Sources say renowned Jefferson scholar Annette Gordon-Reed left in protest over decisions made by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s new president, a fellow Harvard professor.
Blog Posts
Hopes, Fears, and Prophecies. An Essay for Inauguration Day by Historians Robert M. S. McDonald and Peter S. Onuf
We are pleased to offer this essay for Inauguration Day by Robert M. S. McDonald and Peter S. Onuf, editors of the new book
Hopes, Fears, and Prophecies
Do these seem like extraordinary, unprecedented times? Did the 2020 election and its seemingly endless aftermath expose and exacerbate deepening divisions among Americans that threaten our very existence as a people? Historians can’t answer these questions. They can only tell you that the future, like the past, is a “foreign country” and that we’ll get there somehow, despite ourselves. After all, we remind ourselves, history does not repeat itself: it is always extraordinary, always unprecedented. In dark moments we stumble forward, lost in a fog of complexity and contingency, gripped by fear and buoyed by hope. With the gift of hindsight, historians