Historians should not attempt to be pundits

DONALD Trump might be disastrous for most Americans and a danger to the world, but he has been a boon to historians. The more grotesque his presidency appears, the more historians are called on to make sense of it, often in 30-second blasts on cable news or in quick-take quotes in a news article.

As a historian, I'm glad to see my profession getting some much-deserved publicity. But I also worry about the rapid-fire, superficial way history is being presented, as if it's mostly a matter of drawing historical analogies. The result is that readers and viewers get history lessons that are often misleading when it comes to Mr Trump, and shed little light on our current travails.

This is partly because this is not what historians should be doing. We teach our students to be wary of analogies, which are popular with politicians and policymakers (who choose them to serve their agendas) but often distort both the past and the present.