We bring courage to historical study because it takes courage to confront the realities of human sin as it manifested itself in the past. And we need the courage to avoid simple explanations about past events and personalities. History also requires that we exercise justice to the dead. We avoid cherry-picking from the past for political purposes, and we eschew the temptation to use the past in contemporary power games. 

People are touchy about the topic of history these days. They get worked up about statues in public places, history education in middle and high school classrooms, and whether America was or was not founded as a Christian nation. Academic historians are famous for disparaging beloved authors like Barbara Tuchman and David McCullough for writing nothing more than “popular” history, and for them, anyone who casts himself as a historian must be able to produce a doctorate in history from an acceptable institution.

Most recently, Tucker Carlson interviewed a podcaster named Darryl Cooper on a range of topics including World War II. Carlson introduced Cooper, host of the Martyr Made Podcast, as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” It turns out that Cooper, the most important popular historian today (if we accept Carlson’s endorsement), believes that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.”

Carlson’s interview with Cooper exploded with controversy. As of this writing, the interview on YouTube has close to 1 million views in a week and a half. That is an enviable statistic. To put that into perspective, leading Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo struggled to get just a little more than 150,000 views of his lecture titled “Did Robert E. Lee commit treason?”

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