Against “Junk History”: Stephen Kotkin on How Historians Really Work
In a wide-ranging Hoover History Lab conversation, historian Stephen Kotkin argues that good history starts with strong questions—and the discipline to hunt for disconfirming evidence, not just proof that flatters your thesis. The archive is essential, but also dangerous: state records reflect the state’s obsessions and blind spots, so historians have to triangulate across genres—periodicals, memoirs, travel accounts, local knowledge—to see what official paperwork misses. He also describes the historian’s craft as a practice of empathy: not sentimental identification, but the hard work of understanding motives and mental worlds, including those of perpetrators, without excusing them.
Kotkin rejects “history is one damn thing after another” by insisting historians must pair depth with pattern recognition across cases. The payoff is not just better scholarship, but better public reasoning—especially against “junk history,” where lazy analogies (his example: reflexive Munich comparisons) substitute for analysis and shut down debate. He champions “analytical narrative”—showing rather than sermonizing—and writing that respects both specialists and the public by keeping the audience in view. Turning to today’s information ecosystem, he treats AI “slop” as a demand problem as much as a supply problem, and warns that attempts to suppress speech often produce perverse, unintended consequences—history’s recurring lesson.