People are often tempted to colonize the past with their own ideas and to judge historical figures by modern standards.
Philip Stott calls it “the curse of Present-Mindedness”.
One of the spider-holes into which the modern historian can too easily fall is that of 'Present-Mindedness' about past generations, whereby history is rewritten anachronistically by reference to constructs and knowledges that post-date the period in question.
He’s found a classic example in a History Today article on Thomas Jefferson, which he flays and deservedly so.
This is pernicious stuff, about Jefferson, about the history and development of America, and about the Enlightenment itself. It is part of the new cuddly bunny thinking about the world which bedevils the post-agricultural and post-industrial paranoid rich North.
Sounds about right to me.
