The historical profession finds itself at the center of public battles over the essential character and purposes of American democracy, how to sustain them, and who is qualified to do such work. For the past decade and more, historical scholarship, commentary, and teaching has become ever more deeply implicated in what some have described as the “history wars” and the “civics wars": polarized debates pitting those inclined to narrate the American experiment as essentially triumphant against those who paint it as irredeemably tragic, and those conceiving civics as preparation to navigate and sustain the American political system against those conceiving civics as a tool for dismantling and replacing it. The result has been a growing temptation for historians to craft and promote stories of the past that will decide our most divisive debates on the side that speaks to their own values: a temptation increasingly hard to resist as political crises proliferate, even as its indulgence risks further alienating a public fast losing confidence in the profession and the academy generally.

In response to these urgent challenges, this session invites historians to position themselves vis-a-vis the public as experts "on tap, not on top": working to inform and discipline the moral and political deliberations of their fellow citizens, without presuming to resolve the questions driving them. The three panelists will offer distinct but related arguments that only the embrace of a radically historicist humility—in scholarship, teaching, and public discourse—can assure historians' most constructive and democratic contributions to public discourse, and restore the historical profession to a position of significant and healthful influence over American public life. Each, in differing ways, will challenge audience members to ask themselves, Do I sometimes forget that telling a true story is not the same as telling the true story, and am I as alert as I should be to the dangers of the latter?