"By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy.
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe. The prior administration advanced this corrosive ideology [...]."
This directive for historiography presented in the President's Executive Order, its characterization of historical practice and polemical stance on historical interpretation, already diverges from the perspective of current trends in the philosophy of history, its principles, and its methodology, not only in the US. It strongly reflects a particular ideological stance rather than being based in a nuanced understanding of historiography as a discipline. The latter is not merely about rewriting history but the study of how history is written, including the methodologies, interpretations, and biases that shape historical narratives. This strongly suggests the President did not seek the advice of qualified members of the academic community in drafting these policy guidelines.
The directive takes a reductionist approach and frames historiography as a battleground between “objective facts” and “distorted narrative driven by ideology”. This binary suggests a misunderstanding of how history is actually constructed and studied. Contemporary philosophy of history, drawing from thinkers like Hayden White (e.g., 1973 and 1986) and Frank Ankersmit (e.g., 1983; 2005, 2024), emphasizes that writing history is not a mere recitation of facts but an interpretive act. All historical narratives/representations are influenced by the historian’s perspective, cultural context, and methodological choices. Historians select, organize, and narrate events based on available evidence, and this process is inherently shaped by perspective, though not necessarily by “ideology” in the pejorative sense implied here. The claim that recent historical work replaces “objective facts” with distortion oversimplifies the discipline, ignoring the methodologies through which historians grapple with primary sources, competing interpretations, and the limits of evidence. It overlooks how historiography involves critical examination of sources, selection of details, and synthesis into coherent narratives, rather than serving as a mere instrumental political tool.
The text’s assertion of a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite history” aligns with a popular critique from the political right often levelled at trends like critical race theory or postcolonial historiography. These approaches, prominent in current scholarship, reexamine traditional narratives (such as the triumphalist view of America’s founding) through lenses that highlight marginalized voices or systemic inequities. These voices or marginal elements are often only recoverable by rigorous archival work, looking beneath the surface. Philosophers of history like Dominick LaCapra (e.g., 1985, 2001, 2013) would argue this isn’t “revisionism” for its own sake but a methodological shift toward inclusivity and complexity. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) explicitly ties postcolonial historiography to a methodological shift that challenges Western historical frameworks, advocating uncovering subaltern histories, arguing that this emphasis on complexity and inclusivity isn’t revisionism for its own sake but a necessary expansion of historical inquiry. This aligns with modern historiography’s aim to uncover marginalized voices and challenge dominant narratives. This is a legitimate scholarly endeavour in its own right. The Executive Order’s language, however, represents this somehow as an attack on national identity and casts it as a moral failing (“national shame”) rather than a scholarly evolution, betraying a non-historian’s discomfort with ambiguity over a clear, unifying story. The text attempts to conflate the descriptive aims of scholarship as an autonomous field with the promotion of a prescriptive cultural agenda.
Methodologically, the text assumes historians once delivered a pure, untainted truth that’s now been corrupted. Yet, as E.H. Carr noted in What Is History? (1961), history has always been a dialogue between past and present. This implies that historians interpret the past based on their present concerns and conditions. In other words, historians' understanding of the past is inevitably influenced by the social, political, and cultural factors of their own time. The “remarkable achievements” the text defends (such as liberty and individual rights) aren’t denied in modern historiography but contextualized alongside contradictions like slavery or gender exclusion.
Current trends, influenced by social history and the “linguistic turn,” reject the idea of a single, fixed narrative, favouring instead a pluralistic understanding. Here, philosophical trends like postmodernism and structuralism, which challenge the notion of ‘objective facts’ by exploring how power dynamics and cultural frameworks shape historical knowledge, are disregarded by the executive order’s emphasis on ‘truth’ and ‘sanity.’ The author’s apparent nostalgia for an undisputed “legacy” suggests a populistic preference for history as patriotism rather than as inquiry.
The charge of “fostering division” also misreads historiographical intent. Scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty, in works like Provincializing Europe (2000), argue that rethinking history’s Eurocentric or nationalist biases can broaden, not fracture, collective understanding. The Executive Order, by contrast, frames this as a zero-sum ideological war, a view imposing political rhetoric on academic practice".
In short, this portrayal of historiography reveals a non-specialist’s unease with the field’s complexity and its departure from a monolithic, celebratory narrative. It leans on a positivist fantasy of “objective facts” untouched by interpretation, which no serious philosopher of history today would endorse. While its concern for unity and pride is clear, it sidesteps the discipline’s core principle: that truth emerges not from defending a preconceived story but from wrestling with the past in all its messiness. The Executive Order is an attempt to politicize the discipline rather than engage with its principles and methodologies. It overlooks the richness and diversity of historiographical practices and the ongoing debates in the philosophy of history about the nature of historical truth and interpretation.
References
Ankersmit, Frank 2005 Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford University Press Stanford, California
Ankersmit, Frank 2024, 'Representation: The Birth of Historical Reality from the Death of the Past', Columbia Themes in Philosophy.
Carr Edward Hallett 1961, 'What Is History?' University of Cambridge and Penguin Books
LaCapra, Dominick, 1985. History and Criticism. Cornell University Press.
LaCapra, Dominick.2001 Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins University Press, .
LaCapra, Dominick, 2013. History, Literature, Critical Theory. Cornell University Press.
Chakrabarty Dipesh 2000, 'Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference' Princeton University Press
White, Hayden 1973, 'Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe' Baltimore : The John Hopkins University Press.
White, Hayden, 1987. The content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore : The John Hopkins University Press.
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