History is under scrutiny.
In 2003, Charles Clarke, the Secretary of Education of the UK, dismissed medieval historians as “ornamental” as he stressed the supposed needlessness of public funding towards the humanities. Although Clarke’s dismissal of medieval history is by no means an accurate survey of the public opinion towards the profession, it does reflect a widespread public sentiment – a sentiment that history is remote and inaccessible for present society. This sentiment is founded upon derogations of history to a no-longer-needed past and the idea that the historian’s role is to simply gather historical facts with little purpose for the present. Of course, anyone involved in producing historical research in academia or well versed in the latest historical writing will know this is certainly not the case. History, even the supposedly “ornamental” periods of ancient and medieval history, inadvertently affects people in the present and is even a matter of life or death to people in several regions where history has been politicised. Historians constantly argue and debate over the different meanings and implications of historical events and documents, rather than staying content with merely “discovering” facts for the sake of discovering them. These claims of history’s supposed “uselessness” are usually made by those outside the discipline, and thus are based on popular perceptions of history gained from a few works of public history in popular media rather than an accurate examination of academic history writing.
Is history just the study of the past, then?
To read more, check out my article Has History Become Irrelevant?: Different Meanings of the Past in Academic History, Public
History, and Heritage
The Green Ideology 