HNN EDITOR'S NOTE: on 12/9/06 We received the following email:

My name is Courtney Lowery and I am the managing editor of New West.Net.

I'm writing to request you remove an article ("Patricia Nelson Limerick: A fictional interview") you posted in its entirety from New West.Net on Dec. 5. (http://hnn.us/roundup/14.html#top)

The post came from a writer who runs his own blog on New West.Net and it has been removed from our pages because it was in violation of our policies -- we do not condone fictional interviews.

I would appreciate this piece being removed from your site in a timely manner or a clarification be included with the piece explaining to your readers that the story is from Mr. Probasco and not sanctioned by New West.Net.

Thanks for your understanding in this matter and please call or write with any questions or concerns.

Best,

Courtney

Courtney Lowery
Managing Editor

New West Network & Magazine*

For those to whom the name is not familiar, Patricia Nelson Limerick, professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the acknowledged leader of a highly influential cadre of historical revisionists known as the “New Western Historians.” Her book, The Legacy of Conquest is necessary reading for anyone with pretensions of knowing anything about modern Western history. Limerick is much praised on the back cover of her book. Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus and former President of Yale, writes that “Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest returns the Western American past to the mainstream of national history” and Richard White, President of the Organization of American Historians writes, “The Legacy of Conquest is going to be the most talked about and influential book in Western history in years.…(She) is one of the most engaging historians writing today.”

You might well ask, “Why not try to get a real interview with Patricia Nelson Limerick, instead of making all this up?” and I would have to answer, “It wouldn’t be nearly as fun.” So let’s get to it.

Probasco: Hello Ms. Limerick. I just finished rereading my 1988 W.W. Norton paperback edition of The Legacy of Conquest and several of your essays and interviews.

Limerick: Hold on to your copy of Legacy. You’re going to need it for a long time.

Probasco: Let’s start with a close reading of the book and the material I printed out.

Limerick: Fire away. And I don’t mean that in the old, clichéd sense. When I say “fire away,” I am only using a phrase and not necessarily giving credence to its violent, provocative implications. Let me just say, “Proceed.”

Probasco: I am turning to the introduction to Legacy and I see here on page eighteen—you say, “Americans are left to stumble over—and sometimes into—those connections, caught off guard by the continued vitality of issues widely believed to be dead.” I think that you are referring to frontier issues, and what I want to ask is, who believes these issues to be dead?

Limerick: Those who follow He Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken. I can’t say his name because I believe his thesis has been given excess respect and I don’t want to compound that. And I’d rather not use the “F” word either.

Probasco: You are talking about Frederick Jackson Turner and his seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” By “F,” you mean “frontier.”

Limerick: We New Western Historians compete to see who can write the longest text without employing the F word. So far the winner is Richard White whose It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own does not once reference the F in all its 644 pages.

Probasco: In Legacy you talk about how Western studies weren’t really taken seriously back when you entered the field. You write, “the subject of slavery was the domain of serious scholars and the occasion for sober national reflection; the subject of conquest was the domain of mass entertainment and the occasion for lighthearted national escapism,” and then you continue, “Children happily played ‘cowboys and Indians’ but stopped short of ‘masters and slaves.’” Well, Ms. Limerick, don’t children still play ‘Yankees and Rebels,’ pretending they are fighting the civil war? Come to think of it, don’t adults play that game? Only they call it ‘reenactments.’ But it’s just play, isn’t it? Isn’t there just as much of an element of escapism there? Aren’t you confusing academic studies and popular culture, in essence implying that southern history is Shelby Foote and Western history is The Great Train Robbery? Weren’t there any serious Western scholars before you came along?

Limerick: No, no, no, no, no and no. When scholars of Western history left the room, real historians would snigger at them and pretend they were shooting six-shooters and arrows at each other.

Probasco: Let’s get back to the frontier. New West Historians seem to have a particular problem with that word, especially the way Turner used it.

Limerick: The F word carries a lot of baggage. It is fraught with emotional and ideological connotations.

Probasco: Unlike “conquest.”

Limerick: Exactly. The F word, shall we say, has been deep-fried in the batter of nationalistic pride. What’s the first thing you think of when you hear it?

Probasco: A region just beyond a settled area.

Limerick: Precisely. A wild borderland. A place of romantic adventure and escape.

An adviser to former President Jimmy Carter and onetime executive director of the Carter Center has publicly parted ways with his former boss, citing concerns with the accuracy and integrity of Mr. Carter’s latest book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.”

The adviser, Kenneth W. Stein, a professor of Middle Eastern history and political science at Emory University, resigned his position as a fellow with the Carter Center on Tuesday, ending a 23-year association with the institution.

In a two-page letter explaining his action, Mr. Stein called the book “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.” Mr. Stein said he had used similar language in a private letter he sent to Mr. Carter, but received no reply.

“In the letter to him, I told him, ‘It’s your prerogative to write anything you want when you want,’ ” Mr. Stein said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “That’s not why I’m resigning.”

Mr. Stein said that he admired the former president’s accomplishments but that felt he had to distance himself from the Carter Center and the book, which was published by Simon & Schuster.

“It’s an issue of how history should be written,” Mr. Stein said. “I had to distance myself from something that was coming close to me professionally.”

Deanna Congelio, spokeswoman for Mr. Carter, released a statement with his response: “Although Professor Kenneth Stein has not been actively involved with the Carter Center for more than 12 years, I regret his resignation from the titular position as a fellow.” It did not address Mr. Stein’s criticism of the book.

That criticism is the latest in a growing chorus of academics who have taken issue with the book, including Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, who called the book “ahistorical,” and David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“I was just very saddened by it,” Mr. Makovsky said. “I just found so many errors.”...

“He feels snubbed he wasn’t given any kind of acknowledgment for the work he’s done with Carter,” said Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Tulane University in New Orleans. “It’s a bit of bruised ego and philosophical difference being displayed in public here.”

Related Links

• Ralph Luker: Presidents and Plagiarism

  Mr. Luker notes: Hat tip to AJC. There's much more here, here, and here.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990, and editor, with William Kristol, of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He is the author of the new book Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century.



FP: Robert Kagan, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Kagan: Thanks. I appreciate your inviting me.

FP: I want to get your thought on the terror war and on the recent report made by the Iraq Study Group. But let's first talk about your new book. What motivated you to write it?

Kagan: I suppose my interest in the history of American foreign policy began when I worked as a speechwriter for George Shultz in the Reagan years. Although many, especially the so-called "realists", dismissed Reagan as some kind of aberration from American foreign policy -- just as they dismiss George W. Bush, my understanding of America's history led me to believe that Reagan was very much part of the true American tradition.

In the early 1990s, after the Cold War ended, an old debate over the proper course of American foreign policy re-emerged after being mostly dormant during the Cold War. Realists and many conservatives, as well as some liberals, claimed that the U.S. should return to its "traditional" approach, which was, if not isolationist, at least more passive, less inclined to "bear any burden," or as Jeane Kirkpatrick put it at the time -- a "normal" nation. I did not believe the United States ever had been, or ever could be, a "normal" nation, given the highly ideological nature of its nationhood. So, in the mid 1990s, I began a decade-long investigation into our early history to try and determine what were our real foreign policy traditions.

FP: Crystallize your main thesis for us as well as the orthodoxy you are revising.

Kagan: The common perception of 18th and 19th century American foreign policy, both for the public at large and also for the intellectual elite and foreign policy establishment, is that it was primarily isolationist. The early American settlers came to the New World to create a City Upon a Hill, separate and aloof from the rest of the world. Washington's Farewell Address, with its warning against "political connexions" with other nations, and the Monroe Doctrine, with its insistence that Europe plant no more colonies in the Western Hemisphere are both seen as reaffirmations of this isolationist "tradition." Most believe, therefore, that America's first and natural posture in the world is one of passivity and introspection. If Americans do venture out into the world, it is only because they have been attacked or faced an imminent threat.

My argument is that, on the contrary, Americans are and always have been an expansionist people. From the time of the Puritans through the end of the 19th century, Americans were aggressive territorial expansionists, willing to use force when necessary to achieve their expansionist goals. From the 18th century to the present day, Americans have been commercial expansionists, seeking markets and resources wherever in the world these could be found. From the early 19th century until the present, Americans have sought to expand their power and their influence, seeking to shape the behavior of other peoples and nations in ever widening arcs.

And from the Revolution until today, Americans have been ideological expansionists, driven by the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence. They have sought to transform the world, or at least as much of the world as they had the power to transform, to conform with American principles, ideals, as well as American interests. Their record is far from unmixed in this effort. But they have had a profound impact on the shape of the international system. And it may surprise many Americans to learn that even the founders, including George Washington, believed that in time the United States would become the most powerful nation in the world.

FP: As you say, Americans’ record is “far from unmixed” in their expansionism, but it is important to stress, is it not, that America, unlike many great powers, has brought freedom and liberty to the many lands that it touched (i.e. Germany, Japan etc.) rather than enslavement -- as in, for instance, the Soviet case. It is important to apply moral clarity to this subject, no? Otherwise a moral equivalency can develop that suggests America was and is expansionist as Saddam, Hitler and Stalin were – a notion which gravely distorts truth and history.

Kagan: It's a good question. Let me answer in two ways. First, my book Dangerous Nation, covers the 18th and 19th centuries in American foreign policy. The moral argument for American foreign policy is not so clear-cut in this period. For one thing, the United States in its first eight decades was both a liberal democracy and a slaveholding nation, which in the South required a quasi-totalitarian control not only of blacks but of whites. A good part of American expansion this period was partly, and sometimes largely, driven by a desire to spread slavery, not democracy. Then, of course, there was the matter of the Indians.

While I do not take a rosy-colored view of the Indians, who committed inhuman atrocities against one another as well as against white settlers, or a uniformly dark view of American policies toward the Indians, the fact remains that American desires for land -- justified by a Lockean liberal sense that land should be "improved" or it was wasted -- led to violent attacks on Indians, and of a ceaseless violations of treaties solemnly entered into by the U.S. government. This is what I mean by the record not being "unmixed."

This is a large part of our history as a nation.

Ironically, the intervention most often cited as a blatant act of "imperialism," the intervention in Cuba and war against Spain in 1898, was almost entirely fought for humanitarian and moral ends. And that began a fairly steady record, though again not an unmixed record, of American "expansion" for moral ends, which certainly included the two world wars and the Cold War. And here there needs to be a distinction made between the methods of expansion and the use of power and influence, on the one hand, and the goals of power and expansion. All great powers use roughly the same implements of power: they intervene and occupy foreign lands, they exert economic influence designed to shape the behavior of others to suit their own interests and principles. Aggressive dictatorships are usually more brutal in their actions than a democracy like the US, although it was the United States that dropped nuclear bombs on innocent Japanese civilians.

The distinction is not in means but in ends. I don't think it's defensible to assert that the US was not as expansionist as other powers in history. The question concerns the purposes of American expansion, which indeed, was not to enslave but to bring liberty and progress. I have always been amused by the endless debate over who started the Cold War, as if that could determine our innocence and guilt, or the justness of our policies. The truth is, both sides started the Cold War. What made our side right was not that the other guy struck first, but that the principles which we struggled for were right and theirs were wrong.

FP: So how do you fit your thesis into the terror war today? America is clearly confronting a totalitarian ideology, Islamism, which, like Nazism and communism, seeks to expand its doctrine of enslaving humans throughout the world. America is a defender of individual freedom and liberty in this case, as it was in the Cold War and Second World War. What is your angle here?

Kagan: Well, once again we have been surprised to find out that others hate us precisely because of the doctrines we aim to spread, and sometimes spread unconsciously.

Obviously, the Islamists have long felt that American power, as well as American culture, Americans' support of progress, liberalism, and modernity have undermined the conservative attempts to turn back the clock in the Islamic world. This was precisely how Metternich, Alexander, and the other conservative monarchies of Europe viewed the United States in the early 19th century. Their fear of America's revolutionary liberal doctrines made them consider the young US a "dangerous nation," hence the title of my book.

Now, when critics of American foreign policy point out that American actions in the Middle East helped spur Osama Bin Laden to action, they usually mean to suggest that the United States should stop acting in ways that offend Islamists. I would argue that:

[a] we should not stop attempting to spread our principles and our influence

and

[b] we could not stop it even if we wanted to, because ideological expansionism is embedded in the American DNA.

What I would suggest is that Americans stop letting themselves be surprised by the reactions they, often unconsciously, provoke in others. American actions with regard to Manchuria in the 1930s did help convince the Japanese to launch an attack of our Pacific Fleet. That does not mean we were wrong and they were justified. Nor, certainly, does it mean that Al Qaeda's actions are in any way justified. What it does mean is that, as we make our way through the world, shaping it both consciously and unconsciously to conform to our principles, we must be prepared for the reaction and prepared to act, preventively at times. We should not kid ourselves that if we only sit back passively, we will not become the target of others' anger and sometimes of their military aggression.

FP: What do you make of the Iraq Study Group’s report? What do you make of how Iraq was handled? What is the best thing, in your mind, for us to do now -- not only in Iraq in particular but in the terror war in general?

Kagan: I think the ISG report is something of a disaster. First, it does not even come close to offering a workable solution in Iraq. Their main recommendation is the rapid training of Iraqis so that they can stand on their own. Perhaps the commission has not noticed that this has been the administration's strategy from the beginning, and that it has failed.

The commission's recommendations that we seek Iran's aid in Iraq is laughable. Even Jim Baker has admitted since the report was issued that there was very little chance that Iran would be interested in a deal. But what's the harm in trying? he asks. The answer is there can be a great deal of harm when we go pandering to our adversaries from a position of weakness, begging for their help.

My fundamental belief remains, as it has for the past three years, that we need a great many more American troops in Iraq to provide the security and stability to permit Iraqis to begin the process of reconciliation. Our failure to provide security has accelerated the cycle of sectarian violence, as Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurds, unable to count on the United States for basic security, have naturally turned to their own sectarian militias for that protection.

I also believe that we need a much larger number of ground forces overall in the Army and the Marines. We have also been short-handed in Afghanistan, and who knows when we will be forced to intervene in some other region where Al Qaeda and like-minded groups set up a base for attack. It is a tragedy that this administration has failed to prepare our defenses adequately to pursue the war on terror. If this is a war, and I believe it will last a long time, then we should take the necessary steps and spend the necessary money to give us the best possible chance of succeeding.

FP: Robert Kagan, it was an honor to have you as a guest on Frontpage Interview.

Kagan: It has been a great pleasure for me. Thank you very much for inviting me.

For some years now a theatrical troupe called the Reduced Shakespeare Company has made its living performing all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in just over an hour and a half. It’s a highbrow joke. In “Civilization,” Roger Osborne speeds through more than 40,000 years of Western history in just under 500 pages, minus bibliography and index. This is definitely not a joke, although it comes close to being a stunt, an intellectual high-wire act that the author pulls off with deceptive ease.

Is anything missing? Apparently not. Socrates rates a long, considered look, but Mr. Osborne finds room for the lesser-known Cleisthenes. All the major rulers line up in good order, right down to Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Battles and wars, scientists and inventors, artists and tycoons, all get their turn in a smoothly rolling narrative that embraces Michelangelo and Fats Domino, Galileo and Dolly the sheep, the steam engine and the McDonald’s hamburger.

“Civilization” is not a recitation of greatest hits, or a checklist of events and dates. Mr. Osborne, with great skill, ties his disparate topics together into a coherent narrative, as absorbing as any novel, with felicitous turns of phrase, and tidy summations, on virtually every page. Theoretically it should be impossible to describe the life, thought and influence of Thomas Aquinas in less than two pages, but Mr. Osborne does it, showing no signs of strain. It would be hard to imagine a more readable general history of the West that covers so much ground so incisively.

But Mr. Osborne has profound doubts about his subject. His title might well have been followed by a question mark. At every point along the familiar trail of artistic achievement, scientific breakthrough and economic transformation, he stops to probe, often painfully, and to ask awkward questions. ...

As he speeds through the history of the past 20 years, Mr. Osborne goes on something of a rant, teeing off against elitist art, abstract philosophy, the injection of moral categories into foreign policy, privatization of public industries and virtually everything else in sight, including and especially Western rationalism, a guiding light for 2,500 years.

“The fundamental western belief that there are rational ways of organizing the world which will bring benefit to all has been at the root of every human-made catastrophe that has overtaken us,” he writes, “yet many of us still believe that we have a bounden duty to bring our simplistic, universalizing, ‘progressive’ systems of government, economics, education, policing, judiciary and morals to every part of every society on the planet.”

Whew. Only at the end of the book does it become clear that Mr. Osborne has been engaged in a very strange project. While painstakingly reconstructing the imposing, intricate edifice of Western civilization, he has planted a series of explosive charges. And then, when the job is done, he lights the fuses and watches as the entire thing collapses into dust.

President Bush on Thursday announced the recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.

Those to be honored at a White House ceremony on Dec. 15 [include] ...

Paul Johnson. The historian and journalist is being honored for writings that have ''captivated and educated people around the world.''...

David McCullough. The noted author and historian is considered a foremost expert on the American presidency.

[Barton A. Myers, Department of History, University of Georgia.]

Review of The Civil War: A Concise Account by a Noted Southern Historian. Abilene: McWhiney Foundation Press, 2005. 142 pp. Maps, index. $12.95 (paper), ISBN 1-893114-49-X.

In just 137 pages of text, esteemed Civil War scholar Grady McWhiney presents his succinct narrative of the nation's most important historical event. McWhiney's final work offers readers a fast-paced yet factually packed history of the coming of the Civil War as well as a brief overview of the military activities of both Union and Confederate armies. McWhiney's long and controversial career as a southern historian will likely be remembered for his provocative interpretations about the origins of southern nationalism, especially his widely debated arguments that white southerners drew their cultural heritage from Scots-Irish-Welsh immigrants and that this Celtic heritage led Confederate troops to be more tactically aggressive during the Civil War. This final work of McWhiney's is synthetic and does not forward any major new cultural interpretations. The book's primary goal is to introduce the Civil War to a new generation of readers, an objective consistent with the goals of the Grady McWhiney Research Foundation that, according to its website, purports"to further education on topics regarding the history of the middle years of the 19th century in American history and topics in military history."[1] In sum, _The Civil War_ is primarily a reflection on the entire era from the perspective of one who has written extensively on numerous topics in southern history and remained throughout his life an advocate for the region.

McWhiney's current work actually pulls back somewhat from his disputed earlier claims about the cultural origins of southern nationalism and Confederate military strategy. In this work, he does not reiterate his Celtic determinism as a rationale for the Army of Northern Virginia's offensive warfare. Here McWhiney blames Jefferson Davis for choosing the aggressive Confederate military policy and shields Robert E. Lee and other prominent commanders from direct blame. The author's narrative is strongest in its analysis of Confederate martial prowess, which he credits with winning many battlefield victories but also with the ultimate demise of the manpower-strapped Confederacy. McWhiney continues to assert here, as he and Perry D. Jamieson did in _Attack and Die_ (1982), that it was this penchant for the offensive that cost Confederates an irreplaceable number of men and officers. In this concise account, McWhiney even goes so far as to argue that since the Union army"had only a three-to-two manpower advantage over the Confederates" southerners could"have remained in their entrenchments and ... destroyed the federal army" (p. 93). In short, the author seems to have digested (if not completely accepted) his critics' rejection of his cultural claims for aggressive southern military policy. Nevertheless, he preserves his strongest assertions about the devastating nature of Confederate military assertiveness; he maintains that"taking the tactical offensive in nearly seventy percent of the major battles" ultimately cost the Confederacy the war (p. 95).

The volume does suffer somewhat from a particularly pro-southern interpretation of several important events during the conflict. McWhiney blames Abraham Lincoln for not seeking more accommodation with the South during the secession crisis and for not supporting the Crittenden Compromise more forcefully. He lets President James Buchanan's administration off far too lightly for letting the South go in peace, an act that some argue bordered on treason, especially in the case of Secretary of War John Floyd, who allowed vast military stores to fall into southern state government control on the eve of the war. Furthermore, McWhiney goes out of his way to emphasize that the war was really about the conflict between states' rights and federal power, even if the most important state right was the right to own human chattel. Many historians will read this analysis as simply _apologia_ for the institution of slavery that brought on the conflict. In one section, the author even questions the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation as a legitimate war power permitted to the executive branch (pp. 112-113). Nevertheless, he is clearly right about the expansion of U.S. federal and executive power during the war; even if he neglects to mention that Confederate federal government went even further in centralizing executive power, as historian Paul Escott has shown.[2] McWhiney is also quick to point out that the U.S. government failed to do enough to protect the rights of black southerners in the post-war era, yet he curiously does not mention that it was from the local and state governments in the redeemed South that they needed protection. Overall, it is McWhiney's tone, emphasis, and factual omissions that some readers will find problematic.

McWhiney's concise account also leaves out some of the less flattering dimensions of the Confederate cause. He mentions the massacre of black troops at Fort Pillow but takes great pains to minimize the event's implications for white Confederates' racial ideology. He plays down the evidence of other racial atrocities during the war entirely, despite excellent scholarly evidence to the contrary (p. 115).[3] Although McWhiney offers a complete discussion of the Confederate debate over using black soldiers, he presents virtually no information on the approximately 180,000 black troops that served in the Union army. Two glaring absences are the lack of any discussion of the internal guerrilla conflicts across the Confederate home front and the absence of even a single paragraph on southern Unionism.[4]

For scholars of the Civil War and the nineteenth-century American South, McWhiney's volume offers very little that is new, but it will impress upon all scholars many of the remaining lines of debate. For new students of the war, the narrative provides a quick introductory overview, albeit with a pro-southern interpretation of secession, states' rights and federal power, and actions taken by the Lincoln administration, especially regarding emancipation. With this in mind, the book still offers careful readers several interesting but often overlooked historical facts, like the statistical data on swine production in the South and the percentage of Confederate generals killed in relation to Union commanders. In sum, McWhiney's book is a fitting capstone work to his unique career as a"noted southern historian," encapsulating many of his strongest arguments and seasoned with his sympathetic southern point of view.

Notes

[1]. Gary W. Shanafelt,"The Grady McWhiney Research Foundation" (August, 14, 2004), www.mcwhiney.org (June 2, 2006).

[2]. Paul D. Escott, _After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism_ (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

[3]. For a good introduction to racial atrocity, see Gregory J. W. Urwin, _Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War_ (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).

[4]. A good reference for southern Unionism is John C. Inscoe and Robert Kenzer, eds. _Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South_ (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2001). For guerrilla warfare, see Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., _Guerrillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front_ (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1999).

Edward Said's"Orientalism" was a cultural bombshell that has become a landmark -- some would say a crater. One of the most popular and influential academic books ever written, it inspires condemnation and praise in equal measure. Published in 1978,"Orientalism" not only was a founding text for the academic fields of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, but also remains one of the most-cited works in what we can broadly call the"oppositional canon." It has been translated into 36 languages, and it continues to be cited, discussed and taught throughout the world.

Said, who died in 2003, was born in Jerusalem, moving to the United States as a young man. A professor of English literature at Columbia University, he was also an outspoken advocate for the Palestinian cause, which made him extremely controversial. He sat on the Palestinian National Council but became an increasingly bitter critic of Yasser Arafat and resigned in 1991. (Said was probably the only person who could claim both that his office had been fire-bombed by right-wing Zionists and that his writings had been banned in the occupied territories by Arafat.) In"Orientalism," Said argued that from the beginning of Western civilization, Europeans have seen the East -- and in particular the Middle East -- as an alien and threatening Other, and have constructed a mythical and self-serving version of it. Said maintained that this version of the Arab world, which flowered in the work of British and French scholars in the late 18th century and continues to be accepted today, provided a justification for the Western imperialist projects that started with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. Far from being objective, Said wrote, the scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries served the interests of power.

This Orientalist discourse, he maintained, is racist, condescending, controlling, dehumanizing, feminizing and"essentialist" -- that is, it asserts that there is a mysterious"essence," invariably religious, that defines the Arab world. That supposed essence, Said argued, is completely mythical and artificial, based not on actual knowledge or experience of the Arabs but purely on the West's imaginary construction. In other words, Orientalism is an enclosed system, impervious to reality and indeed designed to ignore it.

This monolithic assertion of Western villainy is based on a theoretical framework that Said derived from the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The key idea is"discourse," which Foucault defined as a system of thought that defines what can be"known." This system is inextricably linked to power in all its forms -- hence Foucault's famous formulation"power/knowledge." For Foucault and Said, it was a naive illusion to believe that knowledge can exist independent of power. Because Orientalism is a discourse, no one can really escape it: it is a trans-subjective phenomenon. But Said became dissatisfied with Foucault because his theory did not allow a way out. The other thinker to whom Said was indebted, the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, provided the concept of"hegemony," which allows for the possibility of resistance to inviolable discourse.

In"Orientalism," Said ranged far and wide, from famous scholars like Louis Massignon and Sir Hamilton Gibb to literary greats like Flaubert and Nerval to hosts of unknown travelers and writers. He unearthed countless examples of grandiose statements made by Westerners about the mysterious, threatening, promiscuous, God-obsessed, immutable East. These statements were not coincidental or contingent, Said argued, but reflected a universal imperialist discourse that historically governed everything any Westerner could say or think about the Arab world. As Said put it in reference to the 19th century,"It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." To the end of his life, he believed that this view of the Arab world still held sway.

Said's book provoked a furious controversy that still rages today. With America trapped in Iraq, and with the Middle East on the verge of a regional crisis, the debate about"Orientalism" is not a merely academic one. Bush's entire"war on terror," and in particular his bizarre decision to invade Iraq, could be seen as driven by Orientalist beliefs and assumptions. Moreover, ominously and quite predictably,"Orientalist" ideas in Said's sense are beginning to pop up in the national discourse. One of the peculiar ironies of the Iraq war is that its architects used politically correct pieties to justify it. Bush and former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz repeatedly used nameless skeptics,"who say the Arab world isn't ready for democracy," as straw men to give an idealist gloss to their plans for war. Today, disillusioned and angry conservatives are beginning to rebel against these pieties. Rush Limbaugh, as usual, gave crude voice to the inchoate beliefs of millions when he said that we should just"blow the place up." As the Iraq nightmare deepens, these opinions are likely to become louder.

At this fraught historical moment, a new book, Robert Irwin's"Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents," launches the most formidable assault on Said yet. Irwin has impeccable scholarly credentials: He teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has written on Arabic literature and art, and is the Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Irwin's book is a hybrid, both a history of the academic field of Orientalism and an all-out assault on Said's most famous book.

Irwin maintains that Said's thesis is false, the arguments he made for it dishonest, distorted and weak, and his theoretical framework self-contradictory and evasive. He charges that Said engaged in a counterfactual rewriting of history, attacking figures from earlier eras because they did not say or do what Said thought they should have. Said's entire project, in his view, is"a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is difficult to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations."

Irwin takes pains to point out that, politically, he is on Said's side."I have no significant disagreements with what Said has written about Palestine, Israel, Kipling's 'Kim,' or Glenn Gould's piano playing." This strengthens Irwin's position, as some of Said's supporters have argued that much of the opprobrium heaped on"Orientalism" has come from those opposed to Said's outspoken support for the Palestinian cause, thus serving as an example of the very Orientalist bigotry Said attacks. No such charge can be leveled against Irwin.

Irwin's strategy for demolishing"Orientalism" is to focus on the major figures in the field and to show that who they were, what they believed, and what their scholarship and attitudes were toward the Arab world bear no resemblance to Said's version. He devotes only one chapter to a direct critique of Said's book and in the final one considers other critics of Orientalism. The rest of"Dangerous Knowledge" presents the rich and complex history of Orientalist scholarship and the often eccentric men (and they were almost all men) who engaged in it. His goal is to use reality to dissolve the abstract and tendentious cloak of villainy that Said drapes over an entire scholarly field. It's on this empirical battleground, not in the lofty clouds of theory, that Irwin battles Said. He uses the history of Orientalism and the careers of Orientalists as a needle to let the hot air out of Said's 30,000-feet-above-facts balloon. And the result is one of the more spectacular deflatings since the Hindenburg.

Contrary to Said, Irwin reveals, the towering figures of Oriental scholarship tended to be unworldly, solitary figures, who, far from demonizing the Arab world or Islam, were sympathetic to it and were often regarded as suspiciously un-Christian by their contemporaries. Many were opposed to Western imperial designs on the Near East. Like scholars through the ages, they spent most of their time working diligently on often dry-as-dust textual or linguistic problems. They were also often slightly loony. The father of Orientalism, Guillaume de Postel (1510-1581), was, Irwin notes,"quite barmy": The"foremost expert on Arabic and Islam in Europe" also believed that a woman named Johanna was the angelic pope, the new Eve, the mater mundi who possessed X-ray vision that allowed her to"see Satan sitting at the center of the earth." Postel's weird ideas led the Inquisition to investigate him, but the Holy Office, in a kinder, gentler moment, decided that he"was not a heretic, merely insane."...

The University of South Carolina's Dan Carter sends word that our mentor, George B. Tindall of UNC, died early yesterday morning in Chapel Hill at 85. George was a giant in his generation of historians of the post-Civil War South. There were Comer Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin, and George Brown Tindall. Franklin, alone, survives. Before it was fashionable, they understood that Southern history had to be done in both black and white. For all of his accomplishments, George was a remarkably modest man. Bonnie Goodman wanted to include him in HNN's list of History Doyens, but he just never sent her the information for it. I can stop nudging both of them about it now.
Update: Kennesaw State University's David Parker remembers George Tindall at his new Another History Blog. It's not just any other history blog, he says. It is theAnother History Blog.

Two years ago, we had a fine retrospective session about George's work at the SHA convention in Memphis. There, Dan Carter had copies of George's Ten Commandments for all of us. Beyond good advice – ah, Commands – they also give you a sense of his humor. Tindall's Ten Commandments began in a draft prepared by Wisconsin's William B. Hesseltine. Hesseltine, in turn, may have adapted his commandments from an earlier version by the University of Maryland's Horace Samuel Merrill. So, they're part of a tradition. Feel free to improve on Tindall's rendition, if you can:

Clio's Decalogue: The Commandments of the Muse

IThou shalt smite the Philistines hip and thigh with thy first sentence. This is the First Commandment.

In the summer of 2005, Thomas Dionysius Clark, Kentucky's historian laureate for life, himself passed into history, aged 101. And now his memoirs, meticulously prepared, have appeared in a hefty volume, with a particularly helpful foreword and introduction. The former is by Charles P. Roland, emeritus professor of history at the University of Kentucky, and the latter by James C. Klotter, state historian of Kentucky. Both knew Clark quite well, and they manage in very short compass to include brief overviews of the great historian's life, as well as incorporating some of their own personal insights about the man himself.

Roland notes that Clark was possessed of a "wry and pungent sense of humor." I couldn't help but remember a time many years ago when I was on a committee with the historian laureate when names were being suggested for an academic task. About one candidate there seemed to be general agreement until Clark finally spoke.

"He's a fine fellow," he remarked. "He's done some good work. But frankly, sometimes when he goes to the well and comes back, his bucket isn't quite full." Pungent indeed. The committee, needless to say, quickly settled on another individual for that assignment.

That kind of candor -- and sometimes wry humor and hyperbole -- pervades much of this autobiographical narrative. When Clarks moved into a dorm on the Ole Miss campus, it was "as dreary as any academic dwelling on the North American continent." His first impression of Limestone Street in Lexington was that it was a "grim, cluttered" place, "the ugliest one I have ever seen." And when he rode on Louisville's Watterson Expressway, it was "among the most unpleasant stretches of road on this continent."

Clark (1903-2005) led an extraordinary, outsized life. Born in Louisville, Miss., he found strength in long family roots as well as in the land. He labored two years on a dredge boat and pursued an educational trail that took him (after some summer study at the University of Virginia) to graduation from the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in 1928.

He then went to the University of Kentucky, receiving an M.A. degree in 1929. And how did he decide to come to the Bluegrass State to study? "I literally flipped a buffalo nickel," he wrote, "and it came down on Kentucky." He began teaching at UK in 1931, and he received his Ph.D. from Duke in 1932. His tenure at UK would last until 1968....

State of Denial
By Bob Woodward

All Governments Lie!
By Myra MacPherson

Mayflower
By Nathaniel Philbrick

Andrew Carnegie
By David Nasaw

Mellon
By David Cannadine

Jane Goodall
By Dale Peterson

At Canaan’s Edge
By Taylor Branch

Justice for All
By Jim Newton

The Worst Hard Time
By Timothy Egan

The Omnivore’s Dilemma
By Michael Pollan

The Lost
By Daniel Mendelsohn

The Cold War
By John Lewis Gaddis

In 1862, when the Civil War was going badly for the Union, Harriet Beecher Stowe traveled to the White House to meet with President Lincoln, who greeted her with the now-famous words "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," published in 1852 -- and a runaway best seller in its day -- had indeed fueled the growing anger over slavery that led to the war.

In a contrary fashion, the notable non fiction books of 2006 include several that, by detailing the military and political miscues that have marked the conduct of the war in Iraq, have been factors in turning opinion against the war.

Singling out Bob Woodward's "State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III" is not to slight the grim reports from correspondents in the field, such as Thomas Ricks's "Fiasco," or ignore the accounts of events leading up to the war, such as Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."...

Whatever our nostalgic image of the Pilgrims, it does not include war. But Nathaniel Philbrick has included that word in the subtitle of "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War," with what turns out to be good reason.

Philbrick, who has sailed the Mayflower's waters, recounts the familiar myth with style. But, wrote the reviewer, historian Jenny Hale Pulsipher, readers "will find themselves pulled into a much bigger and ultimately more meaningful story" -- the fracturing of the Pilgrim-Indian alliance that led to King Philip's War, and "the continuing legacy of dispossession and racism."

In a strong year for biographies, there is a notable "double bill" -- "Andrew Carnegie" by David Nasaw and "Mellon: An American Life" by David Cannadine.

Together, wrote David M. Shribman, the Globe's reviewer, they " represent the biographical arts at their best: distinguished biographers taking on some of the largest figures of our business, political, and cultural history" -- Carnegie, "the signature industrialist," and Mellon, "the signature banker."

And for Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the city where the two left their philanthropic mark, their " legacy rests more on what they gave away than on what they accumulated."...

Taylor Branch's "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-1968" is the final volume in a magisterial study that places Martin Luther King Jr. in the context of his times.

The Globe's reviewer, Eric Arnesen, professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote that Branch "offers a needed corrective to popular misconceptions of King's life, not merely restoring his powerful moral critique of Vietnam and poverty in America, but also reminding us just how much the now-celebrated King was criticized, dismissed, and harassed in his final years."

An equally towering figure of those times was Earl Warren. In "Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made," journalist Jim Newton makes it clear that the momentous decisions of the Warren Supreme Court -- including Gideon and Miranda in criminal justice, Brown in school desegregation, and Griswold in reproductive rights -- were carefully shaped by Warren.

The 1930s were a time of testing for Americans, as recounted in "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl," by Timothy Egan, the winner of this year's National Book Award for nonfiction.

Reviewing for the Globe, Carol Iaciofano called it "a powerful, deeply researched chronicle."...

War and its aftermath are the subjects of two other noteworthy books -- "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," by Daniel Mendelsohn, and "The Cold War: A New History," by John Lewis Gaddis.

"The Lost" recounts, with emotion-choking detail, New York literary critic Mendelsohn's search to learn how his great-uncle, and his wife and four daughters, met their deaths in Poland during the Holocaust.

The Globe's review noted that "[the] peeling away of the obscurities of time [and] penetrating into the depths" of survivors' memories give it a special place in Holocaust literature.

Reviewing "The Cold War," Michael C. Boyer, associate editor of Foreign Policy magazine, found Yale historian Gaddis's account "the most accessible distillation of that conflict yet written."

And if that brings this year's best back to the still-raging war in Iraq, consider this year's return of that book credited with starting that "great war" whose legacy remains still sore, " The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin." Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins, it would be a notable book in any year.

Roy Rosenzweig, former vice president for research at the AHA, reports that a special session to pay tribute to Larry Levine will be held at the AHA’s Annual Meeting in Atlanta. The session will take place on Friday, January 5th from 4:45 – 5:30 p.m. in the Hilton Atlanta’s Grand Ballroom D. Eric Avila of UCLA will chair the session, which will include tributes and reminiscences from Linda Kerber, Martin Sherwin, Grace Palladino, Mary Kelly, Michael Kazin, Mary Odem, and others. If time permits, comments from the audience will be encouraged.

His colleagues at George Mason University will also hold a memorial service for him on Saturday, December 16, 2007 at GMU’s Arlington Campus. Visit the Center for History and New Media’s website for Levine to find more information on the memorial service, contribute memories, view images and video, and donate funds to help start the Lawrence Levine Prize at the Organization of American Historians.

At the National Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. today Holt, Rinehart and Winston ( http://www.hrw.com/ ) released Holt World History Human Legacy (C)2008, a new program that promotes the study of history through the investigation of primary source documents and the study of historical artifacts. Authors include Susan Ramirez, Penrose Chair of History and Latin American Studies at Texas Christian University, Sam Wineburg, Professor of Education at Stanford University and Peter N. Stearns, Professor of History and Provost at George Mason University.

Holt World History Human Legacy for high school grades emphasizes document-based investigation and teaches students to read like historians, analyzing source documents to create a richer understanding of historical figures and societies. In addition, Holt author Sam Wineburg has developed a new resource, Reading Like a Historian World History Toolkit, with a collection of essays and teaching materials, to teach students how to be history detectives. The Toolkit includes online resources for students to create presentations after they have analyzed the artifacts and documents to develop their own "historical picture."

In the student edition, each chapter begins with a Geography Starting Points map activity to ground students in the location being studied. Throughout the text, students are encouraged to use forensics to solve historical mysteries making history even more relevant. Opportunities to make connections between past and present further reinforce understanding of history and motivate students.

The Interactive Online Edition enhances learning with audio, video, and interactive features. Teacher resources include a variety of reading and writing support, assessment, and technology to enhance the learning experience.

Data in Holt World History Human Legacy is provided by The World Almanac and Book of Facts, the largest-selling reference book of all time and considered the most up-to-date and authoritative source for historical data.

About Holt, Rinehart and Winston

Holt, Rinehart and Winston is a leading publisher of textbooks and educational materials for grades six through 12 and is part of Harcourt Education, a global education provider serving students and teachers in PreK through grade 12, adult learners, and readers of all ages. The Harcourt companies are Harcourt School Publishers; Holt, Rinehart and Winston; Harcourt Achieve (including the Rigby, Steck-Vaughn, and Saxon imprints); Harcourt Assessment; Classroom Connect; Harcourt Trade Publishers; Greenwood-Heinemann; and Harcourt Education International. For further information, please call 800-992-1627 or visit http://www.hrw.com/ or http://www.harcourt.com/ .

Harcourt Education is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc. ( http://www.reedelsevier.com/ ), which is a world-leading publisher and information provider. It is owned equally by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The parent companies are listed on the London, Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchanges, under the following ticker symbols: London: REL; Amsterdam: REN; New York: RUK and ENL.