I’m a Historian. I See Reason to Fear—And to Hope.

Historians don’t just study history. We construct it. We puzzle pieces into meanings. Aided by our instincts and experiences, as well as by our research, we make sense of other times, other nations, other peoples. In that sense, the writing of history is always personal.

But it’s one thing to reckon with the past and quite another to make sense of transparently historical events as we live through them. Like so many others, I’m staggered by daily bursts of upset and unknowingness, alternately depressed, anxious, angry, and distracted. There’s a whole-soul exhaustion born of living in the age of Trump.

And looking to the past provides no respite. Indeed, when it comes