In his September 2022 Perspectives on History column addressed to members of the American Historical Association, President James H. Sweet reflected on the currents of “presentism” in the profession, calling out what he saw as the anachronistic use of the past for political interests in a range of contemporary settings, from Samuel Alito’s majority decision to overturn Roe v. Wade to a Ghanaian tourist site associated with the African slave trade, and the New York Times’s 1619 Project.1 The essay immediately ignited a critical backlash from professional historians, most of whom were angered by Sweet’s undertheorized presentation of presentism as an ideological feature of historical research and writing as well as (and indeed particularly by) his choice of examples, some of which targeted the work of scholars of race and slavery in America, many of whom are themselves people of color.2 And when Sweet quickly issued an apology for the essay’s “clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism,”3 another chorus of criticism erupted, this time mainly from those on the right who took umbrage at what they perceived as Sweet’s groveling to “the woke brigade.”4Sitting on the sidelines—as we premodern historians often do when these kinds of firestorms break out in our profession—I was struck by two features of the debate. First, presentism is in many ways the creative endeavor that has and continues to keep us in business as historians of the deep past. And second, the real enemy isn’t necessarily presentism; it’s the slow drift into the waters of willed ignorance and anti-expertise. In fact, one solution to the problem of anachronistic interpretation and teleological narration of history is what I would describe as old-fashioned scholarly rigor: the precise skill sets and formal training regimes that scholars of Late Antiquity have developed and employed in our attempts to make sense of the bewildering complexity and frustrating incompleteness of our archives. Put another way, if contemporary politicians, supreme court justices, and racial justice activists want “real” history, let’s give them the past as we know it: uneven, counterintuitive, and full of uncomfortable truths.To be clear, presentism has not always been a force of good in ancient and medieval history. Racist and nationalist ideologues have often tried to root their repugnant ideas “in history,” regardless of the strained interpretations they produce when they attempt to argue, for instance, that early medieval English, “Anglo-Saxon” culture was predicated on whiteness. Less overtly egregious but no less pernicious is the fact that presentism has enabled scholars to elide entire populations of historical actors from their narratives, such as women and people of color, as Joan Scott pointed out in her response to Sweet’s essay.5 She is, of course, completely right: history is always about politics and we undermine our own ethical stance as scholars by pretending otherwise.Nevertheless, without presentism, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could research and write premodern history. For one, presentism ultimately generates the two most important elements of a successful research project: fresh ideas and financial resources. I think it’s fair to say that without the Black Lives Matter movement or LGBTQ+ activism, which has pushed scholars to engage with decades of largely ignored critical theory (much of it produced by queer and nonwhite academics), we would not have the exciting surge of interest in, and commitment of money to, the study of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other forms of diversity in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, including numerous new tenure-track jobs, two of which were recently filled at my own institution. Presentism has also encouraged premodern historians to grapple with STEM initiatives and scientific developments, and with how these different modes of knowledge, data, and tool sets might be applied to the very humanistic study of Late Antiquity. The recent spate of interest in late ancient climate history, for instance, can be explained only by the convergence of modern environmental science with popular anxiety about climate change. Finally, the most crucial, positive force that presentism arguably exerts on our intellectual endeavors is affective. For without presentism, historical empathy is an impossibility. And if we cannot connect to the past as collective human beings who, in our own ways, all feel pain and joy, hunger and satiety, then there is really no point in doing history at all.6Nevertheless, Sweet’s fear about sloppy and tendentious applications of historical evidence to our contemporary interests resonates with me. We must resist the pull to make our work fit seamlessly into contemporary narratives about, say, an individual’s experience of race and ethnicity, or the impact of pandemics on social, political, and economic organization, if the evidence suggests a messier, less coherent story. Scholars too often gloss over inconvenient aspects of their data; worse yet, they uncritically follow a path if it allows them to generate a clear story with present-day pull. Nowhere is that tendency more evident than in the recent spate of studies on the late Roman Empire and the Justinianic plague, many of which appeared by chance just before the start of the COVID pandemic in early 2020. Of course, long before COVID, American culture had been saturated with graphic visions of “the end,” whether in the form of zombie apocalypse television series or, more realistically, illustrated models of catastrophic environmental damage caused by climate change. A story about a tiny microorganism felling the Roman Empire certainly satisfies our itch to see a horrifying past case of cataclysmic destruction, while also still affirming our own modernist fantasies about technological progress saving us from ourselves. As Timothy Newfield demonstrates in his trenchant and learned ViewPoint Essay in this volume (“One Plague for Another? Interdisciplinary Shortcomings in Plague Studies and the Place of the Black Death in Histories of the Justinianic Plague”), the comparison of the Justinianic plague to other global pandemics, notably the Black Death in the 14th century, may play to us in a relatable key (Plague killed everyone! History repeats itself!), but it has no basis in epidemiological science or the late ancient evidence. In fact, as Edward Schoolman shows in these pages, paleoscience can just as often illuminate the highly mundane, unspectacular resilience of premodern societies (see “Reconceptualizing the Environmental History of Sixth-Century Italy and the Human-Driven Transformations of Its Landscapes”). We need not blow up the past to make it interesting and relevant.As a specialist journal (i.e., a journal not aimed primarily at general audiences), SLA is several steps removed from these highly public and politically charged conversations about presentism and historical research. This distance is a good thing, I think, but it’s even more reason why we are obliged to support and promote scholarship that both respects and invigorates the past. Presentism unquestionably has a place in this publication (as Scott says, history has and will always be political), but it must not come at the expense of erudition and expertise. Sometimes this means reengaging with long-running historiographical debates by injecting one’s hard-earned knowledge of an understudied premodern language into the conversation (see Amit Gvaryahu, “‘The Way It Is in the Church’: Late Roman Interest Rates and Syriac Christian Piety”).7 In other cases, it might involve rereading a lacunose inscription in such a way as to potentially erase the presence of a large Jewish synagogue thought to have been established at what would later become the center of the Islamic world (see Mark Letteney and Simcha Gross, “Reconsidering the Earliest Synagogue in Yemen”). Or perhaps it’s a matter of drilling down into abstruse, multi-allusive late ancient religious poetry to examine the bewildering cultural complexity produced by Egypt’s dynamic connectivity with the Red Sea (see Anna Lefteratou, “The Eastward Perspective: The Cosmic and Earthly Dimensions of Jesus’s Passion According to Nonnus”). Finally, the unescapable presence of presentism in history might also require us to experiment with new methods of narration that deliberately follow a path marked by subjunctivity and speculation, so that we can write with greater force and empathy about the experiences of just about anyone in Late Antiquity who was not an elite male landowner.8 Presentism is neither our friend nor our enemy; or perhaps it’s both, but it nonetheless shapes our work whether we want it to or not.