Aug. 27, 2007

No one on my committee said that when you reference and cite something correctly that you have to go up and put quotes around it.

I'm not going to recant on something just from the threat of a billionaire Saudi sheik ... I think I'm a damn good historian.

Contrary to what you might expect, the past just got a lot shorter. The Alliance of Historians and Biographers (AHAB) recently voted to make the capitulation of Neville Chamberlain to Adolf Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938 the only bona fide lesson of history. That event, mentioned in newspaper editorials, conservative blogs, and broadcast news commentaries no fewer than 343,267 times since 2003 as a justification for the Iraq war, has now officially been designated the past's only teachable moment.

"There was a lot of grumbling, but we had to do it," said Titus P. Bloomfield, professor emeritus at Flotsam College in Hypoluxo, Fla., and president of AHAB."There simply hasn't been mention of any other historical incident in years."

Of course, there was acrimony at the AHAB convention among some die-hard members, still clinging to the notion that there are other worthwhile lessons that might be applied to our present situation. For the most part these were grumpy, aging disciples of the Toynbee-Spengler"Decline of Rome" school, joined by a smattering of Civil War buffs who still get occasional royalties from reruns of the Ken Burns series.

At the end of the day, however, the Munichins won out. All that dreary, confusing stuff about kingdoms that ruined themselves pursuing fruitless wars, inept rulers corrupted by power, and civilizations that collapsed after losing their moral and political legitimacy have at long last gone out the window.

Distinguishing himself from many other scholars, McPherson has maintained that slavery, not states' rights or economic disparities, was the seed that started the Civil War.