Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Related reading

Just read an interesting post on Salon ("History is bunk after all") about Margaret MacMillan's "Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History," which is quite relevant to our discussions on Horwitz. An excerpt:

"Dangerous Games" calls for "professional historians" (by which I think MacMillan means "academics") to "contest the one-sided, even false, histories that are out there in the public domain. If we do not, we allow our leaders and opinion makers to use history to bolster false claims and justify bad and foolish policies." In recent years, she complains, academic historians have become either unduly "self-referential" or preoccupied with "fun" but ultimately insignificant fluff like culture studies.

The whole post is here.