When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news. But over the last few years that is precisely what has happened: Just look at the recent debates over America’s legacy of slavery, what can be taught in public schools about the nation’s founders and even the definition of what constitutes fascism. The interpretation of the American past has not in recent memory been as public or as contentious as it is now.

Maybe it started with The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which sought to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” and which accompanied a national reckoning around race. That provoked, perhaps inevitably, a right-wing backlash in the form of “The 1776 Report,” a triumphalist, Donald Trump-directed effort. Then came a raft of laws in conservative-governed […]