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just damn wrong
Aug. 17th, 2012 11:25 amI read this interesting piece in Foreign Affairs about the TV series Deadwood (why is a journal on foreign policy publishing editorials about television and 19th century American history? I have no effing clue). And it makes a number of good points. But one remark early in the piece set my blood boiling.
I could not, without a great deal of time spent and hard work, have contrived a more foolish, wrong-headed, ignorant, preposterous, or self-hating piece of drivel. The writer is, apparently, a professor of history. If this is the state of history teaching in higher education in America, no wonder so few people find history interesting or bother learning it.
A huge part of history is *all about* how people cursed or dressed or died--in other words, how they lived. To think that this necessitates the obscuration of the grand themes of human existence, or that hardship and disappointment are not an important part of those grand themes is to demonstrate a breath-taking failure of imagination, of humanity, and of one's role as a professional historian. ETA: Actually, the more carefully I read this piece the worse it gets. Strawmen, poor factual accuracy, vague generalizations. *sigh*
Of course, audiences should not expect Westerns to be lessons on how people cursed or dressed or died on the frontier. Imposing the rules of history on the genre would mire its grander themes in the mud of hardship and disappointment that covered ordinary life in the Old West.
I could not, without a great deal of time spent and hard work, have contrived a more foolish, wrong-headed, ignorant, preposterous, or self-hating piece of drivel. The writer is, apparently, a professor of history. If this is the state of history teaching in higher education in America, no wonder so few people find history interesting or bother learning it.
A huge part of history is *all about* how people cursed or dressed or died--in other words, how they lived. To think that this necessitates the obscuration of the grand themes of human existence, or that hardship and disappointment are not an important part of those grand themes is to demonstrate a breath-taking failure of imagination, of humanity, and of one's role as a professional historian. ETA: Actually, the more carefully I read this piece the worse it gets. Strawmen, poor factual accuracy, vague generalizations. *sigh*
