Earlier this year four linked organisations in the world of academic history – the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association, the Institute of Historical Research and History UK – issued a joint statement on current threats to our subject. Applications to read History at university are falling; funds to support teaching and research are in very short supply; academic careers have become yet more precarious, deterring young scholars. Like many humanities’ disciplines, the study of History is under stress. The four organisations committed themselves to redress this situation, focusing their efforts on practical and institutional changes. They also asked for assistance.
As you will see below where we publish the exchange we have had with the four institutions, History Reclaimed made contact. We welcome the initiative wholeheartedly, but as explained in our letter, we don’t see the problems as simply institutional: they are academic also. It’s not merely a question of the organisation of History: it’s also about the public perception of our subject as undermined by ideology, and the consequent decline of the authority of academic historians. History is threatened because the public – potential students, parents, teachers, politicians, donors, and other civic bodies – are losing trust in what they encounter in galleries, museums, academic journals, and in print.
We were thanked for our opinions but given a polite brush-off. It’s here that History Reclaimed has run up against the absence of intellectual diversity in our universities and colleges, and the consequent ‘cancel culture’. Because we think differently (though agreeing with the premise that History is under threat) we are not invited to participate. We know of many academic historians who sympathise with us but are unable to speak out or even write for our website for fear of the consequences for their careers.
We wish the four organisations every success – we really do. But their treatment of History Reclaimed is a further example of the problem itself.
‘More than ever, history and historians need a collaborative and co-ordinated approach’: a statement
The following is a joint statement from the Historical Association, History UK, Institute of Historical Research, and the Royal Historical Society following the most recent meeting of this quartet of organisations.
It’s been an especially grim start to 2025 for many in UK higher education. News in early January of cuts and job losses at the universities of Canterbury Christ Church, Northampton and Staffordshire has been followed by announcements from Cardiff, Durham, Newcastle, Reading, Sheffield, and, once again, Kent. This, moreover, is only a selection of the institutions currently pursuing cuts to staffing, reductions in course provision, restructures and mergers.
While few subject areas are immune to what is now a full-blown financial crisis in UK higher education, the arts and humanities continue to bear the brunt. This includes history which is the discipline represented, in schools and universities, by our four organisations: the Historical Association, History UK, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Royal Historical Society.
The problems facing education far exceed the capacity of any single subject association. On the ground, case-by-case, each of us provides support and speaks for our distinctive memberships and constituencies, through targeted research and campaigns. But it’s also the case that the concerns and priorities on which we focus, individually, are shared by this quartet of historical organisations.
When we meet together—or with organisations including the British Academy and Arts and Humanities Alliance, which pursue similar agenda—our work highlights common areas for attention. These include the ‘pipeline’ between school and university, and why some students are being turned away from history; a loss of support for history teacher training in UK universities; and the need to articulate more forcefully and clearly the skills—professional, personal and civic—inherent to the study of history. Here, we work to connect with communities, from students and parents to teachers and politicians, who are sometimes unaware of or resistant to these positives.
Despite history’s immense popularity at large—evident in the public appetite for historic sites, podcasts, film or television, and private research—the health and vitality of our subject in schools and universities cannot be taken for granted. While history remains attractive at GCSE, A-Level and Scottish Highers, in higher education in particular it is under growing pressure. In addition to the challenges posed by an over-marketised, increasingly broken HE infrastructure, history is increasingly vulnerable to uninformed comment about its value compared with other areas of study.
Here our four organisations have common cause.
While engagement with our particular constituencies continues, we’re also working closely and strategically for history across and beyond education. These activities include the sharing of information, to understand the changing environment in which history is studied, taught and practised; identifying and communicating the value of history education; demonstrating the diversity of a subject which is now as likely to involve big data analysis as it is a visit to an archive; and working to close the gap between ‘popular history’ and the specialist teaching and research on which this depends.
In these ways, we seek a more co-ordinated approach to advocacy, so that we might better campaign and speak up for history. Collaboration, between historians, and with fellow humanities organisations, has never been more necessary. If you wish to help us, please get in touch.
Claire Langhamer, Director of the Institute of Historical Research
Lucy Noakes, President of the Royal Historical Society
Antonio Sennis and Sarah Holland, Co-chairs of History UK
Alexandra Walsham and Rebecca Sullivan, President and CEO of the Historical Association
A response to the joint statement of four historical organisations in Britain
Dear co-signatories,
I’m writing on behalf of History Reclaimed in response to your joint statement on the present situation of our subject. We apologise for the delay in responding: we only became aware of your appeal very recently.
We welcome the recognition that History is under threat and we offer our help.
You have focused on a related set of institutional issues, and as far as that analysis goes, we agree that there are practical, financial and organisational matters that require a response from those of us concerned over the state of academic History in the UK.
However, the appeal you’ve published does not mention academic matters, notably the content of many History courses, the composition of many History departments, the nature of school syllabuses and the training of History teachers. As one of our readers has commented, the solution to these related problems may be to ‘teach more history and less propaganda’.
As you may know, History Reclaimed was established in 2021 to combat the distortions of History that were becoming routine in schools, universities, museums and society at large. Our website contains hundreds of examples of questionable and plain wrong assertions drawn from these different arenas. We have sought to uphold historical truth based on the use of evidence, objectivity, and contextualisation – based on scholarship, in short. We are also concerned about the impact on our society and its democratic culture of the wide dissemination of distorted accounts of the British past which, whether designed to do so or not, divide us as a nation.
It is no accident that our subject’s decline coincides with this intellectual collapse. Indeed, there is a prior example of the consequences that follow when subjects dispense with scholarship: the study of English in our universities. English has been in decline for decades following its embrace of literary theory, the narrowing of the literary curriculum to exclude so much writing before the twentieth century, and the decline of close textual analysis. An English degree no longer carries the cachet it once did, and, among other reasons, it was to stop the same process in History that History Reclaimed was formed.
You focus on institutional explanations and solutions. We think the issue is fundamentally about academic standards and academic integrity. As schools, teachers, parents and young people become aware of the ideological content of many History courses, and observe public institutions deforming the past to suit their politics today, they vote with their feet. Schools advise against an application to read History at university; parents refuse to pay for such an intellectually questionable indulgence; and aspiring students choose other subjects.
If History’s decline is to be reversed, we need to win back the public’s confidence in our subject. That involves reasserting the importance of scholarship and sources in historical studies at university level. It requires History departments to welcome intellectual diversity in the appointment of staff, and for those staff to tolerate differences of view and approach among their colleagues. Future schoolteachers should be chosen on their merits and taught their craft in education departments dedicated only to finding and training great teachers. The school syllabus should preserve a balance between teaching children knowledge that will help them understand the present, and teaching them about cultures and societies that were intrinsically different from our own.
The task of re-establishing academic authority is nowhere more pressing than in the realm of ‘public history’, so-called. Our museums and galleries all seem to believe that their role is to promote their favoured versions of the past rather than to display and explain their collections. Here, too, there is evidence that the public is literally voting with its feet, for footfall in some of our most distinguished and yet deluded galleries is in decline. The public do not like to be hectored, especially by curators they do not trust https://www.thetimes.com/article/3e9a3916-839a-4c64-8447-77f42d14942d (‘Tate’s dire visitor numbers should be a wake-up call for a failing institution’, The Times, 21 March 2025)
We welcome the recognition that our subject is under threat. But we take the view that its recent decline has been caused more by intellectual than purely institutional factors. The task is to rebuild trust in History and academic historians. History Reclaimed certainly wishes to help in that.
We hope that our diagnosis of the problems and our suggested solutions are not dismissed because they are, like past itself, ‘different’. We look forward to working with you. Please keep us informed of meetings we can attend and projects in which we can participate.
Professor Lawrence Goldman, on behalf of the Editors of History Reclaim
