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This article deals with Harvard historian Jill Lepore's book on the Tea Party (I didn't want to mix this up with the other Tea Party thread going on now). In her book, Lepore criticizes the Tea Party for what she calls its “antihistory”, or conjuring up a sense of history regarding early America which is not true.I find her premise for writing such a book rather curious, because, after all, why would a historian want to profile a modern political movement in the first place? But issues such as that aside, the article provides some interesting pieces of information regarding historians in modern times, including David McCullough (who is called a "pop historian").The party of antihistory
And her agenda is ……?To listen to the left, our slave owning, property owning, Indian fighting, northern slave trading male founding fathers got us off on the wrong foot. ;D
Most college History professors are liberal, and they just have to churn out polemics like this because they utterly detest any social movement that is ideologically conservative and grass roots driven since they are elitists by nature.
Just another elitist who doesn't understand the Tea Party movement (maybe because it's too simple or makes too much common sense for them to grasp).It's too bad too. I read a book she wrote about King Philip's War and it was well done and balanced.She should just stick to writing about history and stay out of politics. But I am curious enough to want to read this book.
What I'm interested in knowing is how often this sort of thing happens. The article says:
Academic historians rarely mix it up with modern political movements. They even more rarely do so by walking into Boston bars, notebook in hand, and interviewing local Tea Partiers. But that?s what Lepore did ? first for a long story in The New Yorker, where she is also a staff writer, and now in ?The Whites of Their Eyes.?
I'm confused about the "academic" basis for her book. She can claim that she's doing it in order to compare the history as recited by Tea Partiers with history as it actually happened, but then the question would become: why did she pick the Tea Partiers to do this with? Certainly, there are many groups, movements, and politicians out there today that rely on suspect history in order to accomplish their ends. The Tea Party would hardly be the one and only group to do this.In the end, a problem that I would probably have with Lepore's book is that is sounds like a historian is trying to write what is really a sociology or political book. Yet her title as "historian" does not give her expertise in these areas.
How to lose friends or receive lower grades in academica:Ask any professor this question demanded by the powers at the University of London in the 1950s to M.A. and doctoral candidates--what is it in your thesis that adds to the knowledge of mankind?
That question is very powerful and should deflate most of the hot-air ballons that pass for academic works today.
How to lose friends or receive lower grades in academica:Ask any professor this question demanded by the powers at the University of London in the 1950s to M.A. and doctoral candidates--what is it in your thesis that adds to the knowledge of mankind?
That is one of the questions my school asks when you submit a thesis.As to Lepore, despite her history CV, she proves that an academic can write politics masqerading as scholarship just as much as the Tea Party supposedly lets their politics influence their historical belief. I dont doubt that there are plenty of misuses of or misinterpretations of history in Tea Party material. But a liberal should be careful of what stones she throws. If nothing else, her arrogance and contempt for the Tea Party are quite blatant in the few quotes found in the article. I would say that she is just as apt to political bias in history as the Tea Party she is trying to demean.
