Keeping the Faiths

Today, the entire academy, and especially those of us who are part of the American historical profession, owe a profound debt of thanks to several of our colleagues for a truly thankless task:  fighting the farcical, fraudulent, fatuous pseudo-historical pseudo-scholarship of David Barton.

In case you haven't heard, the Thomas Nelson publishing company has decided to stop the presses on Barton's infamous book The Jefferson Lies, and pull all copies from distribution.   Thomas Kidd, who broke the story yesterday at World Magazine, reports:

Casey Francis Harrell, Thomas Nelson’s director of corporate communications, told me the publishing house “was contacted by a number of people expressing concerns about [The Jefferson Lies].” The company began to evaluate the criticisms, Harrell said, and “in the course of our review learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported. Because of these deficiencies we decided that it was in the best interest of our readers to stop the publication and distribution.”

I don't know who in particular contacted the publisher.  But I do know that a number of historians and other scholars have done yeoman's work in demonstrating the evidentiary flimsiness and downright fabrications underlying many of Barton's claims.

John Fea, who blogs at The Way of Improvement Leads Home and who will be commenting on a panel at the fifth annual S-USIH conference this fall, has spent the past several months documenting and debunking Barton's distortions and outright lies. See especially his six-part series of blog posts analyzing Barton's historical argumentation.  Type "David Barton" into the search window at the top of Fea's blog, and you will get a sense of how much time this highly-regarded professional historian has spent doing battle against (really bad) popular "history."  In these posts you will also see that Fea frequently links to the work of other historians and scholars from a range of academic disciplines who have taken the time and care to refute Barton's propaganda -- scholars such as Stephen Prothero, Warren Throckmorton, Michael Coulter, Clay Jenkinson, Alan Pell Crawford.

Similarly, at the Religion in American History blog, historians Randall Stephens, Kelly Baker, Paul Harvey, Chris Beneke, and other contributors and commenters have situated Barton's work where it belongs:  not as history, but as a particular (and particularly virulent) strain of right-wing Christian nationalist propaganda. 

Barton's propaganda has never been aimed at swaying the judgment of the historical profession; though he has apparently been able to dupe the Texas board of education into accepting his propaganda as history, he is not writing anything that has a chance of passing muster with professional historians.  People who practice critical thinking skills for a living are not his target audience.  So professors at places like Messiah College, Grove City College, North Park University -- Christian institutions all -- might have been excused for doing what most of us do when we run across some of the laughable nonsense that sometimes passes for reliable history with popular audiences:  as academics and professionals, they could have simply ignored Barton.  Instead, they took the time and trouble to refute him -- drawing the predictably martyrological response from Barton that their criticism should be dismissed as the work of "academic elitists" who are attacking his "personal religious beliefs." 

Presumably, the group of Cincinnati pastors who recently called for a boycott of Thomas Nelson publishing over Barton's book are not part of the anti-Christian academic elite.  Bob Allen at the Associated Baptist Press reports that these evangelical pastors "were concerned that the book glosses over Jefferson’s heretical views about Jesus Christ and excuses him for owning slaves."  In other words, they fault not only Barton's historical argumentation but the moral judgment from which it proceeds and which it supports.  For them, Barton's work is not just bad history, but bad history in the service of bad theology. 

Indeed, I assume that Barton's work is "bad theology" in the view of the many Christian academics and scholars who have taken the time and trouble to expose the propagandist's falsifications and distortions.  In fact, I would surmise that their own pastoral and confessional concerns as scholars and teachers in faith-based institutions, their sense of responsibility to teach not only well but truly, might have spurred them to take on this particular vapid but vicious wolf. 

As a historian, I am not the least bit interested in promulgating good theology or bad theology or any theology at all.  I just want to write and teach good history.  What is interesting -- and not a little problematic for me -- about this case is the way in which good theology appealed for support to good history, and good history emerged at least in part from a commitment to good theology.

Why do I find this problematic?  Well, that has to do with a book review I have not yet written, and my reasons for not yet writing it.  I will explain my problem in another post.  For now, though, I would like to congratulate and thank these scholars and their colleagues for fighting the good fight and keeping the faith. I'm just not quite sure which faith or faiths they're keeping, and how they fit or ought to fit together.  But this I know:  if we are to judge a tree by its fruits, this latest small victory for good history tastes pretty sweet indeed.

Tim's Light Reading (2-23-2012): Beck-Inspired Flaming, Documentaries, Instrumental Universities, The Market-Democracy Relationship, and New Works of Interest

[Updated: 8:40 am]

1 (of 6). "The Culture Wars are Real": Beck's Minions Attack John Fea

You may or may not know that Glenn Beck has a "news" website called The Blaze. I didn't---until Messiah College professor John Fea, author of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, recently relayed a story about being featured on the Beck site.

The Blaze feature, authored by Billy Hallowell, brought attention to Fea for a line in a recent Patheos editorial wherein Fea opined that "Obama may be the most explicitly Christian president in American history." Hallowell's story has garnered 848 comments (as of 3 pm yesterday), and Fea has reported receiving nasty e-mails and voicemails. As an aside, I was somewhat surprised at the attention Fea received because, beyond the title, Hallowell's article isn't particularly incendiary.

I forward this for your consideration because, well, our relatively quiet blog community might garner this kind of attention at some point. It seems logical since we both write about recent political issues (and candidates), and receive some popular attention from moderates and lefty types. Granted, that attention comes from thoughtful corners. But I wouldn't be surprised if a rhetorical bomb-thrower from the right doesn't hit us soon.


2. "We’re Living in a Golden Age of Documentary Filmmaking"

This was the title of a recent Slate article by Eric Hynes. Hynes focuses on the short-shrift this golden age is receiving from the Academy Awards, but I agree fully. I particularly enjoy the work of Errol Morris. His The Fog of War comes up in the article, and I use that documentary religiously in my twentieth-century American survey courses (as well as The Weather Underground, which complements Fog nicely). The point of Hynes's article is that we have lots of screening choices.


3. Perceived Social Rank and Cognitive Ability

Check out this summary of study by a team of Cal Tech researchers. Here are some relevant passages:

Our cognitive abilities and decision-making skills can be dramatically hindered in social settings where we feel that we are being ranked or assigned a status level, such as classrooms and work environments. ...The finding flies in the face of long-held ideas about intelligence and cognition that regard IQ as a stable, predictive measure of mental horsepower.

"This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed," says Steven Quartz, professor of philosophy at Caltech and one of the authors of the new study. ..."This suggests that the idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other."

I'm still sorting all of this out, but I'd say this study might have something profound to say to intellectual historians---particularly those whose work covers class-based societies (i.e. all of us). Cue the study summary:

Throughout the 20th century, IQ was used in different arenas as a way of sorting or classifying people into niches. Because people believed it to be a more abstract notion of cognitive ability, it was thought to have strong predictive validity of mental capabilities even from age six. But IQ was always measured in social isolation. "That reflects a long tradition of intellectual history, of considering rationality and cognition to be this isolated process," Quartz says. "But one of the things that we're learning more and more in social neuroscience is the role of our social contexts and the social adaptation of the brain." Understanding the role social context plays and its differential impact on the brain may ultimately help educators and others to design more effective learning environments.

And last but not least:

The present study found some unexpected trends, including the tendency for female subjects to be more affected than males by the implicit signaling of social status during the test.


4. Economically Instrumental Universities

USIH friend and public intellectual(!) Ethan Schrum [right] recently penned an op-ed for the Richmond Times-Dispatch that chastises the Obama administration for a having a narrow view of the role of higher education in recent American history. Here's Schrum's conclusion:

Obama, by contrast, told students they were at Michigan to get skills and training for building their personal finances and the American economy. He gave no indication that a student might be at the university to be formed as a person, as a thinker and communicator — and as a global citizen.

Obama's narrow, short-sighted rhetoric for American higher education puts our universities in peril. We must wake up to the possibility that universities might be living on borrowed moral capital and begin framing higher education policy in ways consistent with our universities' noble traditions, before it is too late.

Sure, this is a long-running problem that pre-dates Obama's recent speech. But the president deserves a tongue-lashing for using the nation's bully pulpit to promote a one-sided, and frankly erroneous, view of higher education. Although I understand the needs of the campaign trail ("It's the economy, stupid!"), Obama could've been more honest.


5. A Forthcoming Work of Possible Interest

(a) Bernard Hodgson (forthcoming), "Democratic Agency and the Market Machine," Journal of Business Ethics.

[From PhilPapers] "The alliance of pure market economies with democratic polities has traditionally been a problematic one. It is argued that orthodox theoretical conceptualizations of market behaviour and the application of such theory to our communal lives have entrenched an incoherent alliance. In particular, the reductive mechanism characteristic of both neo-classical economic theory and its deployment in our socio-economic order has severely undermined the telic agency required for the autonomy or self-rule definitive of an authentic democratic order. Such reduction is observed to function through the disabling of the cognitive capacity of consumers and by disempowering the agency of workers such that coercion is misconceived as freely agreed contract."


6. From My OAH-RSO Feed: New Books and Articles of Interest

This month's RSO is loaded with intellectual history---more than I've sampled below. Be sure to check out entry (i)!

(a) Barry, John M., Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012).

(b) Bromell, Nick, "A `Voice from the Enslaved': The Origins of Frederick Douglass's Political Philosophy of Democracy," American Literary History, 23 (Winter 2011), 697-723.

(c)Fischer, David Hackett, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

(d) Goodman, Joyce, "The Gendered Politics of Historical Writing in History of Education," History of Education (London), 41 (Jan. 2012), 9-24.

(e) Laats, Adam, "Monkeys, Bibles, and the Little Red Schoolhouse: Atlanta's School Battles in the Scopes Era," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 95 (Fall 2011), 335-55.

(f) Lee, Maurice S., Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

(g) Lee, Michael J., "American Revelations: Biblical Interpretation and Criticism in America, circa 1700-1860" (PhD Diss, University of Notre Dame, 2009).

(h) Matteson, John, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012).

(i) Murphy, Paul V., The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

(j) Powell, Tara, The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).

(k) Rose, Anne C., "The Invention of Uncertainty in American Psychology: Intellectual Conflict and Rhetorical Resolution, 1890-1930," History of Psychology, 14 (Nov. 2011), 356-82.

(l) Szalay, Michael, "Ralph Ellison's Unfinished Second Skin," American Literary History, 23 (Winter 2011), 795-827.

Lacy's Open Thread: 8/11/2011 Edition

It's been three weeks since trying this for the first time, so let's give it another go. Here are a few conversation starters:



1. No one else has introduced her name here, so I might as well be the first: I'm intrigued by Ryan Lizza's recent 'Pseudo-(anti?-)Intellectual History of Michele Bachmann'. It's a fascinating and depressing account of Bachmann's intellectual influences. Here's a piece tracking responses to Lizza's narrative. I'm intrigued by the second Francis Schaeffer reference I've read this week...segue...



2. Every history graduate student---and every historian for that matter---should be required to read chapter four of John Fea's recent book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction. The chapter's title is "History for the Faithful: The Contemporary Defenders of Christian America." Fea lays out his view of five themes covered in recent popular books by those who want to prove---and among those who want to believe---the thesis that America is a Christian nation.



3. Here's another survey text covering the last 40 years of American history: Jeff Madrick's Age of Greed. Color me green with intrigue. It's amazing to me how the Sixties serve as an impregnable analytical wall---a wall that forces historians to write about it directly, aim for it, or launch from it. Few who narrate broadly seem to write through it.



But hey, these are just my ideas for discussion. I'm open to anything else you want cover. - TL

Lacy's Open Thread: 8/11/2011 Edition

It's been three weeks since trying this for the first time, so let's give it another go. Here are a few conversation starters:



1. No one else has introduced her name here, so I might as well be the first: I'm intrigued by Ryan Lizza's recent 'Pseudo-(anti?-)Intellectual History of Michele Bachmann'. It's a fascinating and depressing account of Bachmann's intellectual influences. Here's a piece tracking responses to Lizza's narrative. I'm intrigued by the second Francis Schaeffer reference I've read this week...segue...



2. Every history graduate student---and every historian for that matter---should be required to read chapter four of John Fea's recent book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction. The chapter's title is "History for the Faithful: The Contemporary Defenders of Christian America." Fea lays out his view of five themes covered in recent popular books by those who want to prove---and among those who want to believe---the thesis that America is a Christian nation.



3. Here's another survey text covering the last 40 years of American history: Jeff Madrick's Age of Greed. Color me green with intrigue. It's amazing to me how the Sixties serve as an impregnable analytical wall---a wall that forces historians to write about it directly, aim for it, or launch from it. Few who narrate broadly seem to write through it.



But hey, these are just my ideas for discussion. I'm open to anything else you want cover. - TL