Reply #24: Jon Weiner, "Historians in Trouble"

[Hidden Stillness]

This sounds like it could be a really interesting book, full of factual accounts of incidents, not just an overarching opinion or claim. Many examples of different kinds were given on this situation, which is not really exclusively "modern" or "current" at all, of course. One was of a professor who wrote a book a few (?) years ago, that I had never heard of, apparently proving that early Americans were not all Wild West pioneer gun-toters defending themselves with "frontier justice" at all, and that gun-ownership among early settlers, farmers, city people, etc., was actually quite rare, and that this not only changed the whole perception of how those people lived and what they acted like, but changed the actual meaning, as they would have known it, of the 2nd Amendment, the "right to bear arms" for a militia, etc.--that they would not have intended for universal gun-ownership and did not practice it themselves. Instantly, the enemy of the people, the NRA, attacked, by hiring lawyers, researchers, etc., etc., to rip apart the book and destroy the author. They could find nothing wrong with the research, but found problems with some of the footnotes. They created such a manufactured "scandal" about some attributions, that the university (can't remember where) took away the professor's teaching class and other earned honors.

There were other examples, such as the famous one where the great historian Doris Kearns Goodwin plagiarized a large section of someone else's book, with no credit given. She later admitted it, apologized, etc., lost most of her media access as a commentator, and then it faded because she is so good a writer, and so popular, that people wanted her books still. Another was an odd example of a teacher of a class on Viet Nam, who claimed to have been a soldier in Viet Nam, and who apperently explained the war so compellingly, that many students called that the greatest class they had ever had. Research showed that the person was a teacher at West Point the whole time. What was strange about this, I thought, was that if the teacher had just presented the lesson as a historical re-enactor, and told the same stories and given the same material, it still would have been authentic and powerful.

An important point that Jon Weiner was making during this C-SPAN talk, was that the punishment or lack of it, did not correspond to the offense committed, and how serious it was, but more to how powerful or connected the accuser or accused were, who had access to the "spin machine," and why the case was even being fought. Predictably, the most vociferous attacks on authors, and the most prolonged attampts to destroy their reputations, came from conservative/Republican sources, and they were often directed as a chance to discredit any talk on an issue at all, rather than an actual discovery of plagiarism. Some reference was made to that silly asshole whose name I can't remember, who is always whining that colleges and universities are "forcing" "liberalism" on innocent students, as an example of this kind of propaganda.

You might recognize Jon Weiner's name as the author of two books on John Lennon, one a kind of social history, and the other tracking the FBI's surveillance on Lennon and Yoko Ono when the Nixon Administration was trying to deport Lennon.

This sounds like a book much more interesting than its purported topic--plagiarism by historians sounds like a book to fall asleep by--as it studies what is really going on here, in the real world, and why some people are targetted, and some are rewarded, such as the anti-feminist liars given medals by the Bush/Cheney Administration, referred to by Weiner. An interesting social study, where the topic and meaning ends up being different from what you at first thought it might be, theoretically.