Marxist historians in Britain — like E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm — sparked a revolution in understanding the role of working people in making history. Their work is still fresh and vibrant today.
Recent critiques of “presentism” fail to see that we can’t divorce the past from the present—and that supposedly objective scholarship has long promoted racist narratives and suppressed Black history.
Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. History is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be “official” by scholars on high.
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