The Magazine

Cheating History

Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin-the historians who let us down.

Nov 29, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 11 • By DAVID SKINNER
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Past Imperfect

Facts, Fictions, Fraud--American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin

by Peter Charles Hoffer

PublicAffairs, 287 pp., $26

PETER CHARLES HOFFER begins his book about the crisis in the history profession with the four most famous words in all of fiction: "Once upon a time." But instead of princes and witches, the reader gets an ironic story about the magical time when "history meant everything to Americans, and historians were revered and trusted. For everyone knew that history's lessons were immutable and inescapable."

Hoffer's point is this: Even before the postmodernists came along and cast all of history into the darkness of relativism, the facts still weren't all they were cracked up to be. The old historians, back in the nineteenth century and even in the early twentieth century, Hoffer shows, didn't treat primary sources with great care. Better raconteurs than curators, such major American scholars of the nineteenth century as Francis Parkman and George Bancroft made big, satisfying stories from history's incomplete and not-always-ennobling record.

They made America look good, Hoffer argues in Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud--American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin, but at the expense of (you guessed it) women and minorities. These poor folks were excluded from the heroic story of our country. Up until the 1950s, historians emphasized progress and national unity, while bypassing events and institutions that would, if looked at fairly, call into question the American people's equal take of the freedoms that set our great nation apart.

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