Historians/History

Bellesiles: Do the People Who Favorably Reviewed the Bellesiles Book Owe Readers an Apology?

by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

The brave minuteman armed with his trusty rifle, Bellesiles told us, was mostly a myth — Americans at the time of the Revolution, and for many decades afterward, seldom owned guns, but instead relied on the government for protection. Bellesiles received glowing reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications, from reviewers who were often visibly ple

The Price of Historical Amnesia

by Ron Briley

As schools begin to reopen all over the country, teachers, especially those in history, will express disappointment over how much their students have forgotten during the summer. But perhaps we are too quick to chide our young people for not maintaining intellectual engagement. It may well be that their forgetfulness simply reflects the historical and cultural amnesia which seems to characterize modern memory in the United States. As we bemoan low test scores and the short at

History: Do Journalists Get It?

by Stuart Banner

A few months ago I published a book about the history of the death penalty in the United States. Ever since, whenever something relating to the death penalty takes place (a court decision, an execution, etc.), I get calls from journalists looking for quotes. My normal response is something like "yes, that's the way things have been happening for some time," or "that reminds me of such-and-such case." But that's never the kind of quote the reporters are looking for

The 9-11 Anniversary Was a Missed Opportunity for American Teachers

by Sheldon M. Stern

James Loewen, keynote speaker at the annual conference of the National Council for the Social Studies, attacked lies in American history and ridiculed the notion of "God Bless America." "The Swedes, the Kenyans," he proclaimed, "don't think God blesses America over all other countries." Is it possible that no one in the audience saw through this nonsense? "God Bless America" is not an assertion of entitlement; rather it is an invocation,

The Los Angeles Time's Secret List on Doris Kearns Goodwin

by Philip Nobile

The Doris Kearns Goodwin story has many lingering mysteries: How much did Goodwin pay in 1988 to silence Lynne McTaggart, author of Kathleen Kennedy? Where is the report by Goodwin’s assistants on the total number of passages copied without proper attribution in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, which the author commissioned in February?When will Simon & Schuster publish the corrected version of The Fitzgerald

What's Happened to History?

by Michael Nelson

What a bad time it has been for the nation's best-known historians--that is, for the small number of historical writers, some affiliated with academic institutions and some not, whose books regularly inhabit the bestseller lists, whose faces frequently appear on television, and whose speaking fees reach well into the five figures. The entire roster consists of six people: Stephen E. Ambrose, Michael Beschloss, Joseph J. Ellis, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, and Edmund Morris. All b

Mr. Gergen's Interview with Mr. Ambrose

by Joe Balkoski

Last week David Gergen interviewed Stephen Ambrose on the PBS show,"The Newshour." It has attracted a lot of criticism. Several critics wrote PBS to complain. Mr. Balkoski's letter appears below. Dear NewsHour: I feel very sad that NewsHour, a program of heretofore unimpeachable standards, has deemed it necessary to air the David Gergen interview with Stephen Ambrose on Tuesday July 30. To me, this interview was appalling and disgraceful. For a news program that prides itsel

When History Teaches the Wrong Lesson

by Rick Shenkman

Note: This article was published last October. In a conversation last week with my stockbroker, he made the point that I shouldn't be worried about the market's decline. The market will bounce back, he insisted, as it always has. A few days later I received from a friend a chart forwarded by a pension planner that illustrated how the market had responded to crises in the past half century. After each crisis there was a dip followed by an even greater rise. The chart was suppo

Would It Weren't So, Joe, But ...

by Bernard Weisberger

I have had some slight and friendly contacts with Professor Ellis by mail and through third parties, which I mention as a disclaimer of total objectivity. I also greatly admire his writings, and take note that there seems to be no suggestion whatever that any of his work as an real historian fails to meet the most exacting professional standards of integrity. What then, do I think of his being caught in lies about what he did during the Vietnam War? In a nutshell that it’s both sad and m

The University of Chicago Is Not Abandoning Its Commitment to Western Civ

by Rachel Fulton

Editor's Note: The University of Chicago is revamping its history curriculum. On other campuses this would barely merit national headlines. But Chicago is different. Chicago's curriculum, with its emphasis on traditional Western history, has held on stubornly in the face of relentless attacks through the years by reformers who championed other approaches. On June 6, 2002 Dr. Fulton defended the change, which she minimized, at a meeting of the trustees of the University of Chicago. Followin

The Vietnam War: Its Relevance for Today

by Ron Briley

In late May, HBO Pictures began running an original film entitled Path to War about President Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to expanding the American presence in Vietnam. Path to War, directed by veteran filmmaker John Frankenheimer, presents Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Alec Baldwin) as pushing the President to take an assertive stance against communist expansion in Southeast Asia, while Presidential adviser Clark Clifford (Donald Sutherland) is portrayed as the voice

Joe Ellis: The Danger of Playing a Role as a Public Intellectual

by Peter C. Rollins

Historian Joseph Ellis, under a dark cloud for lying about Vietnam service, is a real loss to the Amherst community because he was a"perfect" Vietnam veteran. Before it was exposed one year ago that he had lied, Prof. Ellis conformed to the stereotype demanded by local academics: on the one hand, he was (putatively) a combat veteran who had experienced all the horrors of Vietnam we know about from Oliver Stone's film," Platoon"; yet he took an anti-war stance we have come to admir

Letter to the Newberry Library

by Lynne Munson

Editor's Note: Last month the NEH required the Newberry Library to remove the NEH's name from a fellowship awarded to Michael Bellesiles. Below is the letter the NEH sent announcing its decision. The letter has not previously been made public. (Click here to read the Newberry's response to the NEH decision.) May 20, 2002 James Grossman Vice President for Research and Education Ne

Why the University of Haifa Wants to Get Rid of Me

by Ilan Pappe

On May 5, 2002, I was summoned to stand trial in my university, University of Haifa, where I am a lecturer at the department of International Relations. The prosecution, represented by the university's Dean of Humanities, demanded my expulsion from the campus due to the position I had taken in the past on the controversial case of Teddy Katz. Katz was an M.A. student at the University who in 1999 received the highest possible grade for a dissertation that, among other things, exposed an unknow

Could Bellesiles's Problems Undermine Gun Control?

by Don Williams

Emory University recently announced that an outside panel of scholars will examine Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America—with results to be announced this summer. If the investigation discredits Bellesiles then it could hurt the arguments filed by gun-control advocates in a major Second Amendment case ( US vs Emerson) that is coming before the Supreme Court.

In Defense of Stephen Ambrose

by Richard Jensen

On the Ambrose case, five distinct issues need to be disentangled. First, we have celebrity bashing. Not only Ambrose, but several other widely known historians have come under rather savage attack recently. It's hardly a wonder that student knowledge of history is plunging when the craft is under such ridicule. The notion is abroad that our best known writers are frauds (a thought that doubtless reassures tens of thousands of students who are busy c

The Scarlet Letter “P”

by HNN Staff

From Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter"Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty,"I'll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What thin

Scotching Plagiarism

by Robert V. Bruce

Having taken part in some widely reported plagiarism disputes and having chaired a standing committee on student academic conduct, I did not regard plagiarism as a very original sin. But I was not prepared for what I encountered in April 1998. A new book, Alexander Graham Bell: A Life, by a Scottish author, James Mackay, came to my attention that month. I myself had published Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude with Little Brown in 1973. I was the fir

Maybe Now We Should Start Outing All Writers

by Nikki Keddie

Current discussions on Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Bellesiles remind me that the public is so far willing to accept far worse misrepresentations in authorship than these. Ambrose and, to a lesser extent, Goodwin, apparently failed to put in quotation marks or put adequate references to books that they did state they had used. While they may be faulted for trying to write too much too quickly and relying too much on secondary sources, I doubt their books would have been substan

Historians and 9-11

by Ronald Radosh

Recently, along with a few thousand others, I was privileged to attend the annual Francis Boyer Award Dinner of the American Enterprise Institute, to hear Norman Podhoretz give the recipient's annual speech. Podhoretz chose to speak about the intellectuals, the culture and the war on terrorism. He reminded us, looking back to the early days of the war in Vietnam, that the American intervention was in fact not only popular and supported by most of the populace, but that even the American med