With the House Jan. 6 committee hearings now behind us (in all probability), the question for history will be what they meant and what they accomplished. That question is impossible to answer now with any clarity. It will be answered by future historians, political scientists and other experts years or decades from now.
In his influential 1961 book "What is History?" E.H. Carr answered the title question this way: History is a continuous "process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past." In other words, history is not a neutral set of facts separate from the observer. Historians, like other scholars, have agency and subjectivity. They inhabit, exercise, serve, and are driven and impacted by the currents of power (what have been described as "regimes of truth") in their societies.
With the understanding that the history of this chapter in America's democracy crisis is still being created, I have allowed myself to reach a tentative conclusion: The House Jan. 6 committee hearings were anticlimactic.
-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com
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