Irrelevant Scapegoat: The Perils of Doing European History in Post-Trump America

Abstract

On 8 February 2022, an expert in Middle Eastern legal history – Florida State University associate professor Will Hanley – testified in front of Florida's House Education and Employment Committee. As a volunteer commentator rather than an invited speaker, Hanley was allotted just sixty seconds. But in his brief time, he did everything he could to argue against the adoption of the HB 7 ‘stop WOKE act’, which called for new educational protocols, especially regarding how race be taught in US classrooms.1 Hanley is not an Americanist; he does not teach on the subjects the HB 7 law affects, such as the Declaration of Independence, the US constitution, or the Federalist Papers. Nonetheless, this specialist on Islamic naming practices and Ottoman-Egyptian nationalisms stepped up and risked his career at a publicly funded institution because he knew that the reach of the US culture wars is much greater than American history, affecting all historians and all the students they teach – in the United States and beyond.2 In this essay, I want to explain why Hanley's actions should serve as a model for us all. To do this, I focus on how the US culture wars – as waged by both the right and the left – are triggering a global reconceptualisation of European history that will have dangerous consequences for students, researchers, teachers, and the profession at large. I start with Florida – the state where both Hanley and I work – because it is an extreme case of how the new culture wars have taken aim at history education, a template unfortunately being replicated with similar interventions in other US states.