Friday, May 25, 2007
History & Plagarism
Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, both prominent popular historians, have suffered through plagarism scandals. Ambrose, it seems, just brushed it off without any apology. Goodwin, on the other hand, acknowledged mistakes, attributing them to a flawed system of note-taking. The History New Network provides an extensive survey of the unfolding controversy at .
This controversy underscores the urgency of proper note-taking and footnoting. I'm guessing that this controversy will have spawned some instruction essays about how to do it correctly. I'll try to track those down.
The HNN review alludes to Harvard's Associate Director of Expository Writing Gordon C. Harvey and his Writing With Sources. HNN further reported that "on Saturday morning, April 13, members of the Organization of American History (OAH), attending their annual convention in Washington, D.C., crowded into the Renaissance hotel auditorium to hear Robert Caro, Nell Irvin Painter and Goodwin talk about the secrets of vivid writing. Goodwin, however, was a no-show. Sitting in her place was Richard Smith, who'd been drafted on Monday as a last-minute substitute." This symposium was carried on C-Span.
In another article about Goodwin, this time about her book about Lincoln, HNN writes: "In 2001, in a review of McCullough's John Adams titled "America Made Easy," Princeton's Sean Wilentz denounced a series of big-selling biographers for supplying "pleasant uplift" instead of reality and rigor."
Further along in the article, HNN reports that "Wilentz dismissed popular historians as purveyors of what he disgustedly called "narrative, narrative, narrative." But that is Goodwin's natural element. Lyndon Johnson, she once argued, equated votes with love; in her own life a connection got made early on between love and storytelling. In the late 1940s, when her father would get home from work, young Doris would reconstruct the Dodgers games she'd heard on the radio. As she explains in her memoir, Wait Till Next Year (1997), her recitations instilled in her the "naïve confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did." A "Note on Sources" to No Ordinary Time delights in her "favorite details" of the Roosevelt saga, and for a historian she uses the word "incredible," at least in conversation, to a peculiar degree. Her editor seems finally to have broken her of a tendency, notable in the Kennedy and Roosevelt books, to dapple the page with exclamation points, but even so, enthusiasm remains evident in the mature style she's achieved, one that's unpretentious and companionable...." [SOURCE:]
This controversy underscores the urgency of proper note-taking and footnoting. I'm guessing that this controversy will have spawned some instruction essays about how to do it correctly. I'll try to track those down.
The HNN review alludes to Harvard's Associate Director of Expository Writing Gordon C. Harvey and his Writing With Sources. HNN further reported that "on Saturday morning, April 13, members of the Organization of American History (OAH), attending their annual convention in Washington, D.C., crowded into the Renaissance hotel auditorium to hear Robert Caro, Nell Irvin Painter and Goodwin talk about the secrets of vivid writing. Goodwin, however, was a no-show. Sitting in her place was Richard Smith, who'd been drafted on Monday as a last-minute substitute." This symposium was carried on C-Span.
In another article about Goodwin, this time about her book about Lincoln, HNN writes: "In 2001, in a review of McCullough's John Adams titled "America Made Easy," Princeton's Sean Wilentz denounced a series of big-selling biographers for supplying "pleasant uplift" instead of reality and rigor."
Further along in the article, HNN reports that "Wilentz dismissed popular historians as purveyors of what he disgustedly called "narrative, narrative, narrative." But that is Goodwin's natural element. Lyndon Johnson, she once argued, equated votes with love; in her own life a connection got made early on between love and storytelling. In the late 1940s, when her father would get home from work, young Doris would reconstruct the Dodgers games she'd heard on the radio. As she explains in her memoir, Wait Till Next Year (1997), her recitations instilled in her the "naïve confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did." A "Note on Sources" to No Ordinary Time delights in her "favorite details" of the Roosevelt saga, and for a historian she uses the word "incredible," at least in conversation, to a peculiar degree. Her editor seems finally to have broken her of a tendency, notable in the Kennedy and Roosevelt books, to dapple the page with exclamation points, but even so, enthusiasm remains evident in the mature style she's achieved, one that's unpretentious and companionable...." [SOURCE:
# posted by Tom Colvin @ 10:05 AM 
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Hello Tom! Thanks so much for commenting on my blog. I'll be adding your blog to my link column, if you don't mind. :-)
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