On 8 February 2022, an expert in Middle Eastern legal history – Florida State University associate professor Will Hanley – testified in front of Florida's House Education and Employment Committee. As a volunteer commentator rather than an invited speaker, Hanley was allotted just sixty seconds. But in his brief time, he did everything he could to argue against the adoption of the HB 7 ‘stop WOKE act’, which called for new educational protocols, especially regarding how race be taught in US classrooms.Footnote ¹ Hanley is not an Americanist; he does not teach on the subjects the HB 7 law affects, such as the Declaration of Independence, the US constitution, or the Federalist Papers. Nonetheless, this specialist on Islamic naming practices and Ottoman-Egyptian nationalisms stepped up and risked his career at a publicly funded institution because he knew that the reach of the US culture wars is much greater than American history, affecting all historians and all the students they teach – in the United States and beyond.Footnote ² In this essay, I want to explain why Hanley's actions should serve as a model for us all. To do this, I focus on how the US culture wars – as waged by both the right and the left – are triggering a global reconceptualisation of European history that will have dangerous consequences for students, researchers, teachers, and the profession at large. I start with Florida – the state where both Hanley and I work – because it is an extreme case of how the new culture wars have taken aim at history education, a template unfortunately being replicated with similar interventions in other US states.

Before tackling the issues that brought Hanley into the courtroom, it is important to point out that, over the past three decades, the United States has been the site of positive, progressive transformation in history generally and European history specifically. Slowly but surely, the profession has responded to longstanding calls to decolonise the curriculum, diversify faculty and push for greater inclusion among student bodies. What is offered, who is offering it, and whom they are offering it to have shifted. The changes are evident in the difference between what I was taught and what most young Americans now are being taught (at least until today). Even though I was a baby-boomer's baby, from elementary school to college, I rarely learned about the longstanding racial and environmental violence my world had produced. Instead, my schooling worked to instil in me the worldview of the acquisitive settlers of American colonialism, not those who already lived here or were brought here involuntarily. I was dressed up as a pilgrim for school plays at Thanksgiving; I made maladroit dioramas of California Missions for history class; and I went on field trips to the Sacramento Valley so I could pan for gold like the ‘good old ’49ers'. I learned almost nothing about anything anywhere after 1945. The textbooks on European history assigned to me had a lot about Napoleon, Gladstone, Bismarck, Hitler and Stalin, but no mention was made of nineteenth-century colonialism, gender, migration, post-colonialism or environmental destruction. The professors were different, too. Looking up at the podium, rarely did I see anyone who was not male, not white and not heteronormative. I learned about a non-white, queer, non-Western centric world by living in the world, not from what my institutions presented to me.

None of this is the case for my students today. In just thirty years, the difference in American students’ experience is staggering. The students I teach learned about the civil rights movement in elementary school. Textbooks on European history today have entire chapters focused on the systems of violence perpetrated throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, immigration policies within Europe, gender revolutions and environmentalism. The ideals of campus communities also bear little resemblance to what I was offered. Most university catalogues sent to potential freshmen are filled with idyllic photographs of faculty and students that include every possible ethnicity, skin colour, religion and gender. Though in reality faculty continue to be disproportionately male and white, the push for change here is nail-bitingly intense and largely welcomed. Many higher educational institutions require applicants to supply a diversity statement alongside their CVs, cover letters and transcripts, stating explicitly that those ‘who can contribute to the climate of inclusivity on campus are especially welcome to apply’.Footnote ³ And faculty everywhere are wrangling with their deans to broaden the category of ‘diversity’ ever further so that institutional culture is not just more inclusive on paper but also in lived terms.

None of these transformations happened by themselves. They were the result of a previous culture war led by activists, scholars and politicians who wanted American higher educational institutions to embody and support a more complex vision of democracy and progress.

However, faith that this process would last came to an abrupt halt in 2016. The election of Donald Trump and the expanding campaigns to re-elect the ultra-right to state legislatures, school boards and federal offices reversed the gains of the 2000s and 2010s. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Florida, which has taken centre-stage in national conversations about education's role in inculcating a sense of pride, positivity and belief in American exceptionalism. Since early 2022, in a bid for the presidential run in 2024, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has used education policy as a vehicle for white, heteronormative, capitalist and nationalist cultural policies that he claims are the best cures for America's ills. This campaign is not just bombast: it features a carefully crafted collection of legislative initiatives that are designed to control how history is taught, conceived and professionalised.

Between March and May 2022 alone, the Florida legislature passed five pieces of legislation affecting the teaching of history from elementary school to college. The aforementioned HB 7 ‘stop WOKE act’ prohibits any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs, clarifies that colour-blindness is ‘not racist’, emphasises that no individual's status is either privileged or oppressed because of ‘his or her race, color, sex, or national origin’, and demands that American history

The HB 1557 ‘Don't Say Gay’ bill bans public elementary schoolteachers from holding classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity, with the provision that teachers at higher grade levels can also face restrictions if course materials are not considered ‘developmentally appropriate’.Footnote ⁵ The HB 395 ‘Victims of Communism Day’ law designates class time to focus on the atrocities perpetrated by communist regimes and creates an annual day of remembrance to ‘honor the 100 million people who have fallen victim to communist regimes across the world’.Footnote ⁶ The HB 1467 ‘Curriculum Transparency’ bill codifies parents’ right to object to any course materials to which they feel their children should not be exposed.Footnote ⁷ The Florida State Board of Education is re-evaluating textbooks and has already banned forty-five nationally certified textbooks because of their supposed focus on ‘critical race theory’ and over-emphasis on ‘social-emotional’ learning.Footnote ⁸ Finally, the SB 7044 ‘Postsecondary Education’ bill requires teachers working in Florida's public institutions – regardless of their tenure status – to face review and possible termination every five years as a way to ensure that educational institutions are ‘more in line with what the state's priorities are’.Footnote ⁹ Teachers in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools can now be sued if ‘caught’ by parents or students breaking any of these laws, all of which will be in effect for the 2022–3 school year. No-one can doubt the purpose of this legislative onslaught. As DeSantis put it: ‘we are not going to use your tax dollars to teach our kids to hate this country or to hate each other.’Footnote ¹⁰ For DeSantis and his allies, the job of education is to erase any potentially troubling historical narratives about American legacies of violence, hate and prejudice so (white) Americans can live in pride, in peace and continue voting conservatively.

For historians of Europe, the question is: why does all of this matter to us? Unfortunately, the answer is clear. Directly and indirectly, both from the left and the right, the overlapping US culture wars are shaping how European history is taught and professionalised. This has an impact, not just on job opportunities but also on the kinds of books published and the next generations’ views of what Europe represents.

Let us begin on the left. For scholars committed to combatting the relentless onslaught of conservative educational policies in states like Florida, the history of Europe is a key battleground because it is considered the haven of Western-centrism, white-Christian dominated politics, and filled with triumphalist tales of capital, imperialism and cultural elitism. To engineer a more inclusive, globally sensitive curriculum, many history departments are choosing to oust Europe from their strategic plans. No one teaching in the United States today was surprised to read in the American Historical Association Jobs Report that ‘hiring for European history positions continued its long-term decline’, with 2020 showing half as many job offerings than five years before (from 15 per cent of all jobs offered in 2015 to the dismal 7 per cent of 2020).Footnote ¹¹ In 2020–1, the downward trend continued, with only three tenure-stream jobs in any aspect of modern European history announced in the United States. This sharp decrease in new positions is happening at the same time as a generation of Europeanists are retiring. In short, the dip in offerings represents a bigger shift than any one side of this equation shows: departments across the country – in big public institutions and smaller private institutions alike – have decided Europe should be on the out. Sometimes these positions have been repurposed to bolster other, neglected fields, but usually the choice is more a response to administrative pressure for shrinkage, with the ever-less-prized Europeanist lamb slotted for slaughter.

For those who support a progressive agenda, this phenomenon seems just. After all, as Andrew Denning recently noted, European history dominated American academia during the Cold War, monopolising positions, curricula and funding opportunities while the rest of the world (the United States aside) was ignored.Footnote ¹² It makes sense that scholars have responded to the flattened, racially determined Western Civ models of the McCarthy-era past and the Trump-era present by pushing to displace Europe. To correct both the academic past and the political present, faculty are increasingly treating European history as the irrelevant ‘dead, white, guy’ – the former golden boy who has overstayed his welcome. While I sympathise with this impulse, I cannot help but wonder what the history of two of the most studied topics in departments – colonialism and capitalism – becomes without Europeanists. Might this accidentally lead to the perception that capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and the violence that underpinned them was somehow natural? Do we not lose the potential for greater understanding of the historically specific causes and consequences of colonialism by leaving aside the domestic crises that made Europeans accept and even yearn to subjugate in ways no one had imagined before? These are challenging questions for scholars – including me – who want to move beyond a Europe-centred history curriculum. In so many ways, this is the crux of the problem: studying Europe is often equated with Eurocentrism. And though those are not the same thing, they are often treated as if they were, leading to an uncritical purge of Europe in an effort to correct past mistakes of its predominance.

The right, meanwhile, also has its eyes on Europe, but in a completely opposite way. Instead of cutting Europe out, the right is pushing to give Europe a bigger (though more tightly defined) place in a revamped narrative of proud American exceptionalism. A clear example of this can be found in the ‘stop WOKE act’ mentioned above. After two pages delineating how US history should be taught ‘factually’, the bill focuses on how schools should teach the Holocaust, which it describes as

In essence, the right hopes to use European history to cover the issues of democracy, authoritarianism, racism, xenophobia, colonialism and sexism that they want to leave undiscussed in the context of the American past (and present). Clearing out America's complex relationship with these darker aspects of history, while focusing on ways they played out in Europe, makes European history the perfect container for American absolution. America is exceptional once again, and Europe provides the perfect counterpoint for civics lessons about the dangers of prejudice. In a similar vein, the ‘Victims of Communism Day’ curriculum also serves as a way to whitewash American history, filled as it is with heart-warming stories about the Berlin Airlift and the Marshall Plan. Here, it is past American actions ‘saving Europe’ from Russia and communism that are used to deflect increased criticism about America's present-day diplomatic and economic interventions beyond its shores.

This partisan struggle to control European history in the United States has – and will continue to have – important effects, ranging from the inner-makeup of academia to the vision of Europe presented to the next generation. In part, this is because the American job market is at least 60 per cent larger than that in Europe. And, for better or worse, the dominance of English within international circles means that new historiography often emerges from Anglo-American institutions. Casting Europe aside or turning it into a moral fall guy will affect not just Americans’ careers and their knowledge about Europe; it will also influence Europeans applying for fellowships and jobs. It will determine which books get published, and which ones get read.

Highly problematic in all of this is that the articles, books and pedagogies that will likely rise to the top of the pile will substantiate precisely what legislations like the ‘stop WOKE act’ prescribe: namely, that Europe is a continent of rich, greedy, white Christian folks with planetary ambitions and a penchant for genocide. Already we are getting global histories that respond to both the left and the right of the US culture wars in this way, histories that limit Europeans’ roles to international statesmen, bureaucrats, lawyers, bankers, engineers and rogue adventurers voraciously trying to devour every community with which they come into contact. To a certain degree these histories are true and important. But they are also deeply wrong: Europe was filled with more poor, powerless, provincial people than rich, potent, cosmopolitans. Europe was not all white, was not all Christian, was always multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious, and tied for centuries within migratory patterns (forced and unforced) linking it with the worlds surrounding it. Yes, Europeans have perpetrated some of the most dehumanising systems of violence and extraction imaginable. But these systems were not the product of an original sin. They were the result of complicated worlds of inequality and desperation as much as of scientific progress and avarice.

The American culture wars have not been a complete loss for European history, however. Some American-based historians have responded to their hostile political climate by rethinking Europe instead of ousting it or moralising it. Here are just a few examples. Pamela Ballinger, Nimisha Barton, and Lauren Stokes have taken trigger points of America's culture wars to open up new questions about Europe's own migration histories centred on gender, religion, refugees and race.Footnote ¹⁴ Tiffany Florvil, Robin Mitchell, and Silvana Patriarca have confronted Europe's ‘whiteness’, showing not just the deep racist discourses that made ‘white Europe,’ but also showcasing the covered-up histories of the Europeans of colour those discourses tried to erase.Footnote ¹⁵ Emily Greble, Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Judith Surkis have resituated Muslim and Jewish communities from ‘(post)Ottoman Europe’ and ‘colonial Europe’ into the centre of our imaginary of European citizens, reminding us how much ‘Christian Europe’ was (and is?) a crusade, never a universal truth.Footnote ¹⁶ And Anita Kurimay has reminded us that no matter how much a country wants us to ‘never say gay’, the lived experience of LGBTQ Europeans can and should be excavated, unless we want to continue living in convenient, homophobic myths.Footnote ¹⁷ These are just some of the American-based historians who have lived their culture wars and responded by problematising Europe, instead of treating it as irrelevant or as a scapegoat. Thanks to them, we see not just a more multi-faceted world; we also see how dangerous it is to believe Europe was either singular or simple.

Unfortunately, the space for writing and research of this kind requires structures that I fear will be less available if my home country continues to fund, defund, attack, silence and decentre Europe as a side-effect of intense ideological partisanship. If we want to preserve the complexity and diversity of our field, we will have to emulate the courage of Will Hanley. We will have to recognise that the culture wars raging inside and outside our institutions affect us all, even if what is under attack is outside our direct areas of expertise. Only that way can we continue to write and teach histories that challenge rather than placate. Inevitably, there will be those who argue that history and politics should remain separate. But this seems hopelessly misguided in the current climate. It is surely time to stop reacting and start acting. If your first instinct is to disagree, I offer you a quote from a recent New York Times article by another Florida colleague of mine, Gabrielle Cornish, where she cites the Ukrainian music critic Lyubov Morozova's wise words: ‘the idea that “culture is beyond politics” has long been promoted by those who put culture at the service of ideology and war crimes.’Footnote ¹⁸ Let us not fool ourselves. The writing and teaching of history is and always has been constrained and shaped by the political. The only way out is to jump in.