UPDATE: My complaints about the profession were well timed, it seems:
Unfortunately, many historians have become pundits. That’s not what they are supposed to be, if the label “historian” means anything. Presidential historians are supposed to toil in the archives, gather the facts, conduct oral-history interviews, interview foreign leaders, comb through diaries, and allow the partisan passions of the day to cool, and then perhaps pronounce judgment on a presidency. In the case of George W. Bush, prominent historians such as Sean Wilentz were proclaiming the Bush presidency a failure before President Bush left office (in Wilentz’s case, in 2006). One historian whom I admire, Larry DeWitt (who himself is no admirer of George W. Bush), put it quite well, noting that any presidency deserves, at the very least, a “decent interval” before judgment is pronounced; but Bush’s presidency was condemned almost from the start. There is a reason, DeWitt observed, that “we do not award the Bancroft Prize to Keith Olbermann. The ‘informed opinion’ of the community of historians, in advance of actual historical research, is just a report on the political views of this community, not the findings of history.”
Well, a literary General Burgoyne did say that history would lie, did he not?
