Just when historians of the United States were booking flights for their 2005 annual meeting in San Francisco, the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the sponsoring scholarly society, announced that the conference would be moving to San Jose. Anyone familiar with the charms of these two cities will appreciate the sacrifice the OAH was making. The reason for the change was a hotel union dispute in which the OAH sided with labor. In the History News Network's online forum, several historians weighed in on the decision. Not surprisingly, the majority of responses, mainly from social and labor historians, affirmed the OAH. On the other hand, a couple of historians objected to the politicizing of the profession. One of these, Alonzo Hamby, distinguished professor of history at Ohio University, asserted, "[T]he OAH exists to promote the study of history and advance the interests of its members. One of the ways it does this is by holding a well-planned, accessible annual convention with scholarly panels, an exhibition hall, and functioning employment services." Hamby did not indicate that these responsibilities included avoiding cities like San Jose, but he did write that no matter the politics of individual historians, the OAH was acting irresponsibly.

Peter Charles Hoffer's Past Imperfect ends where the OAH's decision began. Reviewing a series of recent scandals among scholars of American history, Hoffer laments a situation in which learned societies like the OAH can take the union's side in a labor dispute but refuse to enforce scholarly standards. Hoffer examines specifically the plagiarism cases of Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, the falsification of documents by Michael Bellesiles, and Joseph Ellis' distortion of his own past. Hoffer had served on the Professional Division of the American Historical Association (AHA), the other major professional historical organization in the United States. The task of this committee was to ensure that historians maintained historical standards, and to evaluate those cases, such as the four cited here, where scholars had apparently violated professional norms. What the AHA's committee did, however, was to turn tail and run. It had to. As Hoffer explains, in 2003 the AHA instructed the committee to stop hearing complaints about cases of professional misconduct.

Hoffer's book, then, is a bit of kiss and tell, revealing how he would have adjudicated the cases of Ambrose, Goodwin, Bellesiles, and Ellis, given the authority to do so. He concludes by noting an irony of the AHA's decision to abandon adjudication of scholarly breaches: in 1995, the organization moved its annual meeting at considerable expense from Cincinnati to Chicago because of city ordinances that discriminated against homosexuals; but in 2003 the AHA lacked the resolve to condemn plagiarism and lying within the profession. If professional historians could collectively decide not to tolerate sexual or racial discrimination, Hoffer concludes, "It is long past time for all of us who teach and write history to take the same kind of stand against professional malfeasance."

This sentence ends the book and gives some indication of the crisis afflicting the historical profession. It is a twofold problem. One part is the growing gap between the experts and the amateurs. Who will control the narrative of America's past: distinguished chairs from Ivy League universities, or the overweight office manager squeezing into a gray uniform to reenact the Battle of Bull Run? Will it be the staff of historical museums, or best-selling authors? The second aspect of the crisis—more or less a consequence of the first—is the public's loss of confidence in professional historians. Here is Hoffer's posing of the predicament: "Economists, political scientists, journalists, and cable television's fast-talking all-purpose pundits have taken the scholars' place as spokespeople for our past and oracles of our future." The reason for such professional usurpation, he suggests, is historians' own "fascination with the arcane and obscure, amounting at times to intellectual narcissism," thereby cutting their "ties to ordinary readers." "Once upon a time," Hoffer writes, "history meant everything to Americans, and historians were revered and trusted. . . . But not today, and perhaps not tomorrow."

Hoffer's culprits, then, are historians themselves. The first section of the book covers the history of historical scholarship. This is arguably the weakest link in Hoffer's argument, since he tries to survey the major American historians, from George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, Charles and Mary Beard, Daniel Boorstin and Richard Hofstader, to Eugene Genovese and Gary Nash, all in eighty pages. But this gloss on the history of the professional is pivotal to Hoffer's description of the contemporary crisis. The fundamental contrast is between the "consensus" historians and the "new" historians.1 For Hoffer, the basic difference is between historians who celebrate America's story of freedom and power ("consensus") and those who point out the nation's flaws because of its record of exclusion and inequality ("new"). Since the 1960s, he contends, the new historians have dominated the profession, and their narrative of the United States has grown increasingly remote from the reading and museum-going public.

Hoffer follows his survey of the profession with a description of four historical controversies from the 1980s and 1990s: George Bush's call in 1989 for a national festival to commemorate Columbus' coming to the new world; the debates over the National History Standards; the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution; and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Each of these cases, Hoffer argues, reveals a vast gulf between the history profession and ordinary Americans. Journalist Christopher Shea accused historians in these episodes of having "tin ears." Hoffer agrees. Academic history has become "remote from everyday life."

This vacuum in the profession has paved the way for popularizers like Ambrose, Bellesiles, Goodwin and Ellis to publish history accessible to readers starved for a good and inspiring story. This is the subject of the second part of Hoffer's book and by far the strongest, because he presents clearly and adjudicates well the major aspects of the scandals that plagued these historians. In the case of Ambrose and Goodwin, sloppy and lazy research, perhaps combined with intentions to mislead about sources, led to plagiarizing both the research and words of other historians. In his popular and award-winning book on gun ownership and use in colonial America, Bellesiles actually fabricated records to support a conclusion that directly challenged the National Rifle Association's reading of the Second Amendment.

Ellis' difficulties stemmed not so much from bad historical methods as from lies about his own past that enabled him to enliven teaching and interviews with claims about firsthand experience in the Vietnam War as well as protests against it. Hoffer's section on Ellis is particularly insightful because he shows convincingly that the kind of historical imagination the Mount Holyoke College historian used on the Founding Fathers was the same kind of reflection that led him to construct a fictional account of his own past. Hoffer's point is not that Ellis made up facts about Washington or Jefferson, for instance, but simply that his scholarship thrived upon those parts of these presidents' lives which lacked a clear historical record and thus invited creativity to fill in the gaps.

These scandals occurred, Hoffer argues, because professional historians by and large have failed to supply the reading public with accessible history. The historians and publishers who have responded to the market for popular history have not consistently followed the rigorous standards of university press publishing, thus fostering the temptation for historians to play with the facts and depart from the rules governing evidence and citation. The result is that in the public's mind history has become "not a critical intellectual act, but a form of entertainment."

Without wanting to diminish justifiable concern for an embattled profession, let alone impugn history's virtues as a scholarly discipline, a reader could suspect that the crisis Hoffer portrays may not be as dire as he says. Did historians ever enjoy such a mystique that the American public—even the college-educated public—was waiting eagerly for the latest book by Perry Miller, say, or Arthur Schlesinger (Jr. or Sr.)? In other words, the decline in professional history's status is likely not so steep because it was never that high. And let us not forget that the real culprits in Hoffer's narrative did receive their just deserts. Bellesiles lost his job at Emory as well as the prizes bestowed on his book. His lies about the past prompted his peers in the profession and at his university to take the stand for which Hoffer calls. Although he continues to write and teach at Mount Holyoke, Ellis was suspended by his college without pay, and lost the department's Ford Foundation-funded chair in history.

Ambrose and Goodwin were not so penalized, and that stems mainly from their work functioning outside the university's hierarchical structures. The academy had no real way of punishing these popularizers. Even so, as bad as plagiarism is, their narratives did not deceive the reading public about the past but about the scholarly methods on which their narratives were based. And the fact that some history books sell well, like those by Ellis, Ambrose and Goodwin, suggests an interest in the past that if cultivated could become healthy.

The other question Hoffer's book invites is whether it is unfortunate that Americans learn more about history from the History Channel than from the speakers' bureau of the OAH. It may be. But the gulf between popular and professional history will not be bridged by learned historical societies' adopting zero tolerance policies for academic felonies. As Gordon Wood observed in a review of Ellis' latest book, "it is not the quality of their prose or their use of theory that prevents most academic historians from becoming popular." Instead, it is "the questions they ask about the past, and the subjects they write about."2

Hoffer unwittingly confirms this point in his own account of professional history from the 19th century to the present. By greatly simplifying the schools of history in ways that professional historians will surely find aggravating, Hoffer does exactly what he accuses other historians of doing—namely, losing some scholarly nuance to attract a popular audience. In fact, his reducing the different historical schools to either celebratory or critical accounts of the United States is a long way from the precision rendered by historians of the profession such as John Higham and Peter Novick.3 The important division in historical scholarship is not between popular (celebratory) and academic (negative) history. As Wood adds, what the reading public does not want is their country to be cast simply "as a villain in other people's stories."4

Unfortunately, Hoffer's rendering of the profession, dividing it between the older historians who relied on "comforting falsehoods" and his own generation which emphasized discomforting truths, is indicative of the impasse in contemporary historical scholarship to which Wood refers. Perhaps the solution is not for professional historical societies to gain more courage in extending their outrage over oppression and injustice to professional malfeasance. The way forward may be for historians to admit that the failings of America are just as complicated and deserve as much nuance as the nation's accomplishments. And to deflate the self-righteousness that afflicts the profession, the leaders of the OAH might reconsider the priorities that led them to move their convention to San Jose.

D. G. Hart, Director of Fellowship Programs at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is the author of several books, including John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (P&R Publishing, forthcoming).

1. Actually, each of these terms, consensus and new, has a more precise meaning among professional historians.

2. Gordon S. Wood, "The Man Who Would Not Be King," The New Republic, Dec. 20, 2004, p. 34.

3. See, for instance, John Higham, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Princeton Univ. Press, 1965); and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).

4. Wood, "The Man Who Would Not Be King," p. 34.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.