I'll never forget hearing a guest lecturer in a history of rock class at UC Davis wondering aloud whether Van Morrison, Steely Dan, and Stevie Wonder were jazz musicians who experimented in rock (ala Ginger Baker) or were fundamentally rock musicians who dabbled in jazz?

The class was very fun and I see an analogy to political historians who comment on the news. Are nineteenth century U.S. political historians who comment on current events acting as politicos first and historians second? Or are they historians who see the importance of the news?

I think about this question a lot. I'm probably like a lot of people out there in that my thoughts on current events garner a lot more interest and comments than the threads I've written on my research or field of expertise. Why is that?

Maybe the nature of the topic of current events inherently draws more people in. It's a shared experience whereas those interested in the history of party development, finance, and journalism in the antebellum era are an exceedingly small lot.

Add to this an unusually high number of libertarians who have taken an interest in the economic history of the nineteenth century who don't share my politics and thus do not care to hear what I have to say about current events.

I wouldn't say the majority of scholars studying economic or political history in the antebellum era are libertarians, but there's a helluva lot more of them in those subfields than, say, those studying race or gender. That's for sure.

If and when the historians and political scientists who are tasked with ranking all the U.S. presidents come out and label the current occupant in the bottom five, the rejoinder from moderates and conservatives will be as predictable as it is shallow.

We're not being objective, they'll say; we need to wait fifty years; we need some distance to accurately judge Trump; we shouldn't be engaged in punditry; we're coastal elites who don't understand real Americans; and the worst of all, we're "biased."

Breaking down all the flawed assumptions behind these shallow responses requires its own lengthy thread or post, which I've written about before, but basically my point is this.

You go into a doctor's office, the doctor takes some blood tests, and returns with a diagnosis. You take your car into the shop and the mechanic tells you what you need to fix. You call the plumber in and he'll tell you why your sink or toilet is backed up.

People go to school for this kind of stuff. They're *trained* in the field. The presence of quack doctors or sketchy mechanics or expensive plumbers does not mean that their entire fields are bogus. You don't say they're "biased" if they give you an answer you don't like.

Historians often go into tons of debt, sacrifice their productive twenties (or later), and take the enormous risk of getting PhDs with little guarantee of a stable job, because they LOVE their subject.

Fine, so history is more of an art form than the science behind taking a blood test. But it's not as different as people might initially suspect.

We can devise a criteria for evaluating presidents. And this criteria will lead us to place Trump in the bottom five of all time.

So instead of maligning "liberal professors" as "biased," why don't we step back, let them do the jobs that they were trained to do, and thoughtfully consider what they have to say. Do not dismiss the years of study and sacrifice they've undergone to come to their conclusions.