Duke Is Abandoning American History

Imagine, for a moment, the year is 2500. Human civilization is gone, lost to disaster, time, or neglect. One day, an alien research team lands in what was once North Carolina and begins to study the ruins of a place once known as Duke University. Buried beneath centuries of sediment, they find a course directory from the Department of History, dated 2025. What would these visitors conclude about American history? Would they know about the Revolutionary War and its heroes, Washington crossing the Delaware, the debates at Valley Forge, the intellectual courage of the Founding Fathers? Would they learn about the immigrants who built the railroads, the entrepreneurs who transformed an agricultural society, or the soldiers who fought fascism across two oceans?

Almost certainly not. They would come away knowing far less about the broad sweep of American history—its political transformations, economic changes, diplomatic turning points, and cultural achievements—than about a narrow range of faculty preoccupations, many of them rooted in identity politics or highly specialized subfields. The result would be a picture of the past that is partial, fragmented, and skewed toward present-day concerns, leaving much of the nation’s history unexplored. But why do I, a Duke history major now in my fourth year, say this?

For starters, there are far too few American History professors who specialize in non-identitarian fields. Of the 16 professors listed under “United States & North America,” only four are credited with teaching the nation’s history through a lens not primarily shaped by identity. More striking still, over 51 percent of the department’s American History offerings, 46 to be exact, are explicitly devoted to themes of racial- and social-justice movements. It’s worth asking whether such a concentrated emphasis risks narrowing the intellectual scope of historical inquiry at the expense of students and faculty.

This imbalance is especially stark when one looks at the research profile of Duke’s history faculty. Within the “United States & North America” concentration, the overwhelming focus is on race, gender, and social movements. Fields such as African American history, Latino history, and the legacies of slavery, while intellectually rich and essential in their own right, have come to dominate the department’s Americanist identity. If only four or so professors approach American history from a non-identitarian lens, one is left to wonder: What exactly is the rest of the department studying? In many cases, the answer is topics such as environmental justice, feminist historiography, and the racialized dimensions of public health. Virtually no one anchors his or her work in the traditional pillars of political, constitutional, military, or diplomatic history. The few who do are conspicuously isolated within a department whose intellectual energy lies elsewhere. Even those who might engage with broader historical questions often approach them primarily through the lens of race, identity, and power.