5 days ago
Our history is on life support. Don't pull the plug.
History as a discipline and a profession is under attack on various fronts. In the United States, the Trump administration is engaged in a frontal assault on key historical institutions, threatening the independence of the National Archives and requiring the Smithsonian museums and the National Parks Service to present an uncritically patriotic version of America's past.
In New Zealand, historical scholarship is being undermined in another way: death by a thousand cuts, which can be as devastating as all-out war.
Long-term underfunding has combined with recent cutbacks to reduce both job opportunities and research infrastructure for historians. History departments in universities are being cut back. At Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, four senior historian positions —those who have produced and maintained identity-affirming projects such as our national dictionary of biography – are now being made redundant.
Archives New Zealand, where government records are made available for historical research, has seen job cuts, reduced opening hours, and the closure of a successful records digitisation programme. Funding for historical research has also become harder to find, especially since the Government ended the Marsden Fund's support for the humanities.
Historians in government departments and universities work for the people of New Zealand. Thanks to past investment by governments of both the left and the right, big national resources such as Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and NZ History are free to the public.
As well as showing the past is crammed with diversity and talent in unexpected places, such open-access resources subvert the paywalls of private publishing and family-history companies. To let these publicly funded and enormously popular sites 'wither and die' through lack of ongoing support is not only a huge loss of accessible and accurate information about our history, but also a shameful waste of past investment.
More than a generalised attack on the humanities, the destruction of our historical infrastructure is a specific attack on those whose jobs it has been to chronicle and make sense of the past at a time when the world has become more volatile than it has been for decades.
We are also living in an age of unprecedented technological change in which generative AI is moving swiftly into education, intellectual production, and creative industries. History can help us to understand these changes and to keep our bearings as the world is transformed around us.
It is perhaps not surprising that attacks on history should be happening now. Very simply, historical understanding is an antidote to the poison of extremism that is seeping into political systems around the world. It is a threat to those who seek to stoke division and undermine democratic rights.
Historians know that our liberal democratic system of government, underpinned by human rights, is fragile, hard won, and not very old. It is not a 'natural state' of things or the end point of some evolutionary trajectory. We know the ways in which power can be wielded to punish peoples, destroy cultures, and erode freedoms.
Equally, the study of history provides inspiration for solutions to the ills of the world, from dictatorships to the housing crisis to individuals' feelings of being untethered from belonging. It demonstrates that even the most inhumane of systems can be defeated, that slavery can be ended, that the subjugation of women can be opposed, that colonised peoples can win self-government.
By explaining the historical forces that have shaped communities and identities, historical scholarship can also help us to better understand those with whom we share our country and our world.
We all have a stake in ensuring there is adequate investment in historical research, writing, and education, whether it be in universities, government agencies, schools, museums, or local communities. If the study of history is allowed to die, our society and political culture will be the poorer for it.
