Thomas E. Woods, the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, explains his relationship to the League of the South at LewRockwell.com. With a doctorate from Columbia and teaching at New York's Suffolk County Community College, Woods is a paleo-conservative. It isn't surprising that the discussion of his relation to the League of the South mentions Eugene Genovese and Clyde Wilson. At Histori-Blogography, Michael Benson takes a not-very-admiring look at Woods' productivity.

Several historians, more sympathetic to neo-conservatism, such as Marc at Spinning Clio and Tom at Big Tent give Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States a more sympathetic look. Personally, I've been prepared to write it off, along with Howard Zinn's A People's History. At Rhine River, my colleague, Nathanael Robinson, says:"get politics out of my history -- if you are doing history to support your political position, I'll bet you are doing bad history."

Nathanael's position cuts both to the Left and to the Right, of course; and I imagine that he intends that it should. I suspect that some of us still have ambiguous feelings about how best to handle the problem of historians' political predispositions and their work. Isn't it illusory, even deceptive, to act as if we have none and pretend that we are telling a story objectively? Is it better to forewarn readers and students of the predispositions and then proceed according to them? Do we suspend our values in the act of writing and teaching history or are those the very moments when they must be called into play?