One of the trickiest courses to teach — or to take as a student — is an American history course that covers a period through which the professor has lived. Memories, still vital attachments, and strong opinions about personalities who were once in the news and are now in the history books — all these are in tension with the detachment that good teaching requires. “Contemporary” or “recent” American history is a minefield of ideological temptations in a way that, say, the history of the Mediterranean in late antiquity is not. Students are not generally going to suspect you of discounting alternative views of the rival fan bases of fourth-century Constantinopolitan charioteers.
So too with the writing of history. A historian my own age will have lived through the past twelve presidencies and had an active part as a voter in determining the fate of eight of them.
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