Fraud with Footnotes

This article is all too accurate on the teaching and writing of history.

Even before the recent postmodernist wave, history graduate faculties were already loaded with future professors who had not so much learned history as historiography, learning "American history," for example, mainly as a review of the various conceptual schemes of Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and other such grand explainers, while often remaining very poorly informed about anything that actually happened in the United States between 1776 and the last quarter of the twentieth century.

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Revisionists of the 1960s tried to select documents that would support otherwise improbable explanations of which forces had most importantly shaped the behaviour of past historical figures. The revisionists of this era need few documents, new or old, since they treat all accounts of the past as mere 'narratives' to be mangled and dismembered on their feminist/post-colonial/anti-racist/gender-sensitive Procrustean bed.

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This kind of research is not instructive, but clever: a display of the student's familiarity with fashionable preoccupations, not the historical events on which these are brought to bear.

RTWT