Steve Benen rolls his eyes at the spectacle of "conservatives" rewriting Texas school books for their own take on history. There's a lot of merit in what he says, but he elides at least two important difficulties.
One, our understanding of history really does change. Alger Hiss was probably guilty; Sam Sheppard was very likely innocent. Calvin Coolidge appears now to have been a better president than I used to think him to be. And Ulysses S. Grant--I'm open to the idea that his reputation has been unfairly blackened by racists hostile to his support for reconstruction. No, I don't think Franklin D. Roosevelt caused the Great Depression--but I do think the question of what did cause the Great Depression remains open and thus a legitimate focus of inquiry.
Two: there is another culprit, or at least co-conspirator here. That would be the profession of scholarship itself. Face it, you're not going to get tenure (except maybe at Slippery Rock) by saying "yes, I think so too." When I was a baby professor, the late great Arther A. Leff gave me some sage advice. The way to get ahead, said Arthur, is to find some Received Idea that everybody takes as Gospel and undertake to show that it is wrong. And you don't have to be right yourself, Leff argued (this may be the important part); you just have to be right enough that others feel they have to refute you. Call me what you want, just so long as you call me for dinner.
I probably never took Leff's advice seriously enough: instead I wrote a lot of boring stuff. On the other hand, these days it seems like everybody is following Leff's advice; so much so that it may be that endorsing the conventional wisdom will soon come to be recognized as the new form of dissent. "Whirl is king/Zeus being dead." And note that when I Google this last phrase, the first reference I come to is myself.
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