2002: October to December

READING TAROT CARDS

One other reader comment (also about Bellesiles) deserves a large audience, if only because it is so suggestive:

Subject: FTC, Miss Cleo and AA [Arming America]
Posted By: Thomas L. Spencer
Date Posted: November 14, 2002, 7:05 PM

I was just listening to something on the radio about psychic charlatan Miss Cleo and the Federal Trade Commission. The tarot card operation she was involved in was investigated and the matter, I believe, went to trial. Seems that fraudulent advertising is a matter for FTC investigation. How is B's work being marketed? What claims are being made in the advertising and on the D.J.? Enquiring minds would like to know, is this an avenue to further expose AA for what it is? Legal Eagles, weigh in here. Is the publisher aiding and abetting this through false advertising?

A similar question was raised by a reader when questions began being raised about Ambrose's many books. To date (as far as we know) no one has filed a complaint against either author's publisher with the FTC.

MR. HISTORY

Do you know who STEVE GILLON is? If you don't, there's a sure bet you will if you ever watch the History Channel. Gillon, who always wanted to be a ball player, has hit one of the great media home runs."Yes," he told HNN,"the rumor is true. I am now the 'resident historian' -- whatever that means -- at the History Channel and will be doing more specials and other features for the network." Gillon, who has been serving as the Dean of the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma, says he will continue to work at OU but will only teach several weeks a year. He will have an apartment in New York.

A CUP OF WATER AND A PAD AND PENCIL, PLEASE

In October Emory University's DAVID GARROW--is there something in the water down there?--was arrested for simple battery after an employee at the school complained he had harassed her for years. Subsequently, he was suspended for six months, an indication that there must have been some fuel in this fire. But has his career been hurt? Maybe at Emory, but he remains a major media figure. In November he wound up on the op-ed page of the NYT. The Times has not seen fit to disclose to its readers that Garrow is currently under suspension. Maybe they don't know.

DID BUSH MEAN TO SNUB THE OAH AND AHA?

The American Historical Association describes itself as the"largest historical society in the United States." The Organization of American Historians notes that it is"the largest learned society devoted to the study of American history." But in September, when President Bush unveiled his administration's three exciting initiatives to promote the study of history, both organizations were conspicuously absent from the program. Why? LEE FORMWALT, the executive director of the OAH, recently revealed that"neither the directors nor officers of the OAH or the AHA were invited to participate in the formulation" of the presidential initiatives. Formwalt told readers in the OAH newsletter, this is"deeply disturbing." Are the AHA and OAH just too liberal for the Bush administration? If anybody knows the answer to this question, please contact us by sending an email to editor@HistoryNewsNetwork.org.

THE UN PETITION THAT'S A HOAX

Last month we told you about an antiwar petition circulating on the Internet in the name of the United Nations. The petition reads, in part:

Today we are at a point of imbalance in the world and are moving toward what may be the beginning of a THIRD WORLD WAR. If you are against this possibility, the UN is gathering signatures in an effort to avoid a tragic world event.

Historians are among those who have been circulating the petition in the form of an email. The petition is a fake, according to the reliable snopes.com. One historian who signed the petition confessed that the claim that the"UN is gathering signatures" had raised some doubts about the legitimacy of the petition. Since when does the UN circulate petitions? Ah, but it was in a good cause.

SWEEPS MONTH

You have probably noticed that there seem to be more sensationalistic programs on TV this month. Of course, you're right. It's November--sweeps month! Used to be that just the broadcast stations played this game in a desperate attempt to maintain or increase their ratings. Now it appears that even the cable companies have caught sweeps fever. The newsletter from the History Channel listing November programs began with this entry:

Sex and History: TWIH. From sex scandals to the origin of sex toys, host Josh Binswanger uncovers an hour of steamy history. Burlesque star Dita Von Teese demonstrates the classic techniques of striptease that drove our grandfathers wild. CC [TV G]

In fairness, it should be pointed out that the History Channel also presented the highly acclaimed"History of Britain" in November.

WANTED: HISTORIAN TO WRITE THE CLASSIFIED HISTORY OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM

The Defense Department has posted the following announcment:

The contractor shall research and write a volume that will provide a narrative account of the CJCS/Joint Staff and JCS involvement in the development of national security/counter-terrorism policy and counter-terrorist operations for the GWOT during the eighteen months following the attacks of 11 September 2001.

OCTOBER 2002

STEPHEN AMBROSE

At Stephen Ambrose's funeral rich and powerful people, including Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, mourned his loss. Around the country millions who'd read his books or watched the movies based on them felt a twinge of sadness. Over at Slate they wondered why the media suddenly seemed to have gone soft, noting that most newspaper obits either neglected the Ambrose plagiarism controversy entirely or glossed over it (with the exception of the New York Times, Slate noted, which"delves into Ambrose's wrongdoing early and at length" ).

Should the newspapers have shied away from the controversy? We wondered and turned to the official Ambrose Homepage to see how his family had handled the matter. To our surprise, the homepage includes a wide and catholic sample of excerpts from nearly a dozen obituaries, several explicitly mentioning the plagiarism scandal. The first obit listed is from his hometown paper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which Slate criticized for leaving"the plagiarism till the end" and allowing"Tom Brokaw to dismiss it as an 'asterisk' on his career." But the very next obit is the one from the New York Times that Slate rated highly.

"Even heroes have flaws," the Salt Lake Tribune noted in its obituary. The Ambrose family, by the arrangement of the obits on his homepage, acknowledged that Ambrose had his.

BELLESILES: STANDING ROOM ONLY

At the upcoming annual meeting of the American Historical Association one session is likely to draw more attention than all the others: Session No. 161, which will be held in the Hilton Waldorf Room on Sunday January 5 at 11 AM:"Comparative Legal Perspectives on Gun Control." Two historians will be presenting papers. PETER SQUIRES of the University of Brighton and MICHAEL BELLESILES, who by then will be a former professor of history at Emory University. Bellesiles's paper concerns"The Interaction of Law and Culture: Guns and the Common Law in Early America," a subject he studied during his controversial year-long fellowship at the Newberry Library.

According to the AHA's ARNITA JONES, Bellesiles is still scheduled to appear at the session, which was selected months ago."We expect a vigorous debate among the many scholars who are intensely interested in Mr. Bellesiles' and others work on this subject," she told HNN. Skeptics may wonder if he'll show up. Last spring, when she was on the hot seat, DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN failed to appear at a panel at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. She gave her regrets in an email sent just 4 days prior to the meeting.

Note: To get into the session you will have to have your registration badge. Nobody off the street can just wander in.

CONGRESSIONAL RESOLUTIONS

You may have heard that Congress is deadlocked. This is not exactly true. Over the past few months Congress has been busy passing resolutions in support of history. Just this month the Senate passed a resolution mourning the loss of Stephen Ambrose and the House of Representatives passed a resolution "recognizing the importance of teaching United States history." This was the same House of Representatives which declared last June that the telephone was invented by an Italian-American named Antonio Meucci, a sausage and candle maker. Alexander Graham Bell's claim to have invented the telephone, our representatives informed us, was based on"fraud and misrepresentation."

As ROBERT BRUCE explained in these pages months ago, the Meucci claim is"ridiculous." Meucci's patent was"essentially the same as connecting two tin cans with a string." Fortunately, while the U.S. House of Representatives was busy misinforming the public about history, the Canadian Parliament (Bell lived and died in Canada) was ready with a prompt correction of the record, passing a resolution of its own in support of Bell's claim as the inventor of the telephone. Officially, the U.S. Congress still says it's Meucci.

Politics has nothing to do with this, in case you're wondering. That Meucci was Italian and that lots of Italian-Americans vote, was of no consequence. The House of Representatives simply wanted to set the record straight because it cares about"the importance of teaching United States history."

HISTORIAN TO U.S. SOLDIERS: DISOBEY YOUR COMMANDER IN CHIEF

PETER N. KIRSTEIN, Professor of History, Saint Xavier University, Chicago, is encouraging members of the United States armed forces to disobey any orders to participate in a war on Iraq. He was quoted as follows in a dispatch from the Arab News, posted October 3, 2002:

It is my hope that large segments of our armed forces would refuse to engage in aggressive military action that would disgrace their families, their nation and all those who have worn proudly the uniform of the United States. Air National Guard units should refuse activation in preparation for airstrikes. Aircraft carrier battle groups stationed in the Persian Gulf should refuse to refuel or preposition aircraft that could attack Iraq. Special forces such as navy Seals and army Rangers should refuse invading Iraq in a preemptive war against a non-threatening adversary. If additional ground troops are deployed, hopefully they would not obey orders to murder civilians or destroy wantonly the delicate infrastructure of Baghdad, Basra and other Iraqi cities.

Professor Kirstein, according to his web page, teaches the following subjects: recent U.S. history, the Nuclear Age, Vietnam, the Cold War, national security policy, the political economy of globalization, and Marxism. After Daniel Pipes's Campus Watch began listing the dossiers of academics"identified as apologists for suicide bombings and militant Islam," Kirstein, along with over 100 other academics, volunteered to be placed on the list.

Campus Watch, after receiving criticism about the practice of keeping"dossiers" on academics--shades of McCarthyism--dropped the dossiers. Academics who volunteered to be placed on the list have received the following notice:"Unfortunately, we have removed the dossiers on individual professors from our site, so we cannot add you to them. However, we have included your name, title and institution on a webpage (http://hnn.us/articles/www.campus-watch.org/apologists.php) that lists academics who submitted a form letter to Campus Watch in defense of apologists for Palestinian violence and militant Islam." Kirstein's name appears on this list.

NEW PETITION AGAINST WAR WITH IRAQ

First, there was the historian's petition to cajole Congress to play its constitutional role in the debate about war with Iraq. Then there was the academic's petition opposing a war with Iraq, which was signed by some 13,000 professors, including more than 1,000 historians. A third petition has now surfaced, this one being circulated by email. It reads, in part:

Today we are at a point of imbalance in the world and are moving toward what may be the beginning of a THIRD WORLD WAR. If you are against this possibility, the UN is gathering signatures in an effort to avoid a tragic world event.

The petition is being circulated by many people including JOYCE APPLEBY, the former president of the AHA and the OAH, who was behind the historian's petition.

LIST OF HISTORIANS ON THE HOT SEAT

DAVID GARROW, winner of a Pulitzer-Prize history of the Civil Rights movement, has become the latest historian to become entangled in controversy. In October he was arrested for battery after an employee at Emory complained that he had used abusive language toward her over a period of years. On October 15, he was suspended from Emory for six months.

For the record, this is a list of historians who over the past two years have become the focus of controversial stories in the Fourth Estate:

Historian	Affiliation	Offense	Outcome
Joseph Ellis	Mount Holyoke	inventing stories about himself	suspended from Mount Holyoke for a year
David McCullough	Independent scholar; PBS	accused of misattributing a quote to Thomas Jefferson about John Adams	acknowledged his error and corrected his text
Louis Roberts	SUNY, Albany	accused of plagiarizing obscure Latin texts	stepped down as chairman of the classics department at SUNY, Albany
Stephen Ambrose	Independent scholar	accused of plagiarizing passages from a dozen books; accused of sloppy scholarship	conceded he borrowed passages from others without using quote marks, but usually included footnotes; admitted he sometimes made mistakes and promised to correct them, though his critics claimed he rarely did
Doris Kearns Goodwin	Independent scholar; Harvard University overseer	accused of plagiarism and paying off an author who complained	admitted copying passages, but insisted it was unintentional
Michael Bellesiles	Emory University	accused of fraudulently manipulating data and facts related to guns	resigned from Emory following the release of a report that found him guilty of misrepresenting data and unprofessional conduct
David Garrow	Emory University	accused of battery	suspended from Emory for 6 months

ANDREW SULLIVAN VS. GLENDA GILMORE

Yale history professor GLENDA GILMORE has won the Sontag Award. The award, given by Andrew Sullivan, goes to"statements by public figures uttered in the same spirit as Susan Sontag's post-9/11 preference for the 'courage' of Islamist mass murderers as opposed to the 'cowardice' of NATO air-pilots over the skies in Iraq. Glib moral equivalence in the war on terror and visceral anti-Americanism are qualities most admired by the judges in this category." Sullivan handed out the award after Gilmore posted an essay in the Yale Daily News in which she castigated the president's Iraq policy:

It is not enough for Bush to be President of the United States, he must become the Emperor of the World. This unclothed emperor is, as they say in Texas, all hat and no brains. In the years before us, I fear there will be causes worth dying for. There will be tyrants so unstoppable that we will have to fight them to preserve our own freedom. But that is not the case now. Instead of standing up against tyranny, we are bringing it to our own doorstep. We have met the enemy, and it is us.

Sullivan:"I wonder what Glenda Gilmore thinks when she absorbs the fact that her nativist, isolationist 'Blame-America-First'; ideology now has a new magazine. And it's edited by Pat Buchanan!"

Gilmore:"I am delighted to accept the Sontag Award. I have disagreed with you since you were a boy wonder. In fact, I cancelled my subscription to The New Republic when you hijacked it, and I have watched your downwardly mobile career path with interest. Are you a U.S. citizen yet? Thank you for bringing a small part of my essay to a larger audience."

The exchange between Gilmore and Sullivan attracted wide notice and led to the posting of hundreds of comments on her article at the Yale Daily website. Offended by her reply to Sullivan, Erin O'Connor, an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, created a new award in her honor on his blog, Critical Mass:

Henceforth, Critical Mass will confer the Gilmore Award on statements by public figures uttered in the same spirit as Glenda Gilmore's nasty ad hominem response to legitimate criticism of her ideas. Off-topic personal attacks, ethnic and gender slurs, and metaphoric accusations of terrorism are the qualities most admired by the judges in this category.

The controversy petered out after several weeks, but not before the Yale history department received several hard knocks from graduate students who believe it has been taken over by radicals. One complained:

What you have seen on display here in this article are the consequences of letting race-and-gender airheads infiltrate and then eventually take over a once a stellar department. Can you imagine what it is like for a graduate student like myself, who labored for seven years in a remote part of the world to learn a non-Indo-European language, to find himself under the thumb of parochial know-nothings like Glenda Gilmore? Yale History has unfortunately become the province of such America Studies apparatchiks and their partisan agendas.

ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY?

The question is old, like a fedora found in a dusty attic bin. Surely nobody cares anymore, one might have surmised. But it recently surfaced after we published an article (one of many) by NORMAN MARKOWITZ, associate professor of history at Rutgers University. A reader brought to our attention an old article which singles out Mr. Markowitz as a member of the Communist Party. Did it matter if he is? Perhaps, we thought. As E.H. Carr observed, it is always good to know something about the historian you're reading. While we do not inquire about the political beliefs of our writers, we do make it a policy to reveal their public affiliations when these are of consequence. Thus, we ask everybody writing about gun issues to reveal if they are a member of the NRA or Hand-Gun Control. Perhaps membership in the Communist Party would be considered relevant on some issues.

Mr. Markowitz told us that he is a member of CPUSA and has been for 24 years. Recently, he became a member of the editorial board of Political Affairs, the"theoretical journal" of the CPUSA. Because this is an official position, we will from now on be listing it in his bio on articles in which his affiliation is related to the subject about which he is writing.

THE TOLL THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT IS TAKING

One sign of the tremulous times in which we live is the controversy that has arisen since Daniel Pipes began collecting dossiers on historians in connection with the website Campus Watch. Another surfaced this past spring when historian ROBERT BUZZANCO hosted a show on the Pacifica Network, which has long been identified with left-wing causes. Buzzanco began the show, which followed hard on the heels of another featuring several pro-Ariel Sharon guests, with the following statement:

Welcome to KPFT. This is Bob Buzzanco on 'Open Journal.' That was the Clash singing 'Washington Bullets' which is an appropriate song because today Washington's bullets are helping to kill women and children, doctors and ministers, clergy in Palestine. You're listening to KPFT, the voice of the dispossessed and voiceless. The past hour you may have thought you were listening to Fox as we had on apologists for the terrorist state of Israel. We're reverting to regular Pacifica programming right now.

"And then the firestorm hit!" Buzzanco recalls. People began to complain that he had been rude to the Jewish guests who had preceded him. One of those guests alleged that he had brushed past her and muttered,"You Jews.""Within hours," says Buzzanco, he was vilified on chat rooms associated with Pacifica as an anti-Semite. Buzzanco, upset that the station management did not defend him, resigned as a programmer. As the controversy continued friends like Howard Zinn wrote letters to the station in defense of Buzzanco. Mediators were hired by the station and an investigation launched. Buzzanco claims he is the victim of a Zionist conspiracy. He concludes:"The lesson in Houston is that false charges of anti-Semitism used against radical voices work!"

Battle lines are forming. People are being drawn into passionate arguments about public issues. Charges of anti-Semitism are being leveled every day. That the history profession would find itself caught up in the ugliness was inevitable.