Should we cool it with the historical present?

by James Somers, October 21, 2021

On podcasts it’s pretty common to hear something like this:

So Alexander Hamilton has just finished law school, and he’s trying to make a name for himself. He’s only been in New York a few years. So he takes on this case…

The problem with the past tense (“Hamilton had just finished law school, and was trying to make a name for himself”) is that, very subtly, it preserves the distance that history already has. Old worlds can feel unreal. The “historical present,” as deployed here, invites you into Hamilton’s shoes. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of that transformation that Peter Jackson pulled with World War I footage in They Shall Not Grow Old. At its best, it makes history feel... present.

But you’ve got to pick your spots. The historical present might be valuable when you’re describing a scene—a moment—and an individual acting in it. It can make those moments vivid. But if you just use it willy-nilly anytime you talk about the past, it’s confusing. After all, it’s the wrong tense.

I’ve found that the New York Times’s Daily reaches for the historical present almost as if it were against the style guide not to. And yet this is a podcast that normally takes such great pains to be clear.

Here’s an example from an episode about the reaction in Wuhan to the coronavirus outbreak. The host, Michael Barbaro, wants to get the reporter to talk in the historical present. The reporter sometimes obliges, but sometimes swings to the past tense. The result is a muddle:

MICHAEL BARBARO
And what is the scene at the airport?

AMY QIN
The scene at the airport was a little bit frenzied. […] So I’m in the airport lobby and I’m waiting for my flight. […]

MICHAEL BARBARO
So what happens once you land?

AMY QIN
So once I land, I find that I am at the Miramar Marine base in San Diego, California. […] And I’ve never seen people come together like this before—and people were so upset about his death.

MICHAEL BARBARO
And what are they saying?

AMY QIN
A lot of people were posting candle emojis and other kinds of remembrances for Dr. Li.

For a while, it still works. But jumble tenses long enough, and the timeline becomes genuinely hard to follow:

AMY QIN
So the reaction is really remarkable. […] It was so clear that this was something that had really tapped into the frustration that was happening.

MICHAEL BARBARO
And what do you make of those reactions? Because it feels like it no longer is really just about this virus and the way that it was handled?

AMY QIN
Yeah so at this point, it is clear that this is becoming so much bigger than just the virus. […] People in China are already used to a pretty high level of censorship, but when it comes to censoring a warning about public health, that goes too far. And the reaction is so overwhelming that the government quickly realizes that they need to do something. And that’s when we see China’s leader Xi Jinping come forward out of the shadows and try to take control of the situation.

Barbaro’s first question—“What do you make of those reactions?”—is ambiguous. Does he mean, What do you make of those reactions today, right now, as we’re speaking, or, What did you make of those reactions at the time? He means the latter.

This kind of miscue happens often when you use the historical present to refer to the recent past—because what tense are you supposed to use to refer the actual present?

Just yesterday I was listening to another episode, this one about kids returning to school amid the Delta variant. Once again, the host, Sabrina Tavernise, tried to foist the historical present upon the guest. Once again, perhaps because that felt so unnatural, the guest only halfheartedly went along:

SABRINA TAVERNISE
Richard, what happens when the Delta variant starts surging in Arkansas?

RICHARD FAUSSET
So, Arkansas, like most states, saw this really nice trough with very low numbers of new cases that went from the spring into the early summer. The whole idea of wearing a mask starts to fade into the background. And life starts to kind of return to normal. But then Delta hits in the summertime. And you started to see […] And this vaccine hesitancy became […]

The two continued mostly in the historical present, sometimes switching tenses like this, gradually narrating events until the timeline got closer and closer to now. Fine. The real trouble came when the reporter wanted to talk not about specific events but about broader themes:

RICHARD FAUSSET
So the governor is going around the state and, particularly recently, we’ve seen some of the vaccination numbers go up in the state. But it’s still lagging compared to a lot of states. And in the meantime, the beginning of school is looming ever larger. [...] And it kind of rolls into this big ball of concern about how kids are actually going to be able to go back to school safely. And it’s that concern that really brought the question of masks in school back to the forefront of the conversation in Arkansas.

The “particularly recently” makes it sound like we’re talking about where things stand right now; the last sentence makes it sound like no, we’ve been setting something up in the historical present. It’s hard to parse.

I’m not cherrypicking; the Daily does this in almost every episode. That’s because Barbaro pushes the conversation that way:

This tense is in the air; when you start listening for it, you hear it everywhere. On the BBC’s In Our Time, the host only occasionally nudges his guests into the historical present; mostly they go there themselves. Often it works; sometimes it doesn’t. On an episode about the Siege of Paris, the group is happily using the historical present throughout. Here’s a typical example:

JULIA NICHOLLS (40:25)
If we look at the event itself, it almost has an outsized legacy compared to what the event is. [...] It’s taken up by various different international left movements [...]

Later in the episode, the host, Melvyn Bragg, finds that the present tense has been burned talking about the past:

JULIA NICHOLLS (44:30)
I think that the Communards also saw this as a continuation of a battle that had been going on since 1789 [...] It was their duty, it was an obligation to fight against those people.

MELVYN BRAGG
What do they think about this in France?

ROBERT GILDEA
What do they think about it NOW?

MELVYN BRAGG
Yeah

I love the historical present—I’ve used it a few times in this post—but I wish it were deployed more thoughtfully. It’s great for narration, less so for exposition. It works well for the far past (the Triassic, say), when there’s no chance of ambiguity, but it can make a mess of recent history. It’s especially fraught when you want to mix timeframes, like on podcasts that discuss the news or the legacy of historical events.

When in doubt, is it so crazy to use the past tense to describe the past?