himself in quite a situation. As part of his function as president of AHA, Sweet writes the monthly column From the President in the organization’s news magazine Perspectives on History. While I imagine the column is usually read with some interest by AHA members and other readers, the text in the September issue of this year entitled “IS HISTORY HISTORY? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present” garnered rather special and outsized attention.