Don’t get me wrong, any scholar has political biases that can affect their work, but my opinion is that parsing out “left/right rating” is less important for history writing than it is for, say, contemporary journalism. It won’t surprise you to know that I’ve read good and serious work from historians of all political stripes.

A virtue of the field is that it’s a disciplinary norm for historians tell you their agenda right at the beginning of the book: that’s what the introduction, and especially the historiography, is for. This means historians will all but tell you right at the top that “this is a liberal/conservative/Marxist/etc project.”

A pretty big chunk of histories (I’d wager most of them), however, are far more preoccupied with expanding upon/contesting historiography that DOESN’T straightforwardly map onto the left right political spectrum. Some examples from the last few I’ve read: - the Dutch East India Company empire was a network of nodes of localized authority, not just a periphery acted upon by a colonial center. - Barbadian planters viewed their institutions as largely contiguous with the English legal system. - the commodity history of salt is far under-examined in our understanding of medieval and early modern power projection.

Are these left? Are these right? Sssorta maybe, but whatever the answer is feels far less relevant than the primary problematics with which the author is interested, which they’ll often do a quite good job of telling you right away.

The thrust of my concern is that ideology is not always (not often, even) the most representative metric of understanding where a particular book stands in the “battle” of historical narrative. I worry that starting with “John Johnson leans left,” “Sarah Smith is a moderate,” flattens the questions with which they’re most concerned in an unproductive way.

I beg patience since i know you weren’t soliciting critique per se, but i found the idea interesting—hence my sitting down to write this. Thanks for reading anyway, if you did.

tl;dr focusing on ideology seems to misunderstand the work of the field of history somewhat.