Pop History Plagerism
 

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is being criticized for plagerizing parts of a book she "wrote" back in '87 (1).

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/23/bo...odaysheadlines

I don't know how many others here were history majors, but even if you only took the intro classes didn't your profs beat you over the head and let you know that poorly cited papers were gonna be harshly graded and plagerism would get you run!

Her research assistant is taking one for the team, but that does not eliminate the "authors" responsibility. I am no great fan of Ms. Goodwin mostly because her definition of a great President is 180 degrees from mine (she favors men with high body counts) but am I over-reacting? History writing seems to be taking a lot of heat these days because of sloppy and sometimes fraudulent scholarship ( the Bellisaurus [? er whatever his name was] history of American gun ownership comes to mind.)(2) I'd say its time for legitamit historians to cut out the polite silence and maybe call for a good old fashioned shunning. Something like, "I'm sorry Jim I can't appear on the News Hour with Doris, its a question of credibility."

Anyway, I wonder how Lynne McTaggert feels about Goodwin taking advantage of her research? *cough* lawsuit *cough* I don't know her work but its a fair bet she wasn't pleased when she found out that a writer who'd already made it critically and financially was using her work. Oh yah Ambrose too. (3)





(1) bah
(2) bah bah
(3) bah bah bah [oops I have inadvertently quoted from the Guns of Navarone by the Skatelites, wet noodle forth coming]

Well ummm let me see, what's the most tactful way to say this?

Who cares?

Now, please don't get me wrong, I don't want to minimize how aggravated I am by all this stuff. I've spent my entire adult life in academia and I don't regard plagiarism as a trivial matter.

But let's just realize that for 99% of the population who ever had to write an essay or a research paper, it was an exercise in putting out something that would not get them a bad grade. I dare say that if you look at even the subset of people who valued their college education, most of them did consider the writing of papers to be the crown of their intellectual achievement. So I suspect even the ones that didn't indulge in occasional plagiarism for their own work won't consider this a particularly heinous crime.

Call me cynical, but I expect this to be a tempest in a very small teapot.

Yah, yer right. This will not even make a ripple. This little tempest has been going on quite a while as a matter of fact. Doris will still be referred to for expert opinion, speaking as she does for entrenched power. It won't matter how she is viewed by her peers. bah bah bah bah bah bah (1)




(1) sorry McGarritt

She was just on Hardball with David Gergen. Every time Chris Matthews talked to her, I couldn't help but laugh. :)

He he, could you hear the Skatelites horn section in the background?

Faintly. :)

Why repeat someone else's account of history, when you can invent your own?
 

Isn't it ironic that historians have such a problem with plagiarism, and don't seem to have any trouble with revisionism?

Re: Why repeat someone else's account of history, when you can invent your own?
 

"It's like rain on your wedding day..."--Alanis Morissette

:)

Re: Pop History Plagerism
 

I thought the URL you posted made *that* quite clear.

C'mon, a tempest in a teapot? This stuff wasn't even paraphrased, it was just whole-hog cut-and-pasted. And then her claim was "Ooops, it was an accident." Spare me.

And the historian who sold everybody the bogus gun "history" book is named "Bellesiles".

Re: Why repeat someone else's account of history, when you can invent your own?
 

Nope, no irony. Folks like to apply the revisionist label to interpretations the don't like. If writers ignore or distort a body of evidence to support a view like Bellisiles did, its fraud, if they use real evidence to challenge assumptions and historical myths its good history.