I have always thought that the profession of Historian would be an idyllic one. You get to wear a comfy hunting jacket (you knows, the ones with the leather patches on the elbows), and while smoking a meerschaum pipe and sipping from a glass of fine Cognac, peruse musty old documents in a dimly lit library, looking for that key to unlock the events of long ago.
Jon Wiener’s new book Historians In Trouble completely destroys this illusion. It turns out that history is a very serious business, and it is as cut-throat as selling used cars or insurance policies. The book details 12 cases of historians who have made errors, either factual or lifestyle, and depending on if they had important friends or important enemies, the consequences were completely different. Some of the infractions were major, and the miscreant walked away unscathed, or in some cases they actually received awards for their efforts, while other authors found that minor problems became career-ending events.
Good examples of this are the completely different situations that Michael Bellesiles and John Lott found themselves in. Both published books on the subject of guns. One was clearly anti-gun control, and the other one, while not being particularly pro-gun control, did make some less than flattering references about Charlton Heston and the NRA in the foreword of his book.
A review of both books revealed factual problems. Michael Bellesiles book Arming America, opened to critical acclaim; however a minor flaw was discovered, not in his research, but in missing a couple of footnotes - footnotes that describe the size of a research sample used. Also, two years of data were excluded because of a minor hiccup in U.S. history known as the Civil War. This data would have skewed the numbers and was irrelevant to the subject at hand anyway!
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