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Subject: "get up c'mon get down with the research"     Previous Topic | Next Topic
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Conferences Eyrie Miscellaneous Topic #327
Reading Topic #327, reply 4
Gryphonadmin
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Nov-29-16, 02:16 AM (EDT)
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4. "RE: get up c'mon get down with the research"
In response to message #3
 
   >Be careful with the Toland. Rising Sun is excellent; but
>Infamy is marred by Pearl Harbor trutherism and I would be
>supremely hesitant to cite it as a source.

In this instance, my frame of interest stops just before Pearl Harbor, and is almost exclusively directed at the Japanese side of the equation beforehand; so Infamy is only there to provide another angle on the Japanese lurch toward war. It may ultimately prove to contain nothing directly useful, in which case it's only in the bibliography as background (much like I expect Weinberg and Wilson to be). Right now, it looks like Hotta and Rising Sun are going to provide the bulk of the secondary-source citations (the heavy lifting will be done by the one English-language primary source I was able to find, the Liaison Conference transcripts published as Japan's Decision for War).

Amusingly, that little John Keegan book—which is essentially a pocket historiography of what Keegan, not yet Sir John, considered the Current Scholarship on the entire war as of 1995—contains a sublimely backhanded dismissal, not just of Infamy but of the entirety of Pearl Harbor history written to that date, to wit:

There are no satisfactory accounts of the event, which remains clouded by allegations of concealed foreknowledge, possessed by both Roosevelt and Churchill. Overlong and ill-organized though it is, Gordon Prang's [sic] At Dawn We Slept must suffice as the nearest thing to a definitive history.¹

Keegan or his editor could perhaps have troubled to spell the late Gordon W. Prange's name right, but that aside, I love it when historians beef with each other. They go at it like rappers sometimes. If you really want a (deeply nerdy historiographical) laugh, dig up the Spring 1979 issue of the journal History Workshop and read Tony Judt's "A Clown in Regal Purple", which opens with a sententious passage asserting that Something Is Wrong With Social History, even though (he acknowledged) it was the New Hotness in historianing at the time—then asks rhetorically, "What, then, is wrong?" and proceeds to lay down the following immortal dis in reply:

The answer is that social history is suffering a severe case of pollution. The subject has become a gathering place for the unscholarly, for historians bereft of ideas and subtlety. The writings thus produced are without theoretical content, a failing disguised by an obsession with method and technique. They represent collectively a loss of faith in history. In their reaction against the chronological imperatives of political or economic history, social historians have all but lost touch with the historical events altogether. There is a constant striving for 'scientific' status, a requirement commonly met by the undignified and indiscriminate borrow- ing of terms and tools from other disciplines. One journal avowedly declares its commitment to 'interdisciplinary history', as if the support of other subjects were required for history to remain a plausible undertaking. In these circumstances the study of the past becomes a playpit for the unattended urchins of other disciplines: computer scientists, parsonian sociologists and structural anthropologists wallow around under a benevolent editorial eye. Small wonder that social history elicits scorn and distaste from the traditional empiricists, who at least retain their faith in history, for all that they do not know what that is.²

The rest continues in similar vein for the better part of 30 pages. He doesn't mention it in so many words, but I bet he thought they had weak rhymes, too.

--G.
¹John Keegan, The Battle for History: Re-Fighting World War II (New York: Vintage Books, 1995): 80.
²Tony Judt, "A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians," History Workshop, no. 7 (Spring 1979): 66.

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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
 get up c'mon get down with the research [View All] Gryphonadmin Nov-28-16 TOP
   RE: get up c'mon get down with the research The Traitor Nov-28-16 1
   RE: get up c'mon get down with the research Peter Eng Nov-29-16 2
   RE: get up c'mon get down with the research Mercutio Nov-29-16 3
     RE: get up c'mon get down with the research Gryphonadmin Nov-29-16 4
          RE: get up c'mon get down with the research Mercutio Nov-29-16 8


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