In Denial
Historians, Communism & Espionage
Chapter One
Revising History
Studying historians and their methods is, for the most
part, the stuff of boring graduate seminars. It means
taking one step back from the actual events and people
that make history interesting and dramatic. Generally
it requires tedious discussion of sources and
methods, among other technical issues, and carping about interpretations
of documents or recondite epistemological questions.
But historiographic debates can also be illuminating, and it is
important that they be allowed to run their course.
In 2000, to take one prominent example, a historiographic
argument moved out of the seminar and into a British court and
the international public square when David Irving, a British writer,
sued American historian Deborah Lipstadt. Irving charged that
Lipstadt had libeled him by labeling him a Holocaust denier in
a book devoted to that topic. A prodigious researcher and prolific
writer, Irving did not deny that he had maintained in books,
in speeches and on his website that there were no gas chambers
at Ausch ... read full excerpt from: In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage ebook
