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EN
History Was Sentenced to Death in My City. It Survived.
['Omar Mohammed']
The Free Press
Last week in The Free Press, Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin argued that history is being defeated by algorithms and artificial intelligence—a framework that led Ferguson, a historian, to conclude, “I failed utterly.”
Nine writers then answered him in these same pages, some sharing his despair, others disputing his diagnosis.
I am also a historian from Mosul, in northern Iraq, who did not merely study the death of history but stood inside it, wrote about it under a death sentence, and spent the years after the war unearthing the deepest erasure my city ever suffered: the deletion of its Jews.
One of my credentials belongs to the world Ferguson is warning about.
From where both meet, I can report that his alarm is justified, and his conclusion is wrong.