It happens at least once a semester. My students and I will be discussing a contested political issue — say, affirmative action or capital punishment — and someone will ask, “Professor, what does history say about it?”
My answer is always the same: History can inform our contemporary debates, but it can’t resolve them. It tells us how people in other times and places acted and thought. But they lived then, and we live now. So we need to figure things out for ourselves.
Alas, that’s a lesson the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seems to have forgotten. In two decisions last week, on guns and abortions, the justices pretended that the past can give us singular answers to divisive present-day questions. That’s an almost childlike caricature of what my discipline does. And no serious historian would endorse it.
