Today we hosted a departmental symposium on the theme of (Dis)Information: Truth, Lies, and the In-Between. The timing of this event was coincidence. The planning began in the fall when I charged our Research Committee and asked them to consider a new form of investment in the intellectual life of the department – a targeted, public-facing event with broad appeal that would bring together guest speakers, department faculty, and students to be part of a conversation about an issue of shared concern that could be explored from multiple angles. What it looked like was up to them – I was game for anything! But it seemed like a wiser investment than one-off events that were poorly attended. This gave us the chance to engage with each others’ work, to think about the issues and themes that connected us across time and geographical distance, and to contribute to the building of department culture. I had seen this sorts of things powerfully modeled at the University of Michigan and UVA and loved what they showed graduate and undergraduate students about what it meant to do scholarly work and how to be in conversation with one another. The committee and, in particular, our junior faculty members seized this opportunity to come up with a fantastic theme and a great group of speakers who connected with members of our faculty to help us think about these issues from 19th century America to contemporary Mexico and Guatemala. The room was often standing-room only with students and faculty cycling in from our department and others over the course of 5 hours on a Wednesday afternoon. There were lots of snacks and intermissions. And lots of lovely and thoughtful and provoking questions.

When they first proposed this theme and began organizing the symposium in September, we did not anticipate where we would be this week. But History and historians have faced ongoing accusations of “presentism” and “revisionism” from multiple quarters for at least 20 years. This topic was relevant no matter what happened. Given the way that debates about AI, social media, and scammers have reshaped our understandings of truth and raised new kinds of questions about how we judge the reliability of information, it was bound to be timely. However, the events of the last week – the pause on grants that have put the work of many people in question – certainly scarier and more consequential for our colleagues in STEM but also impacting the work of historians in our department and elsewhere – it took on a different tone.

I’ve thought a lot about these issues for months – years, really – as we’ve tried to instigate conversations about what exactly it is that we do as historians. Very public debates within the historical profession and within my own subfield of African Studies have been enlightened and impeded those conversations and placed a spotlight on our disagreements and uncertainties. But I don’t think it’s nearly as controversial as some people have led us to believe. We both produce and consume history; we are in and of history all the time. So, in introducing the event and welcoming everyone, here’s more or less what I said:

History is, fundamentally, about information the search for it helps us uncover untold stories and understand different perspectives about the past – stories and perspectives that provide evidence to make arguments that help us better understand ourselves and others, and grapple with the great triumphs, uncomfortable truths, and every day realities of people who lived 1000 years ago and yesterday; who navigated uncertainty and instability, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not, but all within the never-ending stream of human history.

We deal with pieces of information – the evidence, not just the facts and dates of textbooks, but also the complicated stories of a wide range of people from all walks of life and make up the social fabric of our worlds. Found in archives and diaries and archaeological sites and personal collections. Often fragments of things left behind that are peace together to tell incredibly complex and deeply human stories.

We also think deeply about the way that information is transformed into something more through the politics of knowledge production – the power dynamics and systems and processes that shape what we think we know and how we learn it. And, through that, we think deeply about the truth – what is who decides; and how our sense of overtime.

This means that history is hard. I often argue that it is the hardest discipline. Our standards are incredibly high. We can’t say anything about the past that we cannot prove, often with multiple sources of evidence. We can’t observe it or run experiments to answer our question and there’s a chance that no information even survived to help us. There are some things we will never know and yet, we continue to ask; to develop new methods, find new sources, and ask questions. And we analyze those sources from multiple angles while also telling a good story. It makes our work powerful, but it also makes the real work of history – the stories and dates and statues – challenging. That sometimes means it’s target for people who would rather tell simpler stories with clear victims, villains, and heroes. But we don’t live in superhero movies. Life is complicated. It is now. And it always has been. People are complicated. They are unpredictable and complex. And they defy oversimplification. Put a bunch of people together and you have what seems like chaos. But this is the stuff of society and culture and politics.

You have and likely will continue to hear me and others encourage you to be careful in your work – to understand the context in which we are operating and the politics and power relationships that define this moment. I would say that regardless of the political circumstances. We should always be mindful of the context in which we write – not as a means of inhibiting ourselves but as a reminder that we do not ever work in a vacuum. That our work has power and that it circulates in and relation to power. That does not ever mean you should not do the work to share and produce information or seek to uncover or reveal or challenge what we understand is truth. I’ve often said that the work that we do might not have radical intentions, but, if we follow the evidence, it might have radical implications, all the same. The work we do, in our research, and in our teaching, matters. We don’t stop doing it. We continue to hold ourselves to high standards, to commit to telling the stories that the evidence reveals to us. And we think carefully about the truth, the lies, and how we navigate the in between.

That last part was what I planned to say, but we had a great conversation instead about what it means to simultaneously produce history, experience history, and observe history. Our graduate students asked amazing questions – rooted in their anxiety that we were on the cusp of what felt like momentous change but they didn’t know what it was or what, if anything, they should do about it. We talked about the tools that history gives us to navigate these moments – the long historical context that helps us place these moments in perspective in ways that don’t erase anxieties we might have about the present but that help ground us in informed questions about the possibilities and challenges of the future. We talked about what it’s like to get older and realize that you’ve lived history and that the world of your youth has now changed – just yesterday I had this realization as I spoke to a Ghanaian graduate student about my 20 years of experience in Ghana, during which I had been present for many of the major historical milestones in the country’s history and his own historical memory – I was now the senior person who had lived through the things that defined the past and witnessed it first hand; I was now a primary source. And they would be too. It’s a strange thing to both study it and be it.

Afterwards I talked to the graduate students about the fact that they should resist the urge to fall into the trap of believe that historical work is just about dealing with the past. That historical arguments can be consequential without being presentist, even if many historians shy away from making those sorts of claims. And that we absolutely can use our historical knowledge to reflect on the possibilities of the future. I think we might most effectively do that by helping to understand the historical roots of our received concepts, structures, and systems – to understand how we came to what we have today and to consider the possibilities that were dismissed along the way in the midst of the power struggles of the past. History work can also teach us valuable lessons about failure that we can use to inform new visions of the future – that whole “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it” line. I personally prefer the Akan notion of sankofa, often glossed as “go back and fetch it” and associated with history, referring to the idea that wisdom involves reaching back into the past and bringing the insights and lessons with us to inform our present and future. I told them I am sometimes accused of writing manifestos – a colleague reminded me, laughing, that I once said “There is nothing wrong with writing manifestos!” – but what I think historians mean by that is that I write arguments that are unafraid of being consequential. I am very interested in thinking and talking plainly about why our understanding of the past matters not just to other historians but to all of us. And they could do that work too if they wanted to. I tend to think we all should.

It was a lovely day. I walked away inspired and appreciative to be in conversation with so many thoughtful colleagues. I love that we walked away feeling affirmed and unafraid in our work. And I love that we did so by doing the work, talking about the past in a way that was grounded in a careful investigation of the evidence, in conversation with our peers, asking questions about the truth of lived experience and the ways that historical subjects – both ourselves and others – navigate the structures of our lives with agency and seek to make sense of both the continuities and changes unfolding around us. It’s strange and destabilizing to so acutely feel like you’re observing a historical moment and living it at the same time. But we keep doing the work.