PAST IMPERFECT

A professor of history takes to the woodshed not only the recent high-profile plagiarizers and prevaricators (Bellesiles, Goodwin, Ambrose, Ellis) but also those whose acts of omission and commission made possible the whole dreary mess.

Hoffer (Univ. of Georgia) brings a variety of capacities to this unpleasant task: he serves in the professional division of the American Historical Association, he knows some of those under scrutiny, he’s a practicing historian. He believes each of his besmirched colleagues did, in fact, commit academic dishonesty, and he frankly condemns them for it. The proof he assembles is devastating—particularly the side-by-side comparisons of texts. There is no question that Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin played fast and loose with secondary sources, no question that Michael Bellesiles fabricated data for his Arming America (2000), no question that Joseph Ellis (see His Excellency, above) lied about serving in Vietnam. But Hoffer also sees in this sad sky a constellation of factors that enabled these personal and professional failures. He chides his own profession for partitioning their demesne into “popular” and “scholarly.” Academic historians, he says, have become so specialized—so focused on the minutiae of ever narrower topics—that they often do not consider even worthy of discussion the highly popular histories and biographies for “general readers” that appear on bestseller lists (and often win prestigious prizes). These professors, Hoffer argues, abandon their watchdog roles. The author also blames commercial publishers for viewing works of popular history as commodities—things from which to make fast and sure profits. (Does anyone really care if they’re original?) Television—and its viewers—get a spanking, as well, for helping make celebrities of scholars and for insisting on works that celebrate rather than analyze American history. Hoffer also provides a useful summary of the changes in—and politics of—American historiography.

What emerges in this well-researched assessment of a nasty problem are both the author’s love for his discipline and his grief for the losses it has sustained.