Posted on 06/07/2004 7:08:42 AM PDT by SJackson
Are our great universities abandoning the study of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers? It looks like they are. Two of the leaders in colonial- and revolutionary-era scholarship, Bernard Bailyn at Harvard and Gordon Wood at Brown, are being replaced by historians with no apparent interest in the Revolution and the founding. The same happened some years ago at Yale when Edmund Morgan retired.
Bailyn, Wood, and Morgan are members of a generation of American historians who have produced a luminous body of scholarship on colonial America, the Revolution, the founding, and the early republic. They have not written hagiographies of the Founding Fathers, but they have expressed an appreciation that these were extraordinarily gifted men the likes of which are seldom seen in public life. And they have not confined themselves to political and intellectual history. Bailyn has written of immigrants to the colonies and the New England merchants; Wood has shown how the mores of Americans became more democratic as a result of the Revolution; Morgan has written about the Puritan family and American slavery. Their books are beautifully written and accessible to general readers, and some have had large sales in the marketplace. You will find many on the shelves of your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.
Yet Yale, Harvard, and Brown have not found or have not chosen historians to carry on in their tradition.
Why not? As Wood said of the current generation of history professors in an interview with U.S. News, "They're interested in colonial America. Whether they're interested in the founding is another question. They are more interested in women and slaves. They're concerned with questions of oppression."
True, there still are fine historians working on colonial history. Jon Butler of Yale, who has written on religion in colonial and republican America, points to several: David Hackett Fischer of Brandeis (Washington's Crossing), Fred Anderson of the University of Colorado (Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War), Mary Beth Norton of Cornell (Liberty's Daughters), Elizabeth Fenn of Duke (Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82). These all sound like important topics, but only Fischer's work is on the founders. And one wonders what kind of historians will replace them when they retire.
Probably not scholars interested in the Revolution and founding. In an E-mail to U.S. News, Lance Banning of the University of Kentucky, who has written widely on Jefferson, Madison, and the founding, said, "I don't know if I'd say that universities are deliberately discouraging the history of the Founding, but some individual historians certainly would; and there is certainly a sort of systemic problem. Academics, of course, are hired, for practical purposes, by majority vote of existing departments. Academics in general are as captivated by fads and fashions as any group I can think of, and the political, intellectual, diplomatic and miltary history of the Revolution and the Founding are decidedly out of fashion at the moment. Many history departments have little interest in hiring anyone who specializes in these sorts of interests, and a good many teachers of graduate students may well discourage such interests because they do not seem as attractive to hiring departments as studies in race, gender, identity and the like."
Robert David Johnson, in the forthcoming Journal of the Historical Society, paper, provides evidence in support of this proposition. "Among public university departments with more than 10 Americanists, only three (Ohio State, Virginia and Alabama) contain a majority of U.S. history faculty with research interests in American politics, foreign policy, legal institutions, or the military." About 20 percent of the American historians on these faculties specialize in political, diplomatic, or constitutional history; and some of those approach the field from the "race/gender/class framework."
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
...for history.
Say it ain't so - Liberals refuse to recognize who made this country great? I'm shocked, shocked I tell ya.
The America founded in 1776 is as dead as a doornail, wiped out in a revolution in the 1960s. You should no more expect the torchbearers of the new revolution to teach American history than you would expect the Soviets to teach respect for the Czars and the Orthodox Church. The chief problem with the Founding Fathers is that they were embarrassingly white and made no bones about the U.S. upholding Western Civilization. They weren't politically correct and multicultural. There is a fear that teaching the American Revolutiion (I) might encourage some students, especially the white males, to come back to their father's house, and question why it had to be replaced by something that is, beyond doubt, malevolent towards them.
The only history they were interested in teaching when I was at SMU was 1/ The US is evil. 2/ History did not begin until slavery was ended and women could vote 3/ Everything else is and was irrelevant.
There is indeed a such thing as a "liberal" education. It's called revisionism. They learned their propaganda techniques straight from Hitler, i.e. repeated omission and revision until sheeple believe.
Wiped out starting in 1913 when the income tax and IRS were created. It's been downhill ever since. BASTARDS !!!
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