Thanks for watching! Please consider supporting the channel by buying merch: cynical-historian-shop.fourthwall.com Or by donating to my Patreon: www.patreon.com/CynicalHistorian Click "read more" for corrections and bibliography. First, here are some related videos: Original scholarship playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLjnwpaclU4wUSSIUw8fPp1SjwFxOj3wD2.html Anti-conspiracism playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLjnwpaclU4wWS-H7U62SqWWEA-y2eqzoQ.html 2016 movie roundup: ua-cam.com/video/Ub0-yFQFyJ8/v-deo.html D'Souza propaganda: ua-cam.com/video/pS-dqX9dZgk/v-deo.html Historian Annoyances: ua-cam.com/video/4J6IPhEkYmo/v-deo.html Moral Panics: ua-cam.com/video/7pyiLdRWdy0/v-deo.html Culture War: ua-cam.com/video/tppeGYoWDxg/v-deo.html Lost Cause: ua-cam.com/video/4J6IPhEkYmo/v-deo.html *[reserved for Errata]* *Bibliography* James M. Banner, The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021). amzn.to/3y0Y8er Jeremy Black, Clio’s Battles: Historiography in Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). amzn.to/3N3bFfY Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud - American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). amzn.to/2OQJh0m William M. Lamont, Historical Controversies and Historians (London: UCL Press, 1998). amzn.to/49SF1XY Ron Theodore Robin, Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). amzn.to/49Rdkip Michael Shermer, Alex Grobma, and Arthur Hertzberg. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). amzn.to/47NtzuY Jon Wiener, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (New York: New Press, 2005). amzn.to/47yzV1M
Leave it to Ken Burns to have not one but two historians who committed fraud…and to keep on using them even after their actions are revealed. Could you do a video on Ken burns? His failure to conduct historical research, spreading information, and whitewashing history not only regarding race but also gender and sexuality?
I disagree with your introductory point about disgrace. Look at such areas of Bible scholarship which contradict the Christian dogma - namely, the historicity of Jesus (Richard Carrier) or he Homeric influence on th Bible (Dennis McDonald). Both are reputed historians, and yet both have come out claming to have been suppressed and disregarded by academia at large. This pertains to your second part about "bigotry" - I'm sure Christian theologically-minded pseudo-historians would call those two "bigots" for advancing their well-sourced models, just the way you're calling Irving a bigot. In the end, all subjective squabbling... - Adûnâi
@@angamaitesangahyando685 Carrier was never "reputed" and McDonald's was done decades before. Carrier is certainly not being "suppressed"; his actions have done that enough. Nevertheless, your larger point is correct, but this has been carried out by mainstream scholarship over the last century. Schweitzer did what Carrier wished he could do over a hundred years ago. What is interesting, en passant, is you are still gathering the majority of graduate students from a pool of the religious. The academic reality forces a dropping of the "Bible = Fact" belief rather quickly. Bart Eardman is one example: started as a fundamentalist, went to the Moody Bible Institute of all places. How these deal with these issues is fascinating. The smart and successful ones try to separate their fantasies from the facts, but it is not easy. However, David Irving is a bigot. I would refer you to the writings of Christopher Hitchens who WANTED to believe him since it fit his political views, but then he got to know Irving. Irving was comfortable enough to crack racist jokes.
My beloved older brother is a retired professor. One of his students committed the absolutely stupidest act of plagiarism. Here is the note he put on the student's paper. It said "This is really good writing. I know because I wrote it. See me in my office after class".
Every time I see an AI thumbnail I have half a mind to downvote the video purely on that, but that would only increase the metrics. It’s such an ugly and lazy way to use visuals. Imagine having one of those jankey AI images created, looking at all the uncanny inconsistencies, and STILL deciding to use that image rather than try to edit, refine, or replace it.
Sorry, but I'm definitely going to plagiarize that quote! Is that your own work? That sounds a bit snarky, sorry, just wanted to know if the quote had provenance :)
@@paulelephant9521 I am tempted to claim it as my own, which is ironic considering the topic at hand, but alas, I can't. To the best of my recollection, it was sent to me a few years ago. I have a friend who collects amusing or strange news items in the course of the year and then prints them off and includes them with his Christmas cards. You know, silly stuff like, "Would-be burglar cuts through roof and drops into store that is open 24 hours a day" or ironic stuff like, "President of local Mothers Against Drunk Driving arrested for DUI." He also includes amusing saying like the one at hand. It had no attribution. He may have come up with it himself. He is a retired physics professor and we share the same outlook on crappy methodology, pseudoscience, etc. (We actually met as volunteers on an archeological dig and sat wide-eyed staring at each other as the lead archeologist took a couple bent metal rods and tried to "dowse" for a Civil War era burial.) Anyway, no attribution and I am sure that like all those "a guy walks into a bar" jokes, it can be passed along without anybody raising a stink about it. But, thanks for asking.
@@ladymacbethofmtensk896 Freud is far from the most influential name in psychology. A fact which really undermines your comment. It does illustrate your ignorance beautifully though.
The worst thing is how all these people still have fans. Journalist and historian Jon Wiener continues to defend Arming America to this day. Certain people in American Indian Rights groups say Churchill was correct about 9/11. David Irving released a book in the last few years and well, his ilk are getting popular lately as a result of October 7th and Tucker Carlson. Goodwin is still a talking head on CBS and CNN even if they can't call her a historian. The Trump administration quoted Shelby Foote during the George Floyd protests. Ambrose will always get fanboys due to the HBO show, and so on and so forth. Its frustrating that sometimes these people do get a public reckoning, then a decade later its well maybe not, or sometimes no punishment really ever comes down.
@@theshenpartei OK so in order to fall on this spectrum you actually have to be a historian, not a fantasy writer. Did the history profession ever take Menzies seriously? I figured he was sort of in the same league as Erich von Daniken.
@@texasyojimboweirdly enough my late grandfather had one of Ambrose’s books that was plagiarized it was the wild blue book. It was one of the books out of the seven that was plagiarized.
I remember slogging through all 3 Shelby Foot Civil War books and being dumbfounded that the CSA lost the war. Just about anything good that the Union did was either left out, attributed to accident, or minimized such that I didn't realize that they won any battles. It was really weird.
I didn't know anything about Stephen Ambrose prior to this, but that looked like a lot books that he wrote. He did a lot, and that should be a sign of something amiss. I wrote history papers in college for assignments, and being a perfectionist and detail-obsessed, found these were very time-consuming. These were just undergraduate papers. An entire book on a historical event would take a long time, years. That long list of books is a sign of shortcuts being made or relying on the work of others. He was not above making things up, which is unforgiveable for a historian. I looked into his output. He wrote 25+ books, co-wrote 5 others, and was an editor for 5 more. It would be hard to do that much meticulous historical research in one lifetime. Thanks for dealing with Ward Churchill--what a fake. David Irving sounds like a real SOB. This was an education--thank you!
Re: Ambrose's productivity. AS the video says, he never claimed to be researching these things all by his lonesome; he had a whole pile of people doing most of the scutwork for him. Ostensibly, at least.
The Culture Wars existed long before the 1980s. There were culture wars from the beginning of the 20th Century and before. Examples: anti-Asian immigration (1900), the revival of the Klan (1900-1930s), The Red Summer & Prohibition of 1919, the end of the Suffrage Movement in 1020, pre-WWII isolationism (1930s), the conservative swing of the 1950s. Red Scare part II (1950s-early 1960s), The anti-Vietnam War protests and feminists and civil rights movements amd hippies vs.hardhats (1950s-1970s). I've left many out, of course. and I don't even want to get into the 1800s. This is not a criticism. I'm just reacting to how I felt when you said the "Culture Wars that started in the '80s" and remembered my pre-80s life and what I learned of the 50 years before I was born. My Mom's in the next room, and she can remember everything from the middle of WWII on.
I think the foundations of the modern day culture war were laid out in the 1960s. The root of many right-winger's grievances lie with things like Brown v Board of Education or the Civil Rights Act. The capitalist class meanwhile has been fighting their own war since the New Deal.
There is (was?) an interview with Shelby Foote on UA-cam where he complains about African Americans and even calls them the "N" word, and to an African American interviewer no less. I was done right there.
Some novelists make for great historians. I can think of a few local ones here in New Mexico alone. But Foote never engaged with the historiography, which already makes his work next to useless, whereas those authors all have tried their best to follow the historical method
One really should consider the racism inherent in the American gun control movement. In Chicago v McDonald, there is a short history of the movement, which started as an effort to disarm free Blacks. With The Sullivan Act, overturned in NYSRPA v Bruen, the New York legislature decided they did not care for Italians, either.
For a moment, I thought this comment was about the poet, and I got very sad because I enjoyed his poems as a kid. Then I hit Wikipedia. Uh ... wow, that other guy is less than great.
Regarding the idea that anytime sources aren't cited, it's plagiarism, isn't it the case that school textbooks usually don't cite their sources? At any rate, I never noticed citations in any of my school history textbooks before I was in college.
That's why I said, "likely" rather than "definitely." But also, textbooks tend to have accompanying material that lists their sources. For instance, this semester I'm teaching a _religion in American history_ course, and the narrative textbook I'm using has what's called a "desk copy" with full footnotes and an extra 40 pages of bibliography in fine print. The primary source textbook I'm using doesn't need that, since the sources are right there
Genuine question, by including Shelby Foote on this list, does that (by transitive property) mean that Ken Burns is or should be a discredited historian? Full disclosure, I love Burns' documentaries but, as I generally agree with Cynical Historian's premise here, I have a hard time squaring the two matters
I would argue that Burns does have bias. The West and Bison for example only pass a little bit of time on Native americans before placing white Americans front and center. Mexico and African Americans in the west are minimized.
Ken Burns' fatal flaw is that he puts too much trust in his consultants and gives them too much leeway to steer the narratives of his documentaries with little to no accountability, and this extends far beyond The Civil War. After 40 years he really ought to know better.
I am impressed that you have Will & Ariel Durant's History of Civilization books on the shelf behind you. IMO, they are the absolute best books to start learning history. They give a good grounding of looking at history through different lenses -- events, people, technology, culture, economics, and religion. After reading them, one can study history in any area, and keep things in context.
Wait a second...Drachinifel was talking about Broome winning the biggest libel case in UK history (at the time and for many years after) in his video yesterday about Convoy PQ-17. Crazy.
I have a complicated relationship with Foote. The trilogy is the main reason why I’m now a Civil War historian…but nowadays I wouldn’t recommend reading it unless you’re already well-versed with the war and era. The first volume is mostly ok, specifically for pop history; second volume is where the flaws start becoming blatant-he uncritically shared stories of Grant’s alleged drunkenness during Vicksburg that aren’t even plausible due to timing, for example-and then the third…the last chapter is literally a martyrdom of Jefferson Davis. That alone should be enough to discredit it as a serious work. Oh, he also repeats Butcher Grant myths (though not as bad as I remembered on a recent re-read), entirely blames Grant but not Lee for the Cold Harbor wounded, etc. Weirdly he doesn’t go Gone with the Wind on Sherman.
My mother is generally a reasonable woman whose political opinions tend to be fairly moderate (with some exceptions concerning her Catholicism), but she grew up in the Atlanta area so she certainly has disdain for Sherman.
Yeah, I’m not so sure it’s fair to call his books “lost cause” propaganda, in that he mostly tried to both sides everything politically and is far more interested in personalities and battles and not interested in the politics. Ta-Nehisi Coates said something like he’s clearly an en entertaining writer, and better at it than most people who write about the war, but that he ultimately found it sad that Foote’s white supremacy was strong enough to prevent him from clearly seeing the topic he spent his life writing about. Anyway, I think it’s definitely downstream from lost cause ideas and makes perfect sense as the work of romantically inclined white southerner born in 1916, but yeah, people should at least read Battle Cry of Freedom first
@joegibbskins well put. I never really got that from him either. And his "white supremacy" feels more like a generational divide than actual WHITE SUPREMACY.
@@joegibbskinsHis books are steeped in a mid 20th century lost cause viewpoint, but calling them lost cause propaganda borders on presentism. I often get the impression that people are trying to cast him as a neo Confederate which is pretty unfair.
@@joegibbskins Battle Cry of Freedom was very good, and as an alternate suggestion to Foote's work I recommend reading Bruce Catton's books which James McPherson enjoys, while admitting his prose can be a little purple.
Years ago, I loved watching Ken Burns' documentary series. I did not know Foote was bad, at least until I fully rejected the lost cause myth. It's crazy that he got so bad he was sympathetic to the KKK. I'd love to see you do a video about Burns' series. And the bald, British dude, Simon, doesn't write what he reads. He's basically a narrator of script lol. That's how he has so many UA-cam channels.
I just watched a "Skeptic" by Michael Shermer, where he destroyed a Holocaust denial wannabe historian that the deplorable Tucker Carlson was featuring on his podcast.
I don't do "debates" (nothing he's ever done was a debate, just a broadcast argument) with reactionaries and probably wouldn't perform well anyways. I don't have the patience to listen to a whole bunch of BS. There's a reason why historians tend to stick to writing
@@CynicalHistorian I think it’s important. In the same way that flint dibble went and debated Graham Hancock and disproved his stupid theories. You should do the same.
You'll find that political tendencies highly depend on specialization. Liberal arts, yeah definitely leans left, but there's plenty of exceptions - for instance, the most prominent member of my history department is a Trump supporter, though he'll go emeritus next year. Business and sports on the other hand; quite the opposite. Sciences, medicine, and practicums; all over the place. Beyond faculty, there's also staff, which that typically reflects the local population. So it's certainly not like Fox News or other conservative bastions would have you believe
Yes they are and painfully so, I like history and have a thing for things like war and military history, archeology, Paleontology and a few others but the blatant display of liberal values makes me nauseous.
@@AlexKS1992 lmao conservatism is an ideology based on ignorance and pre enlightenment values which directly go against the very concept of higher education and objective research into the past.
Its ironic that economists and businesses anaylsts get away with publishing some wild stuff, yet are the first to cry academic integrity when their opponents in other disciplines call out their antics.
Little by little, all currently existing historical works will be determined by future cultures to be flawed because it doesn't meet their standards and the authors will be canceled. Enjoy the ride and watch the books be burned.
I clicked due to seeing Irving and having watched Denial (based on your recommendation). Didn't know the extent of Irving's conspiracy theories preceded beyond Holocaust denial though.
Interesting topic. Just wondering why Ken Burns would have used Shelby Foote as a talking head in the Civil War when his reputation was considered tarnished?
@@CynicalHistorian Jon Parshall, co-author of *Shattered Sword* on the Battle of Midway and frequent lecturer on the Tube of You, also frequently experiences interruptions from members of his "Kitty Butai."
Great job, couldn't believe it was 42 minutes long... seemed like only 15! I agree 100% on the footnotes. Before I started the video, I checked out the description, and the first thing I saw was footnotes. I knew this would be legitimate and credible! People today are too willing to accept claims without citation, a sad fact of our modern world.
@@drj-pp8hw Lott last published in 2014 because he retired from economic research, founding the Crime Prevention Research Center. I guess he found out there is more money in being a political pundit. Even though he has many examples of misconduct and fraud, he continues today to be cited in academic papers without any negativity and his new works through his institution are repeated by politicians and news organizations as if they were fact or established research while Lott does what he can to encourage this. In 2023, he was sited 509 times in other published papers and is up to 326 so far this year.
I would phrase it as "Ambrose didn't write history, he sold history." And he never let professional standards get in the way of a publishing deadline nor did he miss a chance to profit on others' deeds.
@@hattielankford4775 What if we tried to do that and the rich just lobbies against it like they always do. It would inconvenience them too much to not be able to lie about how good the system they benefit from is
I knew Foote was a southern apologist. Never realized he went so off the rails or that he wasn't even a trained historian. I wonder if Ken Burns has ever regretted giving him that platform, given that Burns has been a fairly outspoken progressive voice in recent years.
@@pendragon2012 Yeah, I don't blame him, I blame it on the general area of history and history media, and on media's need to reach a bigger audience. A great deal of history enthusiasts, especially that of the American civil war, are still firmly embedded in traditional white supremacy since that narrative was unchallenged for very long. So we have a show that's pretty much very 90s, very "both sides".
I thought this is the first time I've called it out, but before release, I searched my previous social media posts - I had one joking Facebook post from a few weeks after the their plagiarism where I joked about it. There is still only one like on it... from my mother, LOL
@@CynicalHistorianYou have a dedicated fan base; that will probably change as soon as people hear about it. Not from me; I don’t have Facebook and don’t plan to download it anytime soon, if ever.
Simon has talked about using plagiarism detectors to make sure the writers are not plagiarizing, although it sounded more of a text based program. He even fired at least one writer for plagiarizing and scrapped all scripts and filmed videos of that writer's work and even deleted the videos that had been uploaded. That said I rewatched both videos and the only things I saw the same in both videos were the myths talking about white slaves, only the wealthy owning slaves, amount of slave deaths/slave streatment, slaves fighting for the South, and the popularity of abolishing in the North. These would be common points to bring up in any video about slavery myths, especially related to the US Civil War. The only thing in the TopTenz video that made me jump up was when it was said FDR made the final ban on chattel slavery so Japan couldn't use it as a propaganda tool. It seem the writer misunderstood FDR directing the DOJ to go shapecropper landlords a few days after Pearl Harbor as a new/final ban.
I'm subbed to all of Whistler's channels (that I know of) and this upsets me. But does not surprise me. If you watch stuff like brain blaze he doesn't absorb the very scripts he's reading. Nor does he quality check the videos before they are uploaded. One vid had an 2 minute spot where there was no audio.
Don't forget that Vonnegut was in Dresden during the fire bombing and helped dispose of bodies, yet he still believed Irving's excessive estimates. It goes to show that even each eyewitness to a huge event can perceive it drastically differently. It also seemed that when Irving's downfall came, Vonnegut was more called out more at the time because he was more famous. Vonnegut didn't study the event, he took place in it and read the current popular history on it
To the naked eye, there's not much difference between 5,000 and 50,000. It's just a sea of corpses that were alive a mere day prior. Plus, Vonnegut was a POW, so I wouldn't be surprised if he heard the propaganda straight from the source and simply used Irving as verification of that traumatic memory
@@dbarker7794 Sure, but Vonnegut's book was also a massive signal booster to Irving's theories, and arguably helped the man himself become mainstream. I don't doubt that Vonnegut had the best intentions - it's hard to imagine an avowed socialist deliberately signal boosting someone he knew to be a Nazi sympathizer or an anti-war advocate siding with one of the biggest warmongers in history - but that book is what popularized the wildly inflated Dresden claims and unwittingly gave neo-Nazis a stick with which to attempt to beat reality senseless for their cause, and that has to be acknowledged.
I love Vonnegut, but he definitely had some poor opinions that were fully rooted in a fundamental dislike of the government. For example, he spoke at length about how the Apollo program was a waste of time and money (it was not a waste). He had a legitimate reason to dislike the government and war, and he was passionate, and his passion turned into a general acceptance “everything must be rotten”
Whoa good timing. The other day I finally watched the Ken Burns Civil War documentary for the first time and while doing so I looked up the commentators who appeared in it and one that stood out was Shelby Foote
@@jerrysmooth24 something amusing I read on his Wikipedia page is that apparently Daniel Craig based his southern accent on Shelby Foote's for the film Knives Out
The thing with Irving is that it is now generally accepted that he always had far-right and anti-semitic leanings well before the Destruction of Dresdent was published. In fact at one point he had shared a platform with British fascist leader Oswald Mosely while he was a student at University College London, during a debate on commonwealth immigration, but he was usually able to brush aside the claims that he was denying the holocaust by saying he was a military historian. I would add that he regained some credibility in 1983 with his initial intervention in the Hitler Diaries forgery (although he later backtracked, and then changed his mind again), , and as late as 1987 he was still actually getting some academic interest, even getting invited to give guest lectures at various universities (including my Alama mater), especially after the release of Churchill's war. My capstone advisor actually attended that lecture he gave at the start of the 1987-1988 school year, and recalled he was wearing an SS tie clip. But some (myself included) now believe that Irving was never actually trying to contribute to historical scholarship, but rather was always trying to push the envelope in terms of what he could say about Hitler and the Nazis in order to try and make more sympathetic perspectives socially acceptable, even if he got pushback in academia, in order to legitimize Fascism as an acceptable political perspective. This is also why (until 1989) he kept more open Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson at arms length. This is also supported by the fact that in 1982 he stepped back from publishing and tried to organize a far right party called "Focus", and had planned out a political career.
Upvote. Irving is such a paradigm of a conman. He is a Kent Hovind, Flat Earther, Ancient Aliens, and all of that. He is just a racist, as Christopher Hitchens learned to his surprise. Hitchens was attracted to him, because Irving denigrated Churchill. Then Hitchens got to know him; Irving was rather open with his Anti-Semitism. Fine the old Errol Morris documentary "Mr. Death" about Fred Leucter. I will not spoil it, but Irving appears, and tries to act like he is not another racist Holocaust Denier. I believe Shermer described him as a Holocaust Denier who does not want to socially be seen as one. Well, he lost his lawsuit, then ended up in prison in Austria. He had a lawyer who concluded her summation with, I am not making this up, screaming "Heil Hitler!"
With regard to the Hitler Diary forgery, one of my professors said that though Irving is a liar clearly trying to falsify history, it can’t be denied that in his attempt to rewrite history he developed a categorical knowledge of the Nazi Germany he was trying to rewrite.
I feel like part of why Shelby Foote is accepted is his voice. When you watch Ken Burns and the music is stirring while Shelby is speaking, it's hard not to get caught up in the narrative he's spinning
I absolutely agree and thought so when it was first broadcast 30-some years ago. I recall telling a friend that I was not sure about his historical interpretations but I would love to have a few beers with him and listen to his stories.
@@misterjaxon2559 this is really important to think about. He was a fantastic storyteller, a mythmaker, rather than an academic historian. His stories made the South come alive. Now, having read a lot about the war, I know similar stories can be told about the North. But where's our devoted storyteller?
Yes, I've heard other people say this exact statement. I didn't know how racist he was though until I watched another interview on with him on UA-cam where he goes off on African Americans, defends the Klan, and then had the audacity to use the "N" word multiple times immediately after admitting that Black Americans hate that word. I was done. I stopped watching and will never give him another second of my time.
He’s also got a good sense for character and writes better prose than most historians. Hell, his “history” is literally called a narrative. They are enjoyable and easily readable and because they concern themselves primarily with battles and the men who fight them, can seem even handed. I really do think people who like the civil war should read Foote at some point. The problem is that Foote’s narratives are the I lt histories some people read on the Civil War, and far more people know when from the Ken Burns documentary where he is even less even handed than in he is in print
@@TylerD288I’ve seen that interview, if it’s the one I’m thinking about, and he says those things to give an account of how Faulkner thought about race. Front what I’ve read, he’s wrong here. Why Faulkner was definitely a racist, he also struggled with that racism in his work especially after the private revelation that he himself was the product of “miscegenation”. That said, Foote did know Faulkner personally, and I do not and also he was from the Deep South, obsessed with the civil war, and born in 1916, so it’s not really surprising that his own views were shitty
Ah, yes. Woodrow Wilson. My favorite story about him is that at the Versailles Treaty meeting. Wilson was shocked to find out that Clemenceau spoke excellent English. Even more so, Clemenceau was a French correspondent in Washington during the Civil War and early Reconstruction. As such, he came to personally know all the 'black Republicans' including Stevens and Sumner. A few years later, Clemenceau wrote about his years in Washington in an attempt to correct some of the bogus history Wilson had written.
That's really cool. I'm surprised I'd never heard that before. I should point out, on quickly looking it up, Clemenceau did most his time as a correspondent during Reconstruction in New York
Plagiarism is a tricky issue, especially outside of specific subjects. On YT it annoys me, but without training it's easy to accidentally fall into it by accident, that training needs to happen fairly early in education and be robust enough to be effective... 🤔
I got into civil war history via the Ken Burns documentary, and Foote was entertaining, but even without prior knowledge he seemed to really like the confederacy. So it's interesting to know about his background...
@@thomassenbart He didn't write objective history whatsoever, he propagated the lost cause myth beyond just racist southerners. He actually promotes the nonsense and easily debunked claim that the civil war wasn't about slavery and that the Union was somehow the aggressor.
@@thomassenbart The Lost Cause myth has nothing to do with how people felt at the time, it's a creation from the post-reconstruction period that made up lies about the goals of the Confederacy and how they acted in the war. You find him well spoken because he is, he is a great storyteller. But you find him "credible and a master in the subject matter" because you are ignorant about the actual history and are substituting a good story for truth. Something sounding plausible and good doesn't make it accurate. He didn't give an objective telling from the southern perspective is the entire point. No one said that this was an issue of good vs evil. You are making up a strawman for someone who is trying to educate you so you can pretend to be the bigger person. This isn't an issue of opinion or of demonization, this is an issue of lies.
@@Tinil0this was something of a shock as I've seen all of Burn's documentaries and learned a lot from them. Even without taking his word at face value, his docs have led me to research events for myself. I'm wondering if Burns lost some reputation after the Foote revisionism became known
@@ThommyofThenn Eh, yes but Ken Burns isn't a historian, he is a documentary film maker. He isn't held to the same standards as historians and all his documentaries is not proper history, but rather pop history. His goal is to tell an entertaining narrative, not to present a history paper. So to some extent he gets off scott free, he just isn't being judged by the same standards as Foote. But by the same note, if your only education on a subject is a Ken Burns documentary then you do not know that subject at all. But yeah, his deferrence to Foote is part of why his work isn't considered serious history. It shows how his focus IS entertainment, not history.
Questioning Wilson is to question the entire economic order and foreign relations of the united states. I don't think its that obscure what the problems with him are, its just something you're not going to be shouting about if you're pursuing a career in a powerful american institution
@@A.Hutler Specious implication. This is a pointlessly fatalistic way of looking at history & politics, and is suspiciously close to the sort of cover that would-be fascists use to muddy the waters of monstrous behaviour. It also ultimately boils down to a false equivalence fallacy hidden behind argumentum ad ignorantiam. Shaming behaviour can easily be abused. But holding bad actors to account is critical when maintaining the integrity of a system, be that a system of government, academia, economics, justice etc.
The thing that gets me about Irving is that he’s rightly seen as disgraced whilst his claims about Dresden in ‘The Destruction of Dresden’ are still commonly heard in pop culture, though they aren’t usually attributed to Irving.
Yep that's the power of cultural defusion. Even if its sept into something popular it might stick around even if it becomes debunked. Slaughterhouse Five said its true, therefore it is. Doesn't matter if the author later admitted its wrong and issued corrected editions, too late. I deal with this a lot with piracy. Some romance novel in the 1960s got quoted as a source for the pirate Anne Bonny. Many of its claims still continue to appear despite the source material being nonsense
A small part of the problem is the casual use of "historian" in popular or social media. If a person is very enthusiastic and seemingly knowledgeable about a topic, they can be described as a "historian" of something, particularly if there isn't obvious academic interest in the topic to contrast. Ideally, they would be described as an "amateur historian" or "enthusiast" but that's not always done.
I agree with this. I'm a high school history teacher, but I'd still argue I'm still simply an amateur historian. My job first and foremost is pedagogical in nature, not academic. An actual historian would blow me out of the water, but I reckon I could manage a classroom better than the average historian.
Malevolent is one word for Irving, I can think of a few more but UA-cam will delete my comment 😉 Re Ambrose I think he was writing a story with Band of Brothers designed to emphasise the heroism of Easy Company, how they were average Americans who accomplished amazing things against the odds. In that he succeeded but in the process he allowed his admiration for them to distort some of the real history by believing what he was told rather than what research would show to be true.
You didn't even mention the "Mary Rosh" scandal around John Lott faking reviews of his book. I wrote something in a column in the college newspaper (20 years ago) that was critical of him and he made a point to reach out to me and tell me how wrong I was.
The weirdest thing about Irving is how he somehow ended up making Vonnegut quote nazi propaganda. Dude hated nazis, even accidental nazis. see: Mother Night
The way I've always seen it, the bombing of Dresden was the most traumatic experience of Vonnegut's life. He saw an appalling amount of death, but nobody really talked about what he'd witnessed after the war until Irving's book. From Vonnegut's perspective, he'd been forced at gunpoint to help dig hundreds of dead people out of ruined buildings. He had no idea whether those bodies were 0.1% of the total dead or 0.01%. Someone who was at least talking about lots of dead civilians seemed more plausible than all the people who'd ignored it all. He wouldn't have had any way of knowing what Irving's motivation was back then. As you say, he clearly hated fascists of all sorts. I remember hearing him on a radio program a few years before his death, absolutely slamming George W Bush and the invasion of Iraq. I don't think it's his fault he got fooled by Irving.
@@alanpennie8013 And it also did not help that throughout the Cold War, historians had a bad habit of taking the claims of German war survivors and Nazi propaganda at face value as primary sources without much in the way of interrogation. This was a frequent problem in discussing the Eastern Front, where for a long time the _only_ available sources were the former German military members, but also had a habit of happening even on the Western Front and North Africa, where non-German sources were readily accessible. See the Battle of Villers-Bocage and the reputation of Rommel, for instance.
King is so adorable. Thanks for including outtakes. My 16-year-old cat Karen recently died, and watching those King outtakes just warms my heart and makes me remember the good times. 💚 Oh, and the rest of the video was good, too. 🙂I'm just a simple history lover as a hobby, with a particular interest in the American Civil War. So I know about Foote, and I see Goodwin pop up in plenty of interviews, but most of the others are new to me. Fascinating to hear about these cases.
I am very surprised this definition of conspiracy theory was so old. I always assumed it came from the JFK assassination where if you thought Oswald was working with someone else (a conspirator) you were a conspiracy theorist and then it went from there. That’s really cool to see it’s from the early 20th century
The first time the phrase was used was in 1863 about the Civil War, but it didn't have a negative connotation, but the history profession didn't exist in the United States. From its usage in 1909, it's clear that historians were using it derogatorily for awhile before that. I think the popularization of the term outside of scholarship came with _The Paranoid Style_ in 1964, but charting popular usage is neigh impossible
the principle "you are innocent until proven guilty " simply means one cannot receive a lawful penalty until the prosecution , which hold you to be guilty , has proven its case in front of the court the prosecution compel the defendant to be judged , up to holding him/her in detention else why would anyone care to be judged
One thing I often think about is the process of debunking this kind of work. It seems that it often takes awhile for serious scholarship to catch up with people like this,
Subscribed! Thank you for clearing some things up. From a fellow historian, I thank you. So I know perfectly well what cats are like around the microphones LOL.
Simon Whistler is not a historia,, but a ex-pat British guy who sounds incredibly posh, and relies on his clippef Foreign Office diction to make him seem much cleverer than he is. He employs a team of writers to churn out scripts for his many channels covering a range of subjects including history, military equipment, true crime, historic buildings, science and technology, etc, etc, in most of which he has little to no expertise, and regularly demonstrates his ignorance by regularly mangling the pronounciation of specific words, names, geographical references and scientific & medical terms, verbal fuck-ups that are glaringly apparent to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the given subject. Only the other day, I heard him refer to the ill fated but much revered Indian mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, as Ramajam! This was as he was holding forth on unsolved problems in mathematics, when he would probably struggle to solve a😅 Soduko. Anyone can mispronounce an unfamiliar word, but its the lengths he goes to sound like he's more of a polymath than Stephen Fry, as a keystone of his don't-argue-I'm-British brand that make his _faux pas_ so worthy of ridicule. So it wouldn't surprise me in the least if he trawls the work of other UA-cam creators for videos he can recycle with a cosmetic rewrite. Given the volume of his output, it can't be down to his intellectual curiosity.
Video is great so far, though I think holyoke is pronounced “Hoe-lee-oak” if it’s in regard to the one in Massachusetts. Minor nit pick, my wife used to bother me about it
2 дні тому+1
Every economist lies shamelessly and never has to explain why their prophecies never turn out right
Spoiler alert! Endorsing and embellishing a lie or expedient or forced narrative STILL does not necessarily constitute TRUTH! We live in a world today where being a historian requires a great deal of courage! People should ask why that is?
I'm a historian of anarchism and anti-fascism, and I thank the algorithm gods for finally recommending a history video that isn't right-wing propaganda or brain-dead regurgitation. Great job! Also, your cat is freaking adorable.
@@garrettmetting6938 the point there was that Philip S Foner wasn't disgraced though. He was a plagiarist though and I'd guess he'd be disgraced today with the current media environment
This is weird. I wondered why I didn't get a notification, and apparently I'm not subscribed... although I was! 🤨 So, people need to watch out, YT might be "un-subscribing" people without their knowledge. #subscribed👍🏻
Oh man what a bummer. I thought the Ward Churchill think was a case of things being blown out of proportion with the way that conservatives in the 00's used him as part of the culture war agenda to discredit academics, but I didnt know he was such a crank as well. The Stephen Ambrose news is disappointing too, I remember reading Band of Brothers in my teenage years and it lead to a lifelong fascination with the second world war. It's crazy how you can be introduced to a topic with flawed information, yet end up becoming learned by expanding out onto other works.
Growing up as a Ken Burns fan who sparked my historical interest, this makes me want to look into his use of pop historians and how as much as he provokes historical interest, also promotes pseudo history. I particularly get really upset with Shelby Foote as the guy was just a writer and while the documentary The Civil War paints him as charming and gives him legitimacy, a lot of better scholars were given less time and to me that ruins it and makes me dislike Foote a lot in addition to his lost cause defenses.
It's odd to think Cinel could avoid legal charges, for and please read this part slowly, making gay porn films with underage participants, because his accusers were, "homophobic". If you will kindly excuse me, I now need to go be ill for a while.
Ambrose definitely did a poor turn with his book Band of Brothers. Those misleading, misrepresented & outright changed or eliminated points of fact in several of persons facts REALLY led to major untruths in The tv series...
I also find it hilarious that he among so many advisors for Private Ryan never critiqued the actual story. Like “Spielberg, this plot didnt make sense. No squadron of troops would go into German territory WITH NO Support, One translator who ISNT trained for combat, to find one guy. Like that isn’t an actual order. Why are you having bullets go through water? Why is this framing the fictional soldiers as the greatest generation? That’s a frankly self-gratifying view of the 40s. Also, why are you making the translator this strawman wimp?”
@@bradhorowitz2765 the reason is that WW2 generation was growing old. And that in the 60s the boomers were feeling guilty about how rebellious they were. So, the idealized the WW2 generation.
@@MrChickennugget360 uhh..maybe? or its the emerging conservative movement? or more mof nsotalgia? afterall, on paper ww2 was the clearest good vs evil battle-unlike the vietnam war. except the greatest generation came home to lynch nonwhite veterans and make deicison sthat led to the vietnam war among other issues. its also worth nothing that america, as most other nations, did not care about the holocaust at all to get involve earlier. kinda makes the whole "greatest generation" myth hard to accept.
@@MrChickennugget360 Some of Easy Company were still around and wrote their own books though. However I always had an issue with Albert Blithe's story given the man survived the war and served a full career career in the Army before dying of an ulcer while on active duty in the 1960s. That was one heck of an oversight although if I remember correctly the explanation for the oversight was Ambrose took some vets' word Blithe died in WWII and didn't check (even then not a great explanation).
Good video. Very interesting opinions. As to Shelby Foote, his opinions are an interesting side to Ken Burn's Civil War. Foote dreams of Pickett's Charge breaking the Union center. Anyone who studies the Civil War should know what the Lost Cause is all about, propaganda and not history. I met people in Georgia that believe in the tenets of the Lost Cause. The ripples of the Civil War can still be felt today. The best Civil War historian, IMHO, is Bruce Catton.
25:57 i wont watch any video with that guy in it on general principle. Good to see my intuition is right. Someone who puts out that many videos cant have time to research properly even with a team.
What does the historian community think of Stephen Halbrook? Books like _Gun Control and the Third Reich._ He's a lawyer, not a historian, but he wrote a ton about how gun control allegedly promotes dictatorships.
Did Wilson,for his many flaws,ever actually violate the standards of Historical work,or was he just,like every white academic until C.Vann Woodward, naive about black history?
The comparative firepower of the English war bow relative to the musket has been commented on by many writers. The simple fact is that the rate of fire a trained bowman could achieve could not be matched with the musket. In terms of accuracy neither would win prizes, at least not under battle conditions. The bowmen would shoot off their arrows at a 40 or so degrees angle towards the enemy and if they were massed up, which they tended to be, they’d find targets readily enough. Muskets had smooth bore barrels and fired a round ball that had no means of stabilization. In addition, machining tolerances with which the barrels were made were notional. At more than 40 paces accuracy was not a thing, but it didn’t need to be. Again, it was the massing of the ranks that ensured that targets were found. In other words when Sessiles or whatever his name was, wrote that bows were more effective than muskets, he was right. Maybe he misquoted his sources or something. Why did armies relinquish the bow in favor of the musket then? Two reasons: - Psychological ones. Firing a volley by the massed ranks of a regiment of soldiers makes a hell of a lot noise and it is scary. - Training. It takes years, if not decades, to train a bowman. English kings obliged the men throughout their realm to train with bow and arrow weekly. They would do that after mass on Sundays. You can still see the scores in the archways of the village churches throughout England and Wales where the men would sharpen their arrowheads. In contrast firing and reloading a musket can be taught in a matter of weeks.
@@FabricofTime Yeah, but at least engineers will have to STUDY those. I mean, look at Bill Nye, he actually understands scientific principles. What's surprising is when engineers are so ignorance of science, and there's a disturbing amount of them
Economists _are_ all those things. There are no hard walls between the social 'sciences;' they all blend. The difference is more the approach/methodology than the topic, even if specific topics gave rise to those methodologies.
@wankertanker1813 It depends on how you define "science." If the methodology of science is being applied to an area of study, it is science. Psychology can be philosophers pontificating, or it can rigorous experiments set up with statistical analysis. Hypotheses are made and everything is operational defined. Is Psychology any more murky than the world of quantum physics? I'm guessing economics is similar.
Recently, someone posted on a Shelby Foote Facebook fan page words to the effect that as much as he enjoys Foote's work, Foote was not really an historian. One commenter in particular was furious and attacked the poster (with words, of course!). That response really took me aback. Foote, as you noted here, is an engaging speaker and storyteller, but not an actual historian. I think his work is important for its perspective and context from the Lost Cause aspect, and relevant due to the large number of fourth- or fifth-generation Lost Causers that exist, but we shouldn't refer to Foote as a historian. Burns identified him in the documentary as "Writer," and that's what he was.
Thanks for watching! Please consider supporting the channel by buying merch: cynical-historian-shop.fourthwall.com
Or by donating to my Patreon: www.patreon.com/CynicalHistorian
Click "read more" for corrections and bibliography. First, here are some related videos:
Original scholarship playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLjnwpaclU4wUSSIUw8fPp1SjwFxOj3wD2.html
Anti-conspiracism playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLjnwpaclU4wWS-H7U62SqWWEA-y2eqzoQ.html
2016 movie roundup: ua-cam.com/video/Ub0-yFQFyJ8/v-deo.html
D'Souza propaganda: ua-cam.com/video/pS-dqX9dZgk/v-deo.html
Historian Annoyances: ua-cam.com/video/4J6IPhEkYmo/v-deo.html
Moral Panics: ua-cam.com/video/7pyiLdRWdy0/v-deo.html
Culture War: ua-cam.com/video/tppeGYoWDxg/v-deo.html
Lost Cause: ua-cam.com/video/4J6IPhEkYmo/v-deo.html
*[reserved for Errata]*
*Bibliography*
James M. Banner, The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021). amzn.to/3y0Y8er
Jeremy Black, Clio’s Battles: Historiography in Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). amzn.to/3N3bFfY
Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud - American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). amzn.to/2OQJh0m
William M. Lamont, Historical Controversies and Historians (London: UCL Press, 1998). amzn.to/49SF1XY
Ron Theodore Robin, Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). amzn.to/49Rdkip
Michael Shermer, Alex Grobma, and Arthur Hertzberg. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). amzn.to/47NtzuY
Jon Wiener, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (New York: New Press, 2005). amzn.to/47yzV1M
Leave it to Ken Burns to have not one but two historians who committed fraud…and to keep on using them even after their actions are revealed.
Could you do a video on Ken burns? His failure to conduct historical research, spreading information, and whitewashing history not only regarding race but also gender and sexuality?
Be careful Cypher! It's a slippery slope into being a cat-channel! 😂😂😂😻😻😻
@@robk8463 your pinned comments are so GOAT'd. Im not even in history but I wish I were so I could use your videos x;D
I disagree with your introductory point about disgrace. Look at such areas of Bible scholarship which contradict the Christian dogma - namely, the historicity of Jesus (Richard Carrier) or he Homeric influence on th Bible (Dennis McDonald). Both are reputed historians, and yet both have come out claming to have been suppressed and disregarded by academia at large. This pertains to your second part about "bigotry" - I'm sure Christian theologically-minded pseudo-historians would call those two "bigots" for advancing their well-sourced models, just the way you're calling Irving a bigot. In the end, all subjective squabbling...
- Adûnâi
@@angamaitesangahyando685 Carrier was never "reputed" and McDonald's was done decades before. Carrier is certainly not being "suppressed"; his actions have done that enough.
Nevertheless, your larger point is correct, but this has been carried out by mainstream scholarship over the last century. Schweitzer did what Carrier wished he could do over a hundred years ago.
What is interesting, en passant, is you are still gathering the majority of graduate students from a pool of the religious. The academic reality forces a dropping of the "Bible = Fact" belief rather quickly. Bart Eardman is one example: started as a fundamentalist, went to the Moody Bible Institute of all places.
How these deal with these issues is fascinating. The smart and successful ones try to separate their fantasies from the facts, but it is not easy.
However, David Irving is a bigot. I would refer you to the writings of Christopher Hitchens who WANTED to believe him since it fit his political views, but then he got to know Irving. Irving was comfortable enough to crack racist jokes.
My beloved older brother is a retired professor. One of his students committed the absolutely stupidest act of plagiarism. Here is the note he put on the student's paper. It said "This is really good writing. I know because I wrote it. See me in my office after class".
Ouch!
If that were me, I'd just drop out
That sounds made up
That's what i thought @@donnagant6575
@@vulpes7079 Actually he never saw the kid again.
AI use in History UA-cam is also becoming far too frequent.
Every time I see an AI thumbnail I have half a mind to downvote the video purely on that, but that would only increase the metrics. It’s such an ugly and lazy way to use visuals. Imagine having one of those jankey AI images created, looking at all the uncanny inconsistencies, and STILL deciding to use that image rather than try to edit, refine, or replace it.
AI use is becoming too frequent…
Economics was invented to make astrology look respectable.
Nice
Sorry, but I'm definitely going to plagiarize that quote! Is that your own work? That sounds a bit snarky, sorry, just wanted to know if the quote had provenance :)
@@paulelephant9521 I am tempted to claim it as my own, which is ironic considering the topic at hand, but alas, I can't. To the best of my recollection, it was sent to me a few years ago. I have a friend who collects amusing or strange news items in the course of the year and then prints them off and includes them with his Christmas cards. You know, silly stuff like, "Would-be burglar cuts through roof and drops into store that is open 24 hours a day" or ironic stuff like, "President of local Mothers Against Drunk Driving arrested for DUI." He also includes amusing saying like the one at hand. It had no attribution. He may have come up with it himself. He is a retired physics professor and we share the same outlook on crappy methodology, pseudoscience, etc. (We actually met as volunteers on an archeological dig and sat wide-eyed staring at each other as the lead archeologist took a couple bent metal rods and tried to "dowse" for a Civil War era burial.) Anyway, no attribution and I am sure that like all those "a guy walks into a bar" jokes, it can be passed along without anybody raising a stink about it. But, thanks for asking.
@@ladymacbethofmtensk896 Freud is far from the most influential name in psychology. A fact which really undermines your comment. It does illustrate your ignorance beautifully though.
In comparison? Or as a means to an end? Either way it explains a lot about the relationship between Ronnie and Nancy Reagan.
When you have the endorsement of Dinesh D'Souza you can rest assured that your reputation as a historian is in tatters.
The worst thing is how all these people still have fans. Journalist and historian Jon Wiener continues to defend Arming America to this day. Certain people in American Indian Rights groups say Churchill was correct about 9/11. David Irving released a book in the last few years and well, his ilk are getting popular lately as a result of October 7th and Tucker Carlson. Goodwin is still a talking head on CBS and CNN even if they can't call her a historian. The Trump administration quoted Shelby Foote during the George Floyd protests. Ambrose will always get fanboys due to the HBO show, and so on and so forth.
Its frustrating that sometimes these people do get a public reckoning, then a decade later its well maybe not, or sometimes no punishment really ever comes down.
Yeah they continue to basically failed upwards in continuing to corrupt/ misinform everyday public.
So where does Gavin Menzies lie on this video Fraud or avoidance?
@@theshenpartei OK so in order to fall on this spectrum you actually have to be a historian, not a fantasy writer.
Did the history profession ever take Menzies seriously? I figured he was sort of in the same league as Erich von Daniken.
@@texasyojimbono they did not
@@texasyojimboweirdly enough my late grandfather had one of Ambrose’s books that was plagiarized it was the wild blue book. It was one of the books out of the seven that was plagiarized.
I remember slogging through all 3 Shelby Foot Civil War books and being dumbfounded that the CSA lost the war. Just about anything good that the Union did was either left out, attributed to accident, or minimized such that I didn't realize that they won any battles. It was really weird.
Why am I not surprised Peter Theil slimed his way into this story.
Very glad you included Shelby Foote! An entertaining writer with a good voice and no regard for truth.
I didn't know anything about Stephen Ambrose prior to this, but that looked like a lot books that he wrote. He did a lot, and that should be a sign of something amiss. I wrote history papers in college for assignments, and being a perfectionist and detail-obsessed, found these were very time-consuming. These were just undergraduate papers. An entire book on a historical event would take a long time, years. That long list of books is a sign of shortcuts being made or relying on the work of others. He was not above making things up, which is unforgiveable for a historian. I looked into his output. He wrote 25+ books, co-wrote 5 others, and was an editor for 5 more. It would be hard to do that much meticulous historical research in one lifetime. Thanks for dealing with Ward Churchill--what a fake. David Irving sounds like a real SOB. This was an education--thank you!
Re: Ambrose's productivity. AS the video says, he never claimed to be researching these things all by his lonesome; he had a whole pile of people doing most of the scutwork for him.
Ostensibly, at least.
The Culture Wars existed long before the 1980s. There were culture wars from the beginning of the 20th Century and before. Examples: anti-Asian immigration (1900), the revival of the Klan (1900-1930s), The Red Summer & Prohibition of 1919, the end of the Suffrage Movement in 1020, pre-WWII isolationism (1930s), the conservative swing of the 1950s. Red Scare part II (1950s-early 1960s), The anti-Vietnam War protests and feminists and civil rights movements amd hippies vs.hardhats (1950s-1970s). I've left many out, of course. and I don't even want to get into the 1800s.
This is not a criticism. I'm just reacting to how I felt when you said the "Culture Wars that started in the '80s" and remembered my pre-80s life and what I learned of the 50 years before I was born. My Mom's in the next room, and she can remember everything from the middle of WWII on.
I think the foundations of the modern day culture war were laid out in the 1960s. The root of many right-winger's grievances lie with things like Brown v Board of Education or the Civil Rights Act. The capitalist class meanwhile has been fighting their own war since the New Deal.
To be fair, saying "the culture wars that began in the 80s" could simply be a way of separating them from the culture wars of earlier times.
@@MichaelKrinsky-hx1vu Yes, the 80's did bring Protestant Evangelism into US politics, something that still exists today.
If you defend Foote, you defend Lost Cause Propaganda. Period. Its amazing to me there are people here who defend him.
There is (was?) an interview with Shelby Foote on UA-cam where he complains about African Americans and even calls them the "N" word, and to an African American interviewer no less. I was done right there.
He definitely said the hard R💀
@@donovanlocust1106 oh yeah.
So?
@@rdred8693 that's bad
@@rdred8693Ok clown 🤡
Shelby Foote is a novelist. Aside from having a pleasant voice, idk why anyone took him seriously as a historian.
Some novelists make for great historians. I can think of a few local ones here in New Mexico alone. But Foote never engaged with the historiography, which already makes his work next to useless, whereas those authors all have tried their best to follow the historical method
@@CynicalHistorian R.L. Willson was a gun expert who got disgraced. You might find his case interesting.
One really should consider the racism inherent in the American gun control movement. In Chicago v McDonald, there is a short history of the movement, which started as an effort to disarm free Blacks. With The Sullivan Act, overturned in NYSRPA v Bruen, the New York legislature decided they did not care for Italians, either.
UA-cam has become a Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Honorable mention, Robert Service, and his Russian to English "translations" and circular references.
For a moment, I thought this comment was about the poet, and I got very sad because I enjoyed his poems as a kid. Then I hit Wikipedia.
Uh ... wow, that other guy is less than great.
I haven't read it but Service's biography of Trotsky has been widely criticized by historians.
@@fidomusic I have read some it. Infantile and hominin attacks without evidence that are ridiculous in terms of historical chronology.
Regarding the idea that anytime sources aren't cited, it's plagiarism, isn't it the case that school textbooks usually don't cite their sources? At any rate, I never noticed citations in any of my school history textbooks before I was in college.
That's why I said, "likely" rather than "definitely." But also, textbooks tend to have accompanying material that lists their sources. For instance, this semester I'm teaching a _religion in American history_ course, and the narrative textbook I'm using has what's called a "desk copy" with full footnotes and an extra 40 pages of bibliography in fine print. The primary source textbook I'm using doesn't need that, since the sources are right there
@@CynicalHistorian OK, thanks!
My APUSH textbook put its references off to one page maybe every unit or chapter.
Genuine question, by including Shelby Foote on this list, does that (by transitive property) mean that Ken Burns is or should be a discredited historian? Full disclosure, I love Burns' documentaries but, as I generally agree with Cynical Historian's premise here, I have a hard time squaring the two matters
I would argue that Burns does have bias. The West and Bison for example only pass a little bit of time on Native americans before placing white Americans front and center. Mexico and African Americans in the west are minimized.
Ken Burns' fatal flaw is that he puts too much trust in his consultants and gives them too much leeway to steer the narratives of his documentaries with little to no accountability, and this extends far beyond The Civil War. After 40 years he really ought to know better.
I am impressed that you have Will & Ariel Durant's History of Civilization books on the shelf behind you.
IMO, they are the absolute best books to start learning history.
They give a good grounding of looking at history through different lenses --
events, people, technology, culture, economics, and religion.
After reading them, one can study history in any area, and keep things in context.
Wait a second...Drachinifel was talking about Broome winning the biggest libel case in UK history (at the time and for many years after) in his video yesterday about Convoy PQ-17. Crazy.
funny i heard CH mention a "naval battle" and i thought... i wonder if he was talking about PQ-17 "Convey To Scatter"
Probably the biggest British legal own goal since poor Oscar Wilde (but infinitely more deserved than he was).
I have a complicated relationship with Foote. The trilogy is the main reason why I’m now a Civil War historian…but nowadays I wouldn’t recommend reading it unless you’re already well-versed with the war and era.
The first volume is mostly ok, specifically for pop history; second volume is where the flaws start becoming blatant-he uncritically shared stories of Grant’s alleged drunkenness during Vicksburg that aren’t even plausible due to timing, for example-and then the third…the last chapter is literally a martyrdom of Jefferson Davis. That alone should be enough to discredit it as a serious work. Oh, he also repeats Butcher Grant myths (though not as bad as I remembered on a recent re-read), entirely blames Grant but not Lee for the Cold Harbor wounded, etc. Weirdly he doesn’t go Gone with the Wind on Sherman.
My mother is generally a reasonable woman whose political opinions tend to be fairly moderate (with some exceptions concerning her Catholicism), but she grew up in the Atlanta area so she certainly has disdain for Sherman.
Yeah, I’m not so sure it’s fair to call his books “lost cause” propaganda, in that he mostly tried to both sides everything politically and is far more interested in personalities and battles and not interested in the politics. Ta-Nehisi Coates said something like he’s clearly an en entertaining writer, and better at it than most people who write about the war, but that he ultimately found it sad that Foote’s white supremacy was strong enough to prevent him from clearly seeing the topic he spent his life writing about. Anyway, I think it’s definitely downstream from lost cause ideas and makes perfect sense as the work of romantically inclined white southerner born in 1916, but yeah, people should at least read Battle Cry of Freedom first
@joegibbskins well put. I never really got that from him either. And his "white supremacy" feels more like a generational divide than actual WHITE SUPREMACY.
@@joegibbskinsHis books are steeped in a mid 20th century lost cause viewpoint, but calling them lost cause propaganda borders on presentism. I often get the impression that people are trying to cast him as a neo Confederate which is pretty unfair.
@@joegibbskins Battle Cry of Freedom was very good, and as an alternate suggestion to Foote's work I recommend reading Bruce Catton's books which James McPherson enjoys, while admitting his prose can be a little purple.
Years ago, I loved watching Ken Burns' documentary series. I did not know Foote was bad, at least until I fully rejected the lost cause myth. It's crazy that he got so bad he was sympathetic to the KKK.
I'd love to see you do a video about Burns' series.
And the bald, British dude, Simon, doesn't write what he reads. He's basically a narrator of script lol. That's how he has so many UA-cam channels.
I just watched a "Skeptic" by Michael Shermer, where he destroyed a Holocaust denial wannabe historian that the deplorable Tucker Carlson was featuring on his podcast.
I referenced his book _Denying History_ in this. I'll have to check out the video
Oh man, Shermer really tore him a new one! I don't think I've ever seen him that angry before.
Can we get a cynical historian vs whatifalthist debate?
Can we have a boxing match between Mike Tyson and a toddler while we're at it? That's what seems to be an entertaining fight in your mind.
@@ineednochannelyoutube2651 whatifalthist has a bigger platform. I’d love to see an actual historian debate him.
@@JuanRameriz-ru7ez I heard he didn't even do well against a non-historian in a debate so it seems even more of a waste of time.
I don't do "debates" (nothing he's ever done was a debate, just a broadcast argument) with reactionaries and probably wouldn't perform well anyways. I don't have the patience to listen to a whole bunch of BS. There's a reason why historians tend to stick to writing
@@CynicalHistorian I think it’s important. In the same way that flint dibble went and debated Graham Hancock and disproved his stupid theories. You should do the same.
I read Shelby Foote's Civil War series. I didn't notice any Lost Cause mythology in his work.
You weren't paying attention.
@@blackpowder4016 Really? Can you cite some examples?
Question. Does academia lean predominantly left?
Lean left? If academia was any more left it would be anti clockwise!
Yes because as my conservative political science professor once said, the facts themselves lean left.
You'll find that political tendencies highly depend on specialization. Liberal arts, yeah definitely leans left, but there's plenty of exceptions - for instance, the most prominent member of my history department is a Trump supporter, though he'll go emeritus next year. Business and sports on the other hand; quite the opposite. Sciences, medicine, and practicums; all over the place. Beyond faculty, there's also staff, which that typically reflects the local population. So it's certainly not like Fox News or other conservative bastions would have you believe
Yes they are and painfully so, I like history and have a thing for things like war and military history, archeology, Paleontology and a few others but the blatant display of liberal values makes me nauseous.
@@AlexKS1992 lmao conservatism is an ideology based on ignorance and pre enlightenment values which directly go against the very concept of higher education and objective research into the past.
Its ironic that economists and businesses anaylsts get away with publishing some wild stuff, yet are the first to cry academic integrity when their opponents in other disciplines call out their antics.
Little by little, all currently existing historical works will be determined by future cultures to be flawed because it doesn't meet their standards and the authors will be canceled. Enjoy the ride and watch the books be burned.
There will be no culture as such, the 'party' and only the party will decide what history is.
Gibberish
Agree 110%. Wokeism is to be blamed.
Foote isn't a historian in his defense
I clicked due to seeing Irving and having watched Denial (based on your recommendation). Didn't know the extent of Irving's conspiracy theories preceded beyond Holocaust denial though.
Interesting topic. Just wondering why Ken Burns would have used Shelby Foote as a talking head in the Civil War when his reputation was considered tarnished?
It was his inclusion that tarnished Foote’s reputation
It saddens me that Whistler plagiarized your work. I'm subbed to many of his channels and have spent a great deal of time watching them.
Why does King Richard meow so much? I've known many cats in my day, but none were so vocal.
Recording this took three hours
@@CynicalHistorian Jon Parshall, co-author of *Shattered Sword* on the Battle of Midway and frequent lecturer on the Tube of You, also frequently experiences interruptions from members of his "Kitty Butai."
Great job, couldn't believe it was 42 minutes long... seemed like only 15! I agree 100% on the footnotes. Before I started the video, I checked out the description, and the first thing I saw was footnotes. I knew this would be legitimate and credible! People today are too willing to accept claims without citation, a sad fact of our modern world.
The most important disgraced historian is Woodrow Wilson.
*WILSON!!!!!!!!!!!!*
Sadly, not disgraced
@@CynicalHistorian truly sad. He is definitely disgraceful then.
all my homies hate Woodrow Wilson
@@CynicalHistorian He tricked the US into a world war and a private central banking system, Who the hell is he not disgraced?!?
Oh yes, the worst confederate apologist of them all!
"You can get away with fraud if you're an economist..." Yeah. that tracks.
@@drj-pp8hwyall are jokes anyway
@@drj-pp8hw Lott last published in 2014 because he retired from economic research, founding the Crime Prevention Research Center. I guess he found out there is more money in being a political pundit. Even though he has many examples of misconduct and fraud, he continues today to be cited in academic papers without any negativity and his new works through his institution are repeated by politicians and news organizations as if they were fact or established research while Lott does what he can to encourage this. In 2023, he was sited 509 times in other published papers and is up to 326 so far this year.
So many people do not bother to maintain any standards of integrity or accuracy. The viewing public can easily get pumped full of falsehoods.
isn't Fraud what economics is all about?
Or if you’re a social scientist.
One British historian said ‘Ambrose doesn’t write history, he writes monuments’. And no, he didn’t mean it as a compliment.
I would phrase it as "Ambrose didn't write history, he sold history." And he never let professional standards get in the way of a publishing deadline nor did he miss a chance to profit on others' deeds.
When an Economist lies in a paper?
It is just Marketing....
They get away with it all the time. Let me recommend you a really good video about it
"What's the difference between an economist and a senile man with a calculator?"
What?
"I'm asking you?"
Hahaha!
We need to implement heavy, enforced marketing regulations. Fifty years ago would be better, but now will do.
@@hattielankford4775 What if we tried to do that and the rich just lobbies against it like they always do.
It would inconvenience them too much to not be able to lie about how good the system they benefit from is
@@AntiSocialPropaganda please do
I think historians give the ‘Civil War A Narrative’ books a bad rap for not sourcing properly. After all, every volume is pure Foote notes.
💀death by pun
You really struggled to pull off that pin.
Do we deserve this . . .
. . . punishment?
Ah, I see what you did there.
@@theodosios2615 So you concede . . .
( •_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
. . . defeat?
I knew Foote was a southern apologist. Never realized he went so off the rails or that he wasn't even a trained historian. I wonder if Ken Burns has ever regretted giving him that platform, given that Burns has been a fairly outspoken progressive voice in recent years.
I think Burns has the problem of going for what makes the best story, so he kinda ignores minority voices unless forced.
@@Tareltonlives Possibly, especially back then, but I think he's gotten a bit better. At least in the public square he's been outspoken.
@@pendragon2012 Yeah, I don't blame him, I blame it on the general area of history and history media, and on media's need to reach a bigger audience. A great deal of history enthusiasts, especially that of the American civil war, are still firmly embedded in traditional white supremacy since that narrative was unchallenged for very long. So we have a show that's pretty much very 90s, very "both sides".
Im a big fan of this channel and I was not aware of the TopTenz incident. I guess the ripoff problem is all pervasive on YT.
I thought this is the first time I've called it out, but before release, I searched my previous social media posts - I had one joking Facebook post from a few weeks after the their plagiarism where I joked about it. There is still only one like on it... from my mother, LOL
@@CynicalHistorianYou have a dedicated fan base; that will probably change as soon as people hear about it.
Not from me; I don’t have Facebook and don’t plan to download it anytime soon, if ever.
Simon has talked about using plagiarism detectors to make sure the writers are not plagiarizing, although it sounded more of a text based program. He even fired at least one writer for plagiarizing and scrapped all scripts and filmed videos of that writer's work and even deleted the videos that had been uploaded.
That said I rewatched both videos and the only things I saw the same in both videos were the myths talking about white slaves, only the wealthy owning slaves, amount of slave deaths/slave streatment, slaves fighting for the South, and the popularity of abolishing in the North. These would be common points to bring up in any video about slavery myths, especially related to the US Civil War. The only thing in the TopTenz video that made me jump up was when it was said FDR made the final ban on chattel slavery so Japan couldn't use it as a propaganda tool. It seem the writer misunderstood FDR directing the DOJ to go shapecropper landlords a few days after Pearl Harbor as a new/final ban.
I'm subbed to all of Whistler's channels (that I know of) and this upsets me. But does not surprise me. If you watch stuff like brain blaze he doesn't absorb the very scripts he's reading. Nor does he quality check the videos before they are uploaded. One vid had an 2 minute spot where there was no audio.
Don't forget that Vonnegut was in Dresden during the fire bombing and helped dispose of bodies, yet he still believed Irving's excessive estimates.
It goes to show that even each eyewitness to a huge event can perceive it drastically differently.
It also seemed that when Irving's downfall came, Vonnegut was more called out more at the time because he was more famous. Vonnegut didn't study the event, he took place in it and read the current popular history on it
To the naked eye, there's not much difference between 5,000 and 50,000. It's just a sea of corpses that were alive a mere day prior. Plus, Vonnegut was a POW, so I wouldn't be surprised if he heard the propaganda straight from the source and simply used Irving as verification of that traumatic memory
@@CynicalHistorian
When you read first hand accounts, they often over state the loss of life.
@@dbarker7794 Sure, but Vonnegut's book was also a massive signal booster to Irving's theories, and arguably helped the man himself become mainstream. I don't doubt that Vonnegut had the best intentions - it's hard to imagine an avowed socialist deliberately signal boosting someone he knew to be a Nazi sympathizer or an anti-war advocate siding with one of the biggest warmongers in history - but that book is what popularized the wildly inflated Dresden claims and unwittingly gave neo-Nazis a stick with which to attempt to beat reality senseless for their cause, and that has to be acknowledged.
@@icook1723 But surely not when it comes to the holocaust, nobody ever exaggerated that....that's for sure 🙄
I love Vonnegut, but he definitely had some poor opinions that were fully rooted in a fundamental dislike of the government.
For example, he spoke at length about how the Apollo program was a waste of time and money (it was not a waste).
He had a legitimate reason to dislike the government and war, and he was passionate, and his passion turned into a general acceptance “everything must be rotten”
Whoa good timing. The other day I finally watched the Ken Burns Civil War documentary for the first time and while doing so I looked up the commentators who appeared in it and one that stood out was Shelby Foote
it takes shelby foote 9 minutes to say the word "tidewater" he had the most southern aristocrat voice ever
@@jerrysmooth24 something amusing I read on his Wikipedia page is that apparently Daniel Craig based his southern accent on Shelby Foote's for the film Knives Out
@@Spongebrain97where did you watch that documentary Amazon or Netflix?
@theshenpartei I saw it on the Internet Archive website which had all the episodes
If you remove Foote's opening monologue, and end the series with Dr Fields' final speech, the series still holds up.
I’ll be one of these in 20 years 😎
The thing with Irving is that it is now generally accepted that he always had far-right and anti-semitic leanings well before the Destruction of Dresdent was published. In fact at one point he had shared a platform with British fascist leader Oswald Mosely while he was a student at University College London, during a debate on commonwealth immigration, but he was usually able to brush aside the claims that he was denying the holocaust by saying he was a military historian. I would add that he regained some credibility in 1983 with his initial intervention in the Hitler Diaries forgery (although he later backtracked, and then changed his mind again), , and as late as 1987 he was still actually getting some academic interest, even getting invited to give guest lectures at various universities (including my Alama mater), especially after the release of Churchill's war. My capstone advisor actually attended that lecture he gave at the start of the 1987-1988 school year, and recalled he was wearing an SS tie clip.
But some (myself included) now believe that Irving was never actually trying to contribute to historical scholarship, but rather was always trying to push the envelope in terms of what he could say about Hitler and the Nazis in order to try and make more sympathetic perspectives socially acceptable, even if he got pushback in academia, in order to legitimize Fascism as an acceptable political perspective. This is also why (until 1989) he kept more open Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson at arms length. This is also supported by the fact that in 1982 he stepped back from publishing and tried to organize a far right party called "Focus", and had planned out a political career.
Upvote.
Irving is such a paradigm of a conman. He is a Kent Hovind, Flat Earther, Ancient Aliens, and all of that. He is just a racist, as Christopher Hitchens learned to his surprise. Hitchens was attracted to him, because Irving denigrated Churchill. Then Hitchens got to know him; Irving was rather open with his Anti-Semitism.
Fine the old Errol Morris documentary "Mr. Death" about Fred Leucter. I will not spoil it, but Irving appears, and tries to act like he is not another racist Holocaust Denier. I believe Shermer described him as a Holocaust Denier who does not want to socially be seen as one.
Well, he lost his lawsuit, then ended up in prison in Austria. He had a lawyer who concluded her summation with, I am not making this up, screaming "Heil Hitler!"
With regard to the Hitler Diary forgery, one of my professors said that though Irving is a liar clearly trying to falsify history, it can’t be denied that in his attempt to rewrite history he developed a categorical knowledge of the Nazi Germany he was trying to rewrite.
I feel like part of why Shelby Foote is accepted is his voice. When you watch Ken Burns and the music is stirring while Shelby is speaking, it's hard not to get caught up in the narrative he's spinning
I absolutely agree and thought so when it was first broadcast 30-some years ago. I recall telling a friend that I was not sure about his historical interpretations but I would love to have a few beers with him and listen to his stories.
@@misterjaxon2559 this is really important to think about. He was a fantastic storyteller, a mythmaker, rather than an academic historian. His stories made the South come alive. Now, having read a lot about the war, I know similar stories can be told about the North. But where's our devoted storyteller?
Yes, I've heard other people say this exact statement. I didn't know how racist he was though until I watched another interview on with him on UA-cam where he goes off on African Americans, defends the Klan, and then had the audacity to use the "N" word multiple times immediately after admitting that Black Americans hate that word. I was done. I stopped watching and will never give him another second of my time.
He’s also got a good sense for character and writes better prose than most historians. Hell, his “history” is literally called a narrative. They are enjoyable and easily readable and because they concern themselves primarily with battles and the men who fight them, can seem even handed. I really do think people who like the civil war should read Foote at some point. The problem is that Foote’s narratives are the I lt histories some people read on the Civil War, and far more people know when from the Ken Burns documentary where he is even less even handed than in he is in print
@@TylerD288I’ve seen that interview, if it’s the one I’m thinking about, and he says those things to give an account of how Faulkner thought about race. Front what I’ve read, he’s wrong here. Why Faulkner was definitely a racist, he also struggled with that racism in his work especially after the private revelation that he himself was the product of “miscegenation”. That said, Foote did know Faulkner personally, and I do not and also he was from the Deep South, obsessed with the civil war, and born in 1916, so it’s not really surprising that his own views were shitty
Ah, yes. Woodrow Wilson. My favorite story about him is that at the Versailles Treaty meeting. Wilson was shocked to find out that Clemenceau spoke excellent English. Even more so, Clemenceau was a French correspondent in Washington during the Civil War and early Reconstruction. As such, he came to personally know all the 'black Republicans' including Stevens and Sumner. A few years later, Clemenceau wrote about his years in Washington in an attempt to correct some of the bogus history Wilson had written.
That's really cool. I'm surprised I'd never heard that before. I should point out, on quickly looking it up, Clemenceau did most his time as a correspondent during Reconstruction in New York
They might be thinking of Tocqueville
I love two things: scholarly rigor, and adorable kitties. This video provided both--kudos
Plagiarism is a tricky issue, especially outside of specific subjects. On YT it annoys me, but without training it's easy to accidentally fall into it by accident, that training needs to happen fairly early in education and be robust enough to be effective... 🤔
I got into civil war history via the Ken Burns documentary, and Foote was entertaining, but even without prior knowledge he seemed to really like the confederacy. So it's interesting to know about his background...
Yeah, explains a lot about his bias and his repeating old lies
@@thomassenbart He didn't write objective history whatsoever, he propagated the lost cause myth beyond just racist southerners. He actually promotes the nonsense and easily debunked claim that the civil war wasn't about slavery and that the Union was somehow the aggressor.
@@thomassenbart The Lost Cause myth has nothing to do with how people felt at the time, it's a creation from the post-reconstruction period that made up lies about the goals of the Confederacy and how they acted in the war.
You find him well spoken because he is, he is a great storyteller. But you find him "credible and a master in the subject matter" because you are ignorant about the actual history and are substituting a good story for truth. Something sounding plausible and good doesn't make it accurate. He didn't give an objective telling from the southern perspective is the entire point.
No one said that this was an issue of good vs evil. You are making up a strawman for someone who is trying to educate you so you can pretend to be the bigger person. This isn't an issue of opinion or of demonization, this is an issue of lies.
@@Tinil0this was something of a shock as I've seen all of Burn's documentaries and learned a lot from them. Even without taking his word at face value, his docs have led me to research events for myself. I'm wondering if Burns lost some reputation after the Foote revisionism became known
@@ThommyofThenn Eh, yes but Ken Burns isn't a historian, he is a documentary film maker. He isn't held to the same standards as historians and all his documentaries is not proper history, but rather pop history. His goal is to tell an entertaining narrative, not to present a history paper. So to some extent he gets off scott free, he just isn't being judged by the same standards as Foote. But by the same note, if your only education on a subject is a Ken Burns documentary then you do not know that subject at all.
But yeah, his deferrence to Foote is part of why his work isn't considered serious history. It shows how his focus IS entertainment, not history.
Woodrow Wilson not being disgraced is crazy
The president with a stroke?
Questioning Wilson is to question the entire economic order and foreign relations of the united states. I don't think its that obscure what the problems with him are, its just something you're not going to be shouting about if you're pursuing a career in a powerful american institution
The husband of the first female president of the USA 😉lol
How about Jared Diamond? Or did that one not have a proper degree in the first place?
@@A.Hutler Specious implication. This is a pointlessly fatalistic way of looking at history & politics, and is suspiciously close to the sort of cover that would-be fascists use to muddy the waters of monstrous behaviour. It also ultimately boils down to a false equivalence fallacy hidden behind argumentum ad ignorantiam.
Shaming behaviour can easily be abused. But holding bad actors to account is critical when maintaining the integrity of a system, be that a system of government, academia, economics, justice etc.
The thing that gets me about Irving is that he’s rightly seen as disgraced whilst his claims about Dresden in ‘The Destruction of Dresden’ are still commonly heard in pop culture, though they aren’t usually attributed to Irving.
Yep that's the power of cultural defusion. Even if its sept into something popular it might stick around even if it becomes debunked.
Slaughterhouse Five said its true, therefore it is. Doesn't matter if the author later admitted its wrong and issued corrected editions, too late.
I deal with this a lot with piracy. Some romance novel in the 1960s got quoted as a source for the pirate Anne Bonny. Many of its claims still continue to appear despite the source material being nonsense
You'd be surprised by how many cultural assumptions, icons, and debates come out of bad history.
I think piers Morgan said something about dresden recently, as an example
@@jdkessey Ward Churchill is a prime example of that. Culturally, many have accepted some of his nonsense.
Slaughterhouse 5
A small part of the problem is the casual use of "historian" in popular or social media. If a person is very enthusiastic and seemingly knowledgeable about a topic, they can be described as a "historian" of something, particularly if there isn't obvious academic interest in the topic to contrast. Ideally, they would be described as an "amateur historian" or "enthusiast" but that's not always done.
I agree with this. I'm a high school history teacher, but I'd still argue I'm still simply an amateur historian. My job first and foremost is pedagogical in nature, not academic. An actual historian would blow me out of the water, but I reckon I could manage a classroom better than the average historian.
Ambrose wanted to write novelistic history with poor methodology, while Irving is openly malevolent.
Malevolent is one word for Irving, I can think of a few more but UA-cam will delete my comment 😉
Re Ambrose I think he was writing a story with Band of Brothers designed to emphasise the heroism of Easy Company, how they were average Americans who accomplished amazing things against the odds.
In that he succeeded but in the process he allowed his admiration for them to distort some of the real history by believing what he was told rather than what research would show to be true.
You didn't even mention the "Mary Rosh" scandal around John Lott faking reviews of his book.
I wrote something in a column in the college newspaper (20 years ago) that was critical of him and he made a point to reach out to me and tell me how wrong I was.
I had history professor once said you cannot go wrong with too many footnotes.
I like that. I shall like to steal it.
Better to have too many rather than too few.
Came for the analysis, stayed for the outtakes
The weirdest thing about Irving is how he somehow ended up making Vonnegut quote nazi propaganda. Dude hated nazis, even accidental nazis. see: Mother Night
Figures for an American POW captured during the Battle of the Bulge, and, unlike Irving, was actually there.
The way I've always seen it, the bombing of Dresden was the most traumatic experience of Vonnegut's life. He saw an appalling amount of death, but nobody really talked about what he'd witnessed after the war until Irving's book. From Vonnegut's perspective, he'd been forced at gunpoint to help dig hundreds of dead people out of ruined buildings. He had no idea whether those bodies were 0.1% of the total dead or 0.01%. Someone who was at least talking about lots of dead civilians seemed more plausible than all the people who'd ignored it all. He wouldn't have had any way of knowing what Irving's motivation was back then. As you say, he clearly hated fascists of all sorts. I remember hearing him on a radio program a few years before his death, absolutely slamming George W Bush and the invasion of Iraq. I don't think it's his fault he got fooled by Irving.
@@chrisball3778
It didn't help that Dresden ended up on the wrong side of The Iron Curtain so that the issue got muddled by Cold War propaganda.
@@alanpennie8013 Absolutely.
@@alanpennie8013 And it also did not help that throughout the Cold War, historians had a bad habit of taking the claims of German war survivors and Nazi propaganda at face value as primary sources without much in the way of interrogation. This was a frequent problem in discussing the Eastern Front, where for a long time the _only_ available sources were the former German military members, but also had a habit of happening even on the Western Front and North Africa, where non-German sources were readily accessible.
See the Battle of Villers-Bocage and the reputation of Rommel, for instance.
King is so adorable. Thanks for including outtakes. My 16-year-old cat Karen recently died, and watching those King outtakes just warms my heart and makes me remember the good times. 💚
Oh, and the rest of the video was good, too. 🙂I'm just a simple history lover as a hobby, with a particular interest in the American Civil War. So I know about Foote, and I see Goodwin pop up in plenty of interviews, but most of the others are new to me. Fascinating to hear about these cases.
I am very surprised this definition of conspiracy theory was so old. I always assumed it came from the JFK assassination where if you thought Oswald was working with someone else (a conspirator) you were a conspiracy theorist and then it went from there. That’s really cool to see it’s from the early 20th century
The first time the phrase was used was in 1863 about the Civil War, but it didn't have a negative connotation, but the history profession didn't exist in the United States. From its usage in 1909, it's clear that historians were using it derogatorily for awhile before that. I think the popularization of the term outside of scholarship came with _The Paranoid Style_ in 1964, but charting popular usage is neigh impossible
@@CynicalHistorian thanks for the detailed reply Cypher!
Thank you.
(I didn't expect so many comments labelling you as a dangerous communist, I'm very naive.)
the principle "you are innocent until proven guilty " simply means
one cannot receive a lawful penalty until the prosecution , which hold you to be guilty , has proven its case in front of the court
the prosecution compel the defendant to be judged , up to holding him/her in detention
else why would anyone care to be judged
One thing I often think about is the process of debunking this kind of work. It seems that it often takes awhile for serious scholarship to catch up with people like this,
Very true. That's the asymmetry principle at work
Subscribed! Thank you for clearing some things up. From a fellow historian, I thank you. So I know perfectly well what cats are like around the microphones LOL.
What's amazing, is that Doris Kearns Goodwin still gets interviewed on PBS.
i know! it's kinda blowing my mind but it just one more thing PBS done
Simon Whistler is not a historia,, but a ex-pat British guy who sounds incredibly posh, and relies on his clippef Foreign Office diction to make him seem much cleverer than he is. He employs a team of writers to churn out scripts for his many channels covering a range of subjects including history, military equipment, true crime, historic buildings, science and technology, etc, etc, in most of which he has little to no expertise, and regularly demonstrates his ignorance by regularly mangling the pronounciation of specific words, names, geographical references and scientific & medical terms, verbal fuck-ups that are glaringly apparent to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the given subject. Only the other day, I heard him refer to the ill fated but much revered Indian mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, as Ramajam! This was as he was holding forth on unsolved problems in mathematics, when he would probably struggle to solve a😅 Soduko. Anyone can mispronounce an unfamiliar word, but its the lengths he goes to sound like he's more of a polymath than Stephen Fry, as a keystone of his don't-argue-I'm-British brand that make his _faux pas_ so worthy of ridicule. So it wouldn't surprise me in the least if he trawls the work of other UA-cam creators for videos he can recycle with a cosmetic rewrite. Given the volume of his output, it can't be down to his intellectual curiosity.
The assertion that English defamation law is "guilty until proven innocent" is a gross oversimplification.
Video is great so far, though I think holyoke is pronounced “Hoe-lee-oak” if it’s in regard to the one in Massachusetts. Minor nit pick, my wife used to bother me about it
Every economist lies shamelessly and never has to explain why their prophecies never turn out right
Spoiler alert! Endorsing and embellishing a lie or expedient or forced narrative STILL does not necessarily constitute TRUTH! We live in a world today where being a historian requires a great deal of courage! People should ask why that is?
I'm a historian of anarchism and anti-fascism, and I thank the algorithm gods for finally recommending a history video that isn't right-wing propaganda or brain-dead regurgitation. Great job! Also, your cat is freaking adorable.
wasn't Mussolini an anarchist?
@@superhetoric LOL what?! He was literally THE fascist! The term came from Italy!
Behind every great historian is a kittykat providing needed harassment services.
Immediately clicked solely due to Foote as I used to watch the Ken Burns Civil War doc in history (civil war) class
😂 So many trolls. He must be doing something right.
Is Philip S. Foner related to Eric Foner?
Yep. They're a whole family of historians
@@CynicalHistorian huh. So a disgraced historian is related to one of the best reconstruction historians (imo)
@@garrettmetting6938 the point there was that Philip S Foner wasn't disgraced though. He was a plagiarist though and I'd guess he'd be disgraced today with the current media environment
This is weird. I wondered why I didn't get a notification, and apparently I'm not subscribed... although I was! 🤨 So, people need to watch out, YT might be "un-subscribing" people without their knowledge. #subscribed👍🏻
Oh man what a bummer. I thought the Ward Churchill think was a case of things being blown out of proportion with the way that conservatives in the 00's used him as part of the culture war agenda to discredit academics, but I didnt know he was such a crank as well. The Stephen Ambrose news is disappointing too, I remember reading Band of Brothers in my teenage years and it lead to a lifelong fascination with the second world war. It's crazy how you can be introduced to a topic with flawed information, yet end up becoming learned by expanding out onto other works.
I've been reading history since IWas 10 years old (I'm 67 now) you have to take every thing you read with a grain of salt.
Bellesiles's name is misspelled in the video title. It's Bellesiles, not Belliselles. Also, the pronunciation of his name is more like bell-EEL.
I love this channel. The content is always great, and I can count on cat content at the end of every episode. 10/10 quality
Growing up as a Ken Burns fan who sparked my historical interest, this makes me want to look into his use of pop historians and how as much as he provokes historical interest, also promotes pseudo history. I particularly get really upset with Shelby Foote as the guy was just a writer and while the documentary The Civil War
paints him as charming and gives him legitimacy, a lot of better scholars were given less time and to me that ruins it and makes me dislike Foote a lot in addition to his lost cause defenses.
Burns....
It's odd to think Cinel could avoid legal charges, for and please read this part slowly, making gay porn films with underage participants, because his accusers were, "homophobic".
If you will kindly excuse me, I now need to go be ill for a while.
Shelby Foote? Man, let me go get my popcorn!
Affirmative action isn’t a good thing
Says the white, heterosexual, Christian male who has never tasted discrimination.
@@tom-kz9pbWant a medal to go with your didn’t earn it job?
It was, racists lied about what it did. Morons believed them.
It sounds like some of these "disgraced historians" are great fiction writers. Just not historians.
Ambrose definitely did a poor turn with his book Band of Brothers. Those misleading, misrepresented & outright changed or eliminated points of fact in several of persons facts REALLY led to major untruths in The tv series...
I also find it hilarious that he among so many advisors for Private Ryan never critiqued the actual story. Like “Spielberg, this plot didnt make sense. No squadron of troops would go into German territory WITH NO Support, One translator who ISNT trained for combat, to find one guy. Like that isn’t an actual order. Why are you having bullets go through water? Why is this framing the fictional soldiers as the greatest generation? That’s a frankly self-gratifying view of the 40s. Also, why are you making the translator this strawman wimp?”
@@bradhorowitz2765 did you type that with your butt?
@@bradhorowitz2765 the reason is that WW2 generation was growing old. And that in the 60s the boomers were feeling guilty about how rebellious they were. So, the idealized the WW2 generation.
@@MrChickennugget360 uhh..maybe? or its the emerging conservative movement? or more mof nsotalgia? afterall, on paper ww2 was the clearest good vs evil battle-unlike the vietnam war. except the greatest generation came home to lynch nonwhite veterans and make deicison sthat led to the vietnam war among other issues. its also worth nothing that america, as most other nations, did not care about the holocaust at all to get involve earlier. kinda makes the whole "greatest generation" myth hard to accept.
@@MrChickennugget360 Some of Easy Company were still around and wrote their own books though. However I always had an issue with Albert Blithe's story given the man survived the war and served a full career career in the Army before dying of an ulcer while on active duty in the 1960s. That was one heck of an oversight although if I remember correctly the explanation for the oversight was Ambrose took some vets' word Blithe died in WWII and didn't check (even then not a great explanation).
Good video. Very interesting opinions. As to Shelby Foote, his opinions are an interesting side to Ken Burn's Civil War. Foote dreams of Pickett's Charge breaking the Union center. Anyone who studies the Civil War should know what the Lost Cause is all about, propaganda and not history. I met people in Georgia that believe in the tenets of the Lost Cause. The ripples of the Civil War can still be felt today. The best Civil War historian, IMHO, is Bruce Catton.
I have a particular affinity for David Prior, but he was one of my professors - even helped with the creation of my Lost Cause episode
@@CynicalHistorian Thank you for your reply.
Can writing history be anything other than a political act?
25:57 i wont watch any video with that guy in it on general principle. Good to see my intuition is right.
Someone who puts out that many videos cant have time to research properly even with a team.
Thanks! Have commented on this and others of your videos.
What does the historian community think of Stephen Halbrook? Books like _Gun Control and the Third Reich._ He's a lawyer, not a historian, but he wrote a ton about how gun control allegedly promotes dictatorships.
Thanks!
The first disgraced historian in the USA might have been Woodrow Wilson
Sadly never disgraced
@@CynicalHistorian he is in the eyes of us and definitely in yours, and that means a lot!
Did Wilson,for his many flaws,ever actually violate the standards of Historical work,or was he just,like every white academic until C.Vann Woodward, naive about black history?
He set the course for the present day, in 1913.
The comparative firepower of the English war bow relative to the musket has been commented on by many writers. The simple fact is that the rate of fire a trained bowman could achieve could not be matched with the musket. In terms of accuracy neither would win prizes, at least not under battle conditions. The bowmen would shoot off their arrows at a 40 or so degrees angle towards the enemy and if they were massed up, which they tended to be, they’d find targets readily enough. Muskets had smooth bore barrels and fired a round ball that had no means of stabilization. In addition, machining tolerances with which the barrels were made were notional. At more than 40 paces accuracy was not a thing, but it didn’t need to be. Again, it was the massing of the ranks that ensured that targets were found. In other words when Sessiles or whatever his name was, wrote that bows were more effective than muskets, he was right. Maybe he misquoted his sources or something.
Why did armies relinquish the bow in favor of the musket then? Two reasons:
- Psychological ones. Firing a volley by the massed ranks of a regiment of soldiers makes a hell of a lot noise and it is scary.
- Training. It takes years, if not decades, to train a bowman. English kings obliged the men throughout their realm to train with bow and arrow weekly. They would do that after mass on Sundays. You can still see the scores in the archways of the village churches throughout England and Wales where the men would sharpen their arrowheads. In contrast firing and reloading a musket can be taught in a matter of weeks.
I can't believe people listen to this guy, the background is a huge red flag.
Those darn books
@@CynicalHistorian I was talking about the flapping red background.
@@punksci6879 I would be concerned if there were stars and strip flapping in the background
How long have economists pretended to be sociologists, historians, biologists, political scientists, etc?
Probably about as long as engineers have been pretending to be physicists, biologists, and geologists.
@@FabricofTime Yeah, but at least engineers will have to STUDY those. I mean, look at Bill Nye, he actually understands scientific principles. What's surprising is when engineers are so ignorance of science, and there's a disturbing amount of them
Economists _are_ all those things. There are no hard walls between the social 'sciences;' they all blend. The difference is more the approach/methodology than the topic, even if specific topics gave rise to those methodologies.
As we know economics isn't a science.
@wankertanker1813 It depends on how you define "science." If the methodology of science is being applied to an area of study, it is science. Psychology can be philosophers pontificating, or it can rigorous experiments set up with statistical analysis. Hypotheses are made and everything is operational defined.
Is Psychology any more murky than the world of quantum physics?
I'm guessing economics is similar.
Recently, someone posted on a Shelby Foote Facebook fan page words to the effect that as much as he enjoys Foote's work, Foote was not really an historian. One commenter in particular was furious and attacked the poster (with words, of course!). That response really took me aback. Foote, as you noted here, is an engaging speaker and storyteller, but not an actual historian. I think his work is important for its perspective and context from the Lost Cause aspect, and relevant due to the large number of fourth- or fifth-generation Lost Causers that exist, but we shouldn't refer to Foote as a historian. Burns identified him in the documentary as "Writer," and that's what he was.
Great video, you should make a part 2 for other historians. I didn’t know that Goodwin had problems with some of her books.
31:40 er, the accurate terminology is not "CP" and it's definitely not "underage p0rn" 🤨 please use CSAM going forward