My subject, history, is in terminal decline. A.I. finally killed it, but it has been sick since the late twentieth century. The demise of a reading public, disinformation, fake news, and political spin fatally weakened it. Undergraduates have fled the history major, and PhDs can’t find jobs teaching or writing it.[1] It’s curtains for my vocation.
The timing is sadly ironic. We need history. Without it, we’re adrift in a sea of events without precedent, cause, or meaning. Cut off from the past, we become prey to those who would use history for nefarious purposes: those who deny precedents by saying “nothing like this has ever happened before.”[2] Those who start wars by claiming that its victims “have no history” independent of the aggressors.[3]Those who twist a deadly riot into a “day of love.”[4] Orwell was right when he warned that he who controls the past controls the future. We ignore his words at our peril. There’s tragedy in a society killing the thing that could save it.
I earned my doctorate in history thirty years ago, just as things began coming apart. I didn’t see it, then, but paid attention in 1994 when eminence grise historian Eric Hobsbawm prefaced his masterpiece study of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, with the lament “most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present” divorced from historical events shaping their own moment. Hobsbawm attributed youthful amnesia to the frenetic pace and news-cycle distortion of modern life.[5] It was an early warning of an illness that has now progressed beyond the point of recovery. Here’s why:
Because we’ve ceded our intellectual lives to small screens and small ideas. This happened “gradually, then suddenly,” to borrow Ernest Hemingway’s quip about bankruptcy. It’s due to social media and the iPhone, both of which came into existence in the aughts. The effects of this are dismally catalogued by Rose Horowitch’s recent essay in The Atlantic proclaiming “The End of Reading Is Here.”[6] People aren’t illiterate, exactly, but they’ve lost capacity for the concentration to get through books, and they lack contextual awareness and vocabularies to make sense of most literature. As goes the reading public, so goes history.
Because we’ve become cognitively shallow. By design, social media makes us distracted, outraged, reactive, addicted.[7] We’ve conditioned ourselves out of the “slow thinking” described by economist Daniel Kahneman.[8] That sort of thought, deliberative, critical, rational, is the stock-in-trade of history. It’s painstaking. Practitioners of slow-thinking have been marginalized as arbiters of cultural truth, replaced by “influencers” dealing in anger, shock, emotion.
Because, as deliberative thinkers are ushered offstage, we’ve surrendered their public functions to artificial intelligence. History educators have resisted A.I. Their approach favors the creation of sterile classroom environments, scrubbed of A.I., and the confinement of student writing to policed spaces.[9] I’ve tried this, with some success, but it strikes me as a stopgap and ultimately futile.
That’s because students, with help from Big Tech, keep getting more savvy about disguising A.I. plagiarism, which they find irresistible.[10] A fashionable corollary trend castigates anyone who would deny young people the benefits of A.I., thus depriving them of “real-world” skills which allegedly make it indispensable. When I first encountered A.I. plagiarism, a colleague at the liberal arts college where I taught remarked “We [history professors] keep telling students to slow down with A.I., but the business school is telling them to speed up, it’ll make them more productive.” It’s easy to guess which side of this mixed message young people take to heart: the one with productivity and a financial bottom line in its corner. Documented atrophy of thought and written expression should surprise no one.[11]
Because A.I. magnifies our tendency to believe anything, or nothing, by “hallucinating” alternative realities and generating infinite counterfactual worlds. It builds on the post-truth culture enabled by the Internet. That culture thrives on conspiracies: 9-11 was “an inside job,” climate change is a hoax, vaccines don’t work, school shootings were staged by a “deep state” trying to enslave us, legitimate elections were “rigged.”[12] Big lies have become mainstream discourse.
Because, in my classroom, facts are now up for grabs. When students show me an A.I. deepfake or Instagram post as “evidence,” or ask questions such as “you think astronauts really walked on the moon?,” I realize we don’t share the same reality. When facts are fungible, history becomes unteachable.
Because Americans’ awareness of history is built on unstable foundations: movies, television shows, TV news. A large majority see history as “little more than an assemblage of names, dates, and events,” according to a recent American Historical Association survey. Less than a third read books on history. College courses rate dead last as a source for the general-public’s historical understanding.[13]Young people are far more likely to turn to YouTube than a library or university for history education.
Because education professor Sam Wineburg misstated the problem when he called historical thinking an “unnatural act.”[14] History, as I know it, involves making arguments from primary- and secondary-sources. Those sources are almost always textual. Arguments require objectivity, an ability to detach from one’s own identity and imagine how historical actors behaved and thought. They necessitate an awareness for context, contingency, chronology, and causation. Arguments must be revised or scrapped in the face of contradictory evidence and better arguments. The primary vehicle for history scholarship is a book-length monograph. History’s disciplinary approach lacks relevance for what used to be called an educated citizenry. It’s not unnatural; it’s archaic.
My assertion of history’s death differs from a largely discredited claim by political theorist Francis Fukuyama. Near the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama saw “the end of history” in the triumph of Western democracy over authoritarianism. He believed that history’s motive force, its dialectic, ceased along with the Soviet Union. Fukuyama focused on processes, not method.[15] It’s the latter that has died, the actual guts of the discipline.
An example suggests how much we’ve atrophied. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke with advisors about a work of history he had read several months earlier, Barbara Tuchman’s analysis of the outbreak of WWI, The Guns of August. The book described European leaders’ straitjacketed militaristic thinking and how it led them to catastrophe. Kennedy said “I am not going to follow a course that will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, [ titled] The Missiles of October. If anyone is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move.” Tuchman won a Pulitzer-Prize for Guns, in part because of Kennedy’s invocation. It was a Book of the Month Club read, which is itself an artifact.[16] One can hardly imagine a work of history having a comparable impact on leaders or the public today.
Why keep teaching it, then? I still love history, and, for me, loving it matters. My best teaching moments, when it seems I’ve conjured the past into our classroom for students to see, touch, smell, provide compensation. That’s my existential payoff. As a new school year approaches, I still chase those moments.
Professionalism matters, too: working to know and understand my students; sweating lesson plans, assessments, field trips, guest speakers; keeping current in my subject; showing up in dress code; maintaining collegiality; communicating with parents and administrators; attending office hours; commenting thoughtfully on student work; configuring my classroom. I take pride in doing the job well.
Personal rationales don’t address the larger question, though, which is what happens to a society cut off from historical insight, one that has chosen not to know itself?
On that score, at least, Fukuyama rightly foresaw “the end of history will be a very sad time.”[17] He thought post-history society would lose an ideological perspective that gave life meaning. As I see it, without history, we’re deracinated, vulnerable to demagogues and fundamentalism, and, ultimately, we face a similar crisis of meaning. Contemplating that, I’m happy to go back to my classroom this fall and carry on as though history still lived.
Notes.
[1] On declining undergrad history majors, see Julia Akinyi Brookins, “Tracking Undergraduate History Enrollments in 2023,” Perspectives, Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 16 April 2024.
On job-trends for history professors, see Robert S. Townsend, “The 2025 Academic Job Report,” Perspectives, 20 May 2026.
[2] One of Donald Trump’s favorite phrases, often used to suggest the media, justice system, or his political opposition is stacked against him with unprecedented unfairness. See, for instance, his response to the criminal case against him for fraudulent business practices.
[3] Vladimir Putin’s false assertion regarding Ukraine. See “How Ukraine’s History Differs from Putin’s View,” Michelle Martin, interview with historian Timothy Snyder, 26 February 2022.
[4] James FitzGerald, “Trump Calls 6 January ‘Day of Love’ When Asked about Capitol Riot,” BBC News, 17 October 2024.
[5] Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, A History of the World 1914-1991 (New York, 1994), p.3.
[6] Horowitch, “The End of Reading Is Here,” The Atlantic, 8 July 2026.
[7] See, for instance, Cal Newport, “Is Social Media More Like Cigarettes or Junk Food?” The New Yorker, 22 January 2025.
[8] Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, 2011).
[9] Described by Dana Goldstein, “How A.I. Killed Student Writing (And Revived It),” New York Times, 30 April, 2026.
[10] Goldstein, “Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era,” New York Times, 18 June 2026,
[11] Claire Cain Miller (and others), “Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline,’” New York Times, 13 May 2026.
[12] One individual, Alex Jones, encompasses nearly all of these conspiracies. His political mainstreaming is described in PBS Frontline’s, “United States of Conspiracy,” 28 July 2020 (updated 18 January 2022),
[13] Peter Burkholder and Dana Schaffer, “A Snapshot of the Public’s Views on History,” Perspectives, 30 August 2021,
[14] Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia, 2001).
[15] Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man dates from 1992. It is based on his essay, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer, 1989), pp. 3-18.
[16] Described by Meredith Hindley, “The Dramatist,” Humanities, Sept-October 2012, v. 33, no. 5,
[17] Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer, 1989) p. 18.