I've been having a debate this morning via e-mail with Richard Jensen, a well known historian who manages Conservativenet, a private listserv, about the nomination of Allen Weinstein to be Archivist of the United States.

Here are the reports about Weinstein's nomination by the Associated Press, Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber only), New York Times, and Washington Post. The charges against Weinstein are outlined in this editorial in The Nation. You can expect a fairly big dustup over this nomination -- at least a big one so far as dustups go among historians. There'll be petitions and arguments -- that's for sure.

Suspicions have been aroused about Weinstein's work as a result of his conclusions that Alger Hiss was guilty of spying for the Soviet Union, Weinstein's use of paid access to Soviet archives for a subsequent book, and his unwillingness to make his notes available to other researchers. Suspicions about the administration's motives focus in its apparent determination to prevent access to records of the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations. My own sense of things is that Weinstein is correct about Alger Hiss, but Weinstein's refusal to make his notes available to other researchers should ring the alarm bells.

Historians normally point to the evidence for their conclusions in reference notes. Ordinarily, there is little controversy about them. When questions arise, a responsible historian will disclose his or her sources. That is our equivalent of the scientists' insistence that experiments must be replicable. Weinstein's publisher paid for his access to the Soviet archives. Other historians are barred from access to the Soviet archives. Weinstein arouses suspicion by his refusal to make his notes on documents in the Soviet archives available to other researchers. If we've learned nothing else from the Bellesiles controversy, surely we have learned that a historian must be willing to fully disclose, to be fully transparent about, the bases on which he reached his conclusions.