"Presentism," Fischer wrote, "appears in the new-liberal narratives of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., where American history is the steady progress of pragmatic liberalism from Jefferson to Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt. In his 1970 book Historians' Fallacies, David Hackett Fischer identified Schlesinger-style history as a historical error called "presentism." You couldn't look for the origins of the present in the past without doing damage to the past, and you'd do it based on your politics. While Tanenhaus is right about what happened, he's wrong about when: A generation of historians did try to expunge this kind of history, but now it's coming back in. Schlesinger and his contemporaries "rummaged in for clues to understanding, if not solving, the most pressing political questions of the present," Tanenhaus said, but today's "current historians" don't. this month, he claimed there are now no longer any historians who write about the past as if it mattered to us today. When Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, eulogized the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
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