| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice. By Allan Megill. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xvi, 288 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-226-51829-9. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-226-51830-5.)
This is a rewarding book. In ten essays, Allan Megill explores some of the most pressing challenges and worrisome pitfalls in modern historical practice. The focus is on epistemology and the ways historians have fallen victim to theoretical, logical, and methodological errors that have become commonplace in modern historical writing. Megill asks of his contemporaries—"how can we best avoid historiographic error?" (p. ix). It is an important question and one that deserves to be taken very seriously by those who care about and seek to master the discipline.	1
A tendency to play fast and loose with evidence, to substitute speculation for empirically based analysis and to jettison historical reality for historical wish fulfillment is abroad in the land, Megill warns. His study is designed to problematize these trends by reiterating disciplinary fundamentals. Those fundamentals may be lost, Megill suggests, on a younger generation that may have encountered standard rules of historical argumentation and practice only while studying scholars such as Michel Foucault who have repudiated many of them.	. . .

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