Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower
Product Description
The revealing and much-discussed look behind the scenes of recent headline-grabbing controversies in the history profession.
Widely reviewed and discussed upon its hardcover publication, Historians in Trouble is investigative journalist and historian Jon Wiener’s “incisive and entertaining” (New Statesman, UK) account of several of the most notorious history scandals of the last few years.
Focusing on a dozen key controversies ranging across the… More >>
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It seems, according to Wiener, that the most famous historians of all, Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, were actually the worst offenders. Goodwin, a former associate of Lyndon Johnson, used passages from another woman’s book, a woman who had made a specialty of the life of Kathleen Kennedy (JFK’s sister who died young and beautiful). When she has nabbed (by the other woman), instead of coinfessing all she made a secret pact with the author, telling her, keep this quiet and I will give you lots of money, and do whatever else you like. The cover-up was worse than the original offense! As far as Ambrose goes, well, poor guy was probably sick when he began his career of mass plagiarizing, but Wiener suggests that the sheer number of books he signed contracts to write left him with little time to do the research himself, so he just began copying books like crazy and ladling on whatever pages he needed, thinking no one would notice. However, FORBES magazine had his number and called him on it, whereupon he said he would write no more books. Death took him away from us, he who did so much for the “Greatest Generation.” I hope his “D-Day Museum” in New Orleans is okay. It stood as a tribute to Ambrose’s genius and, to a lesser degree, as a reminder that if you’re famous enough, you can get away with things for which a lesser historian would have had his ass handed to him.
You can see that happening again and again in Wiener’s book. I like the book quite a bit, but I did notice that when a right-wing historian makes a mistake, and pays for it with his career and/or obloquy from the press, Wiener finds this right and just, but when it happens to someone like Michael Bellesiles, author of ARMING AMERICA, or to Mike Davis, author of ECOLOGY OF FEAR, he calls it a witch hunt pure and simple. I say, you can’t have it both ways. And please, whatever Dino Cinel did or didn’t do, how do his sexual offenses measure up to the sorts of trickery the other historians profiled in the book pull? If Cinel, the professor at CUNY who had been a priest and got booted out because he made sex tapes of himself with young men (some who looked underage, though none of this was ever proven) has committed some intellectual fraud that would be one thing, but the way Wiener cuts him up one side and down the other, not even trying to interview him as though he were such scum it would contaminate you to talk with him, well, to me it just rings of professional homophobia. After all, the only other sexual references in the book are to the sexual harassment charges brought against Elizabeth Fox-Genovese by another woman. And Wiener despises Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, I wonder why.
Happily, the book reaches a higher plateau when Wiener begins to speculate-after reviewing case after case of horrifying greed and stupidity-that perhaps something in the discipline of history itself encourages fraud-or that perhaps historians as a breed have something wrong with their moral fiber. I don’t know, could be!
Rating: 3 / 5
Disclaimer: Jon is a colleague of mine at The Nation magazine. The book is a great read, period. Jon has taken a collection of potentially stultifying subjects (mudfights among academics) and turned into a crackling, amusing and ultimately readable piece of first rate journalism. The disparate treatment handed out to different cheating or flawed historians will raise your eyebrows.. and your blood pressure. I particularly liked his account of the scandal around Doris Kearns Goodwin and the way she bought and spun her way back to legitmacy. In all, genuinely fine book on the juicy subject of academic corruption and fecklessness.
Rating: 5 / 5
Weiner’s book is not so much a survey of fraud among historians so much as it is a tu quoque defense of Michael Bellisle and others who share Weiner’s particular predjudices. Yes, Doris Kearns Goodwin plagerized, as did Stephen Ambrose, and both should be (and were) condemned for that. But somehow Weiner turnes this into an argument that Bellisles, who fabricated evidence and lied in support of a false hypothesis, was unjustly pilloried. Somehow, I don’t see the connection.
Rating: 1 / 5
Professor Wiener provides a one-sided view of events which he has not sufficiently researched. Claiming to have received ground-breaking information from an anonymous source, Wiener rescues Bellisles from the right-wing conspiracy which cost him his job. Nevermind all of Bellisles’s fantastic lies; forget his blatant dissmebling and the mountain of evidence that he is guilty of fraud, not just sloppy research: Jon Wiener has uncovered a right-wing plot (since when does the left defend plagiarism in the academy?). If he digs a bit deeper, perhaps he can link it back to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. He’d obviously love to, because his chapter on her appears to be more of a personal attack rather than an indictment of her professional capabilities. All said and done, Wiener’s book is a tabloid-piece on historians he doesn’t like. His claims are often poorly grounded, sloppily researched (no wonder he defends Bellisles), and at best the ravings of a conspiracy theorist. He’s probably cursing Charlton Heston, George Bush, and William Bennett(none of whom i admire, but a fella’s gotta make a buck) for bribing me to write this review.
Rating: 1 / 5
I didn’t know anything about the people discussed in this book before reading it. So everything, I know about any of these situations comes from “Historians in Trouble”.
Jon Wiener makes reading about plagiarism enjoyable. But, in doing so, he sacrifices credibility. With all the colorful slants, it doesn’t take a high school education to figure whose side Mr. Wiener is on. While by itself this isn’t a problem, combined with the fact that the portrayal of most historians in the book is so one-sided even the most naive will wonder if relevant facts are missing.
I have a couple problems with the way this book comes to its conclusion. First, it is a case study of only a dozen people. Therefore, they all could have been cherry picked. Meaning the conclusion lead the facts and not the other way around. Second, he reduced his data set from twelve to one within a couple sentences. It seems to me extrapolating on one person is pure speculation. A nice theory, but more comprehensive research is needed to determine if there is any merit to it. Finally, the Conclusion chapter is poorly organized, and throws in theories not even mentioned earlier in the book. Compared to the thoughtfulness put into the rest of the book, it was a total hack job.
Rating: 2 / 5
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