The media keep calling the 2024 election “unprecedented,” said political historian Jill Lepore. They said the same thing about contests for U.S. president in 2016 and 2020.
“Since, I would say, the [2000] Bush v. Gore election, our political discourse is about falling off a cliff,” Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, told her students recently. “It has a weird torquing effect on how people experience daily life.”
Lepore is one of three well-known scholars teaching the brand-new “HIST 10: A History of the Present” this semester. Co-created with professors Maya Jasanoffand Kirsten Weld, the introductory course uncovers historic concepts and clichés that anchor perceptions of today.
“We’re going to approach the present in this classroom as historians — as people concerned with how individuals and collectives situate themselves in historical time and, most importantly, how they make meaning of it,” promised Weld, a Canadian-born historian of modern Latin America.
Jasanoff, the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and Coolidge Professor of History, kicked off the first lecture with some history on the course itself. HIST 10 was once offered as a yearlong survey for actual and prospective concentrators focused on the Western world, especially Europe, she explained. But that framing slowly fell out of favor with students and faculty alike until the course was finally canceled in 2006.
“But we felt, and continue to feel, that history is something we all need to be educated in and conscious of,” said Jasanoff, a historian of the British Empire. “And so the three of us started talking about re-presenting a gateway course to revivify the sense that history is integrated into our consciousness, our lives, our society, our government, and much more.”
They designed a lecture course broken into three modules, each informed by individual interests and expertise. First Jasanoff is interrogating evolving definitions of ancestry. Lepore, who is also a Harvard Law School professor and New Yorker staff writer, will then lead a section on rights. And Weld will wrap things up with a unit on memory.
