Whoooops Your Citations, Mitch Daniels!

Hey, remember that time when Mitch Daniels tried to save academic freedom by destroying it? When he claimed that Howard Zinn "falsified" his history and that God-fearing Americans Indiana students should not get credit for courses that include A People's History of the United States? When he threw around all of these critiques from other historians that allegedly proved that Howard Zinn was a witch lying Commie?

Welp! According to John K. Wilson of the Academe Blog, some of the historians Mitch referenced are not too thrilled about his citation. And not just because Mitch hasn't mastered Turabian:

Academe Blog posted Michael Kazin’s response last night, in which Kazin wrote that Daniels “should be roundly condemned for his attempts to stop students from reading Zinn’s big book and for calling Zinn a liar…” Kazin wrote about Zinn’s book, “chapters of it can be quite useful if contrasted with alternative interpretations.”

Sam Wineburg took to Twitter to respond to Daniels, writing: “Mitch Daniels uses my work to defend his shameless attempts to censor free speech. Shame!” Wineburg noted, “I have criticized Zinn but will defend to my death the right to teach him. Shame on Mitch Daniels.” He explained, “Mr. Daniels, free societies openly teach ideas we disagree with. We do not censor objectionable speech. Study your Orwell.” As Wineburg put it, “How could I possibly agree that ‘banning Zinn’ makes sense when I assign him in my own classes?”

Michael Kammen disagreed with Daniels’ belief that Zinn “intentionally falsified” his work. While Kammen might not recommend the use of Zinn’s book in schools today, it is “only because it was written 35 years ago and there are now more balanced and judicious treatments of the US survey.” Kammen also rejected Daniels’ view about banning Zinn’s work from professional development classes for teachers: “I think that some teachers might need to know about its emphases because when Zinn wrote the US history textbooks omitted a great deal. Although it is not a great book, it remains a kind of historiographical landmark. Teachers should at least be aware of it.” And Kammen emphatically opposed the idea of politicians deciding what books should be used in schools rather than historians and teachers: “Absolutely not!”

Whoooooooops!

See, this is the thing, Mitch. I, like most historians, can critique a work of history largely because historiography has moved on. This is not the same as "interntionally falsified." Historians aren't Doctor Who; we aren't able to travel forward in time and see what new materials are uncovered that may make our interpretations less viable. In the future.

And I'm also capable of disagreeing with other historians' interpretations without calling their works a pack of lies. Historians disagree about how to weigh one piece of evidence against another all the time. We have entire schools of thought that disagree with each other! This does not equal calling another historian a liar.

Nor does it mean banning their work from classrooms. Would you believe it, I *intentionally* assign opposing viewpoints on history in my classes, because I think students benefit from seeing that debate! To date, I haven't had any students morph into Marxist Red Anti-American Transformers just because they learned that historians disagree with each other. YMMV.

(And yeah, historians are sometimes petty. They sometimes trash work because they don't like each others' politics or just think someone is an obnoxious asshole at conferences. But you know what? That bad behavior does not give you license to imitate it.)

Make no mistake: there are historians who do falsify data or intentionally misrepresent their evidence. Sometimes for the sake of politics. There are those who are incompetent and unintentionally mess up what thye're trying to do. And these bad historians (mostly) get called out for it. But that is not what you are doing, at all.

You are intentionally twisting other people's critiques to fit your agenda. And frankly, you look like an uninformed ass doing it.

Historical arguments are supposed to be about the careful and honest use of evidence. You might try that sometime.