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Review
| Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of American History, by Peter Charles Hoffer. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. 272 pages. $26.00, paper.
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| Past Imperfect may be read as a series of professional misconduct hearings that never actually took place. It is also a lament for the condition of historical scholarship and its diminished stature in America. In this thoughtful book, Hoffer contextualizes four recent cases involving falsified evidence (Michael Bellesiles), plagiarism (Doris Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose), and autobiographical misrepresentations (Joseph Ellis). Past Imperfect ultimately treats them as expressions of an ethical and intellectual crisis for which the entire profession is responsible. The author, who served on the AHA Professional Division from 2002–2004, was motivated to write Past Imperfect after the AHA decided in 2002 to curtail the Division's authority to investigate and adjudicate misconduct. For Hoffer, the timing of this decision was disastrous, indicating the profession's unwillingness to "police itself" and take fraud seriously (p. 139). Historians "fumbled the opportunity" to teach the public a valuable lesson about historical methods and ethics (p. 237). Past Imperfect offers that lesson. |
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The first half of the book is autobiographical, with specific attention paid to standards of research and scholarship as they evolved from one generation to the next. After concise discussions of nineteenth century amateur historians (like George Bancroft and Francis Parkman), their early professional counterparts (like William Dunning and Woodrow Wilson), and the progressives of the early twentieth century (e.g. Charles Beard), Hoffer turns to the rise and decline of cold war "neo-consensus" history. As the demographics and political orientation of the profession changed, consensus history was surpassed by a more inclusive, professionally rigorous "new history" that chastised previous generations of historians for homogenizing and sanitizing the past. New historical scholarship reshaped American history textbooks, university departments, and national organizations such as the AHA and OAH, producing an "apparent triumph"—and a "mischievous appearance"—by the end of the 1980s (p. 93). |
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Although the author has sharp words for New Left and radical historians, this is not a tale of decline from "good," "objective" history to something unworthy of the name. Hoffer agrees that consensus history, with its "glorious and heroic" fables, was a "manipulated and misrepresented" history that worked only for the elites (p. 232). He commends the new historians for improving scholarly standards, but nevertheless takes issue with their fragmentary research agendas, intellectual obscurity, and ideological preoccupations. Whereas the new history regarded the past in all its complexity that it was due, its scholarship recoiled from the public. "[I]n their rush to overturn the falsities and fabrications of consensus history," Hoffer writes, "the new historians had forgotten what made consensus history so successful all those years. General audiences wanted something from history that the profession seemed determined to withhold: proofs that American history could inspire and delight" (p. 91). However, consensus history though driven from the ranks of serious scholarship found new life in the profit-driven world of commercial publishing, where the conventions of professional scholarship were poorly understood by editors and ordinary readers. Would the profession, when faced with clear evidence of misconduct by historians who wrote these books, its standards to "popular" history? Or had the distance between "popular" and "professional" history grown so wide that the same standards no longer seemed to apply to each? |
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Following up on these questions, Past Imperfect proceeds with discussions of the specific cases. All four writers had published with large commercial publishers and earned a wide readership; their transgressions were therefore played out in highly public, albeit misunderstood, ways. Hoffer is thorough and unsparing in his discussion of how each author acquired popular success and then betrayed the cause. He seems most dismayed by Michael Bellesiles, a research scholar whose book Arming America received numerous popular awards before critics cast doubt on his evidence, setting in motion a process that ultimately cost him his job at Emory University. By contrast, Joseph Ellis— who invented details about his own life (including stories about serving in Vietnam, marching in the civil rights movement, and scoring heroic touchdowns in high school) that turned out not to be true—receives the most sympathetic treatment, in part because he did not gain anything material from his falsifications. Not so for Kearns-Goodwin and Ambrose, who poached flagrantly and repeatedly from previously-published works and built reputations as two of the most popular and beloved historians in the nation. Yet at the end of the day, their dismissal as mere popular historians allowed professional historians to dodge their obligations to investigate and punish plagiarism (p. 207). |
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Past Imperfect is fluidly written and passionately argued, and it raises important and provocative arguments about historical writing and scholarly ethics. The length and readability of the book make it especially well suited to an undergraduate methods seminar, particularly if read along with Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacobs, or Eric Foner's Who Owns History. Readers may dispute aspects of Hoffer's argument (or even his final analysis), but an earnest consideration of his argument will make all of us better teachers and scholars. |
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| University of Alaska Southeast |
David H. Noon |
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