Analysis Of Peter Charles Hoffer S For

Analysis Of Peter Charles Hoffer s For

For everyone knew that history's lessons were immutable and inescapable.

The old historians, back in the nineteenth century and even in the early twentieth century, Hoffer shows, didn't treat primary sources with great care. Better raconteurs than curators, such major American scholars of the nineteenth century as Francis Parkman and George Bancroft made big, satisfying stories from history's incomplete and not-always-ennobling record.

These poor folks were excluded from the heroic story of our country. Up until the s, historians emphasized progress and national unity, while bypassing events and institutions that would, if looked at fairly, call into question the American people's equal take of the freedoms that set our great nation apart.

Now, Hoffer's account may sound like some rote, first-day-of-class lecture--but it is in fact the setup he's chosen for an examination of the plagiarism and falsification scandals that have stirred up his profession. An outsider might think that the recent scandals involving Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Joseph Ellis, and Michael Bellesiles concern merely those writers' personal wrongdoing.

Whatever the shortcomings of the historical profession--not paying enough attention to women and minorities in the old days, say, or paying them too much attention these days--surely that is a separate matter from whether Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys lifted copy from Lynne McTaggart's earlier Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times. Not so, according to Hoffer, who believes the recent crop of scandals is, like everything else in American history these days, indeed, about women and minorities.

More about Analysis Of Peter Charles Hoffer 's For Ourselves And Our Posterity

Hoffer believes that for us to understand the scandals properly, we must travel the long road connecting early pro-American "consensus" historians to the radical anti-American historians of the s. In this, he increases the divide between academic historians and readers of popular history, even as he intends to close it. With Hoffer spending out of pages on the history of writing history, his book actually proves that what interests historians is not what interests non-historians about the past. The most relevant part of this extended prelude concerns the new historians who began climbing the ranks in the mids--Hoffer included. They were defined by two ambitions: to call into question American history as it was handed down to them, and to live out their New Left convictions as professional academics. Analysis Of Peter Charles Hoffer s For