RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events bad history

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/07/lies-the-debunkers-told-me-how-bad-history-books-win-us-over/260251/

Earlier this month, George Mason University's History News Network asked readers to vote for the least credible history book in print. The top pick was David Barton's right-wing reimagining of our third president, Jefferson's Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. But just nine votes behind was the late Howard Zinn's left-wing epic, A People's History of the United States. Bad history, it turns out, transcends political divides.

If these books seem an unlikely pair, they also have a good deal in common. Both flatter their readers by promising to let them in on hidden truths of which most people, and most experts, are unaware. Both offer stark, simplistic accounts (buttressed, in Barton's case, by a litany of historical errors). And both undermine the notion that the past can be rationally interrogated, debated, and revised by people from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum.

The History News Network no doubt intended to amuse as much as edify: it made no pretensions to random sampling and didn't specify what "credible" history might involve. But there's a graver implication: If a poll were conducted to identify the most influential popular historians of the past three decades, Barton and Zinn might also rank at the top. Both have attracted large and powerful followings. Barton's Christian nation narratives are revered by the likes of Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, and Michelle Bachmann, while Zinn's unforgiving indictments of capitalism and American nationalism made him a patron saint among many progressives and won him the admiration of celebrities such as Matt Damon and Bruce Springsteen.

Barton's and Zinn's works have also made a discernible impression on secondary education. Barton served as an expert consultant for the Texas State Board of Education's recent revamp of its influential state social studies curriculum, while A People's History (which first appeared more than three decades ago) is aggressively marketed by an education project that bears Zinn's name and has been taught in countless middle school and high school classes.

It's not just that Barton and Zinn have large constituencies. They also inspire a degree of passion that verges on the pugnacious. In early 2011, Mike Huckabee quipped that the country's schoolchildren should be forced "at gunpoint ... to listen to every David Barton message." (Elaborating on his pedagogical vision, Huckabee suggested that students be exposed to Barton's teaching through a "simultaneous telecast.") Zinn received his own bellicose endorsement from Matt Damon's character in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. "If you wanna read a real history book," Damon instructed his therapist, "read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. That book'll [expletive] knock you on your [expletive]."

What exactly is it about Barton's and Zinn's versions of history that inspire such uncompromising, take-no-prisoners fervor? And how do they manage to wield so much influence, given the widespread skepticism about their accuracy?

Partisanship is the first answer that comes to mind. Barton and Zinn have served as eloquent and vocal supporters of right- and left-wing causes respectively, and both have reworked the past for transparently political purposes. Each has offered conclusions that resonate with his audiences' beliefs. Whatever the validity of their claims, in other words, many readers apparently think they should be true. (It's also likely that partisanship accounts for some proportion of votes against Barton and Zinn's credibility.)

But that's only part of the explanation. There's a more insidious mechanism that helps explain both the passionate support these authors inspire and the well-founded suspicion that they are fudging the record. In short, Barton and Zinn have each crafted a sort of Da Vinci Code history. Nearly everyone knows the basic plotline of that bestselling Dan Brown novel, which leads readers via a highly dubious series of clues to the previously undisclosed origin of Christianity while unraveling the malicious web of deception that concealed it for centuries.

Adapting this gripping storytelling approach, Barton and Zinn offer audiences the illusion that they have been hoodwinked by undisclosed authorities -- Ivy League academics, textbook authors, the New York Times, eighth-grade social studies teachers, parents. They give readers the intellectual self-assurance that accompanies expertise without the slog of unglamorous study required to attain it.

The message is that you, dear reader, know something that the vast majority of unenlightened chumps do not. For devotees of Barton and Zinn, it's as though a switch has been flicked and everything in a darkened room illuminated. (Barton compares his labors to those of a soldier who discovers an IED and then alerts others.)

Now, Barton and Zinn aren't conspiracy theorists exactly, but they press the same psychological buttons. Barton's hyper-patriotic Christian founding narrative and Zinn's unmasking of elite white male criminality offer the dual satisfaction of solving a mystery and showing up a teacher. This double-win is so sweet that readers might not wish to entertain any non-complying facts, and so easy that wrestling with more complicated accounts will seem pure drudgery. Read Barton and you see vividly how pointy-headed secularists stole our Christian heritage from us. Read Zinn and you understand how capitalism has robbed us of justice itself. Scales fall from your eyes.

The trick works partly because of how little credit Barton and Zinn give their fellow historians, even those who have some affinity with their own conclusions. To acknowledge their full debts to other scholars (and how selectively they've drawn from them) would complicate their black-and-white narratives, diminish their implicit claims to originality, and undercut their self-aggrandizing roles as historical redeemers. Barton's strategy is to trumpet his allegedly unique, unmediated study of historical documents; Zinn's was to apply a subversive and allegedly populist lens to every significant episode in American history. The effect, however, is largely the same.

All of this is worth remedying because a well-functioning democracy requires at least a minimal threshold of public trust and a modest baseline of historical agreement. When we repeatedly fall prey to partisan debunking, and when the validity of basic facts -- and even the method of defining them -- is subject to constant ideological chicanery, there's very little room for substantive debate and conversation.

Of course, democracies need skepticism too, and lots of it. But, in general, they should avoid reserving their biggest, most prominent platforms to those who dress up half-boiled theories as raw, unexamined truths. Barton and Zinn haven't just revised earlier scholarship; they have snuck up from behind and bludgeoned it. In the process, they have undermined the trust and sense of common purpose that is essential to understanding our past -- and to democratic life itself.

David Barton's right-wing reimagining of our third president, Jefferson's Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson

History News Network asked readers to vote for the least credible history book in print.

Well, Iggy, since the history professors and high school teachers are overwhelmingly liberal, it makes perfect sense that they would character assassinate David Barton, since his writings are in oppossition to their de-Christianized revisionist narrative of American history.

I didn't see any examples beyond insulting Barton and alleging without examples in the piece, Barton's "right-wing revisionism" and "litany of historical errors." I saw no examples given.

As I said, Howard Zinn I've read, and can attest firsthand, based on slogging through his 800 pages of America-hating liberal-revisionist history.
I haven't similarly read a volume yet of Barton's. But Zinn is a "distant second" to Barton, in their reader-surveyed scorn. And that makes perfect sense to me, based on the known biases these days of history teachers and professors.

The funny thing is: I agree with you both. I can recognize that Barton's work is seriously-if not fatally-flawed. However, I would not be surprised if Barton got criticized for things that Zinn might've gotten away with, simply because of politics.

Those in poli-sci, sociology, anthropology, and just about any "field" with studies at the end of it are notorious for pushing agenda driven, bad history...even amongst historians!

even as someone with two fairly useless degrees, I can tell you that while you should certainly allow someone with 'studies' at the end of their major to finish their sentence just on general principle, you will never get that few seconds of your life back and can safely disregard whatever they said. especially gender studies. most retardedly pointless field out there.

Nashville-based Thomas Nelson Publishers has canceled a controversial best-seller by David Barton, an influential evangelical leader, because the book contains historical errors.

Barton’s book, “The Jefferson Lies,” claims to expose liberal myths about Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s third president.

But a group of conservative scholars says Barton’s take on Jefferson is factually untrue. And a group of ministers from Cincinnati called on Nelson to cancel the book.

Casey Francis Harrell, director of corporate communications for Thomas Nelson, said the publisher had gotten several complaints about the book and found enough errors to cancel it.

“Because of these deficiencies, we decided that it was in the best interest of our readers to cease its publication and distribution,” Harrell said.

Barton stands by his book and said Nelson never mentioned any concerns about the book, which was published in April and made the New York Times best-seller list.

“All I got was an email saying it was canceled,” he said. “It was a complete surprise.”

The book is still available for sale at Amazon. com and other retailers. But Harrell said the publisher has stopped any new shipments and is recalling the book from retailers. Online retailers have been asked to stop selling the e-book version.
'Extremely rare'

Harrell said that to her knowledge Thomas Nelson has never before canceled publication of a New York Times best-seller.

“We carefully edit every book we publish, and we rely on the expertise of our authors concerning their subjects,” she said. “It is extremely rare that the company would have to withdraw a book from the market based on concerns about its content.”

The publisher hasn’t decided what to do with the recalled books.

Barton is president of WallBuilders, an Aledo, Texas-based conservative group that says it wants to reclaim America’s forgotten Christian history.

An early press release for the book, put out by Thomas Nelson in May, portrayed Barton as battling revisionist history to tell Jefferson’s true story.

“History books routinely teach that Jefferson was an anti-Christian secularist, rewriting the Bible to his liking, fathering a child with one of his slaves, and little more than another racist, bigoted colonist — but none of those claims are actually true,” the press release claimed.

Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor at Grove City College in Grove City, Pa., said it’s Barton who actually twisted the facts.

Throckmorton is co-author of “Getting Jefferson Right,” a book that criticizes Barton. It was released as an e-book in May and then later in paperback.

Throckmorton said he’d been concerned about Barton’s version of American history for several years. He and his co-author looked at Barton’s sources, “and we found they didn’t support what he wrote,” he said.

For example, Barton claims Jefferson was an investor in an early American printing of the Bible, when Throckmorton says Jefferson only bought one copy.

Barton wrote that Virginia laws banned Jefferson from freeing the more than 200 slaves he owned.

“That’s not true,” Throckmorton said. “Jefferson freed two slaves, one in 1794 and one in 1796. So you can’t say he didn’t free slaves, because he did free two slaves.”

Barton said Throckmorton is wrong. He said he has documents to back up all the claims in his book.

For example, he said the laws in Jefferson’s time fined owners who freed slaves, and Jefferson would have freed his slaves if he could have. He said Throckmorton doesn’t understand how complex the laws about freeing slaves were.
Slavery claim sparks protest

The claim about slavery caused a group of ministers from several Cincinnati churches to call for Thomas Nelson to drop the book.

“‘The Jefferson Lies’ glosses over Jefferson’s real record on slaveholding, and minimizes Jefferson’s racist views,” said the Rev. Damon Lynch of New Jerusalem Baptist Church, an African-American congregation in Cincinnati.

Lynch said he and other ministers from diverse backgrounds had contacted Nelson about their concerns. He said that if the book hadn’t been canceled, he would have boycotted Nelson.

“We love Thomas Nelson,” he said. “My library is filled with Thomas Nelson books, and I didn’t want to stop doing business with them.”

Throckmorton is not Barton’s only conservative critic.

World Magazine, run by former George W. Bush adviser Marvin Olasky, recently published an online news story about conservative historians who also think Barton made errors.

One was Glenn Moots, professor of political science at Northwood University in Michigan. He said Barton was well-intentioned but should have been more careful to get the details right.

“It doesn’t help any of us if the story isn’t told in an accurate manner,” he said.

Barton said he met with a different group of scholars recently and they approved of his work.

“I can’t tell you how many Ph.D.s were in the room,” he said. He would not give names, saying the scholars hadn’t given permission for him to do so.

He also said other publishers had made offers on his book and he hopes to sign a new contract soon.

The book’s cancellation disappointed Barton’s local fans. He was in Nashville in March to speak to about 250 people at a meeting of the 912 Project.

Janice Johnson said she’s heard Barton speak several times and bought an audio copy of “The Jefferson Lies.” She hopes the controversy won’t undermine his credibility.

“He’s usually so rock solid on history,” she said.

Or, at least, I think that's WWWS (What Would Wondy Say?).

More "liberal smears" of David Barton:

http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs/dr-warren...vid-barton.html

http://www.worldmag.com/articles/19882

And, of course, Mercury Ink picked this up because it is owned by Beck and Beck is like a modern day prophet who stands as defender of Christianity against the evil forces of liberal, communist elites.