By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Even scholars fall for bunk history.
Andy Schocket, a professor of history and director of American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, knows a lot of the historians who provided promotional blurbs that appear on the back of Michael Bellesiles’ “Arming America: The Origins of American Gun Culture.”
“These are really good historians,” Schocket said.
The book argues that gun ownership and violence was rare before the Civil War, and that the current gun culture is wholly the product of a campaign by arms manufacturers.
“Arming America” even won a prestigious prize from Columbia University.
“The only one problem with the book is that it’s entirely bunk,” Schocket said.
That became clear when scholars started to look at the book’s evidence and logic. Bellesiles’ employer Emory University convened a commission to investigate concerns about the book’s scholarship. That commission concluded the book “foundered by a consistently biased reading of sources and careless use of evidence.”
Bellesiles no longer teaches at Emory. The prize was rescinded, and the publisher pulled the book, though the author has since republished it privately.
Schocket recently spoke on “Bunk Peddlers: Alternative History and Why It Matters.”
He first distinguished bunk history from alternative history, a genre of fiction that builds its stories based on history taking a divergent path. Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” being a prime example.
Bunk history, he said, adopts the methodology and trappings of history – “you’ve got to have footnotes, that makes it history” – but it “presents a preconceived conclusion” in search of proof.
This includes Holocaust deniers and those who promote the “pernicious false claim” that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights, not slavery.
These narratives “become weaponized in public debate as a way to bolster one’s side in the current political debate.”
Schocket also looked at David Barton’s “The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson.”
The book contends that Jefferson opposed slavery and argues despite “the pretty much overwhelming evidence” that did not father the children of Sally Hemmings, a woman he held as a slave. It also contends he believed in conventional form of Christianity.
“Jefferson Lies” won the praise of conservative pundits, was a bestseller, and also won a prize as “the least credible history book in print” by the History News Network website. The book’s publisher also withdrew it only to have the author get it reprinted.
Barton repeatedly takes facts out of context, Schocket said. At one point, Barton contends the phrase “propagating the gospel among Indians” in a bill Jefferson signed as proof of his faith. Problem is, Schocket said, that phrase is actually part of the name of the religious group involved in the land transaction that was the subject of the bill.
Bunk history is not just promulgated in books. Schocket’s third example was a 42-page pamphlet “The Truth about Jim Crow” published by the American Civil Rights Union.
Schocket said as much as he appreciates any light shone on the repressive and violent mechanisms that kept freed African Americans in virtual servitude, this pamphlet has another agenda.
Jim Crow laws, it spelled out, were Dehumanizing, Deadly, and Democratic, as in the political party.
Quoting Meatloaf, Schocket opined: “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
While the pamphlet’s cataloguing of Jim Crow’s ills get it right, its claim that this is solely the work of Democrats is a result of willfully ignoring evidence. The Republicans gave up on Reconstruction in order to get their candidate Ohio’s Rutherford B. Hayes elected. During the resurgence of the KKK in the early 20th century from Maine to Oregon, the hate group emerged mostly in states controlled by Republicans, including Ohio.
Keeping the system of racial oppression in place, Schocket said was the work of both political parties.
And later in the century when civil rights legislation was proposed it was opposed by many Democrats, but the clearest predictor of whether someone would vote against it was if they represented a state that had been part of the Confederacy.
“The Truth about Jim Crow,” Schocket said, “contradicts even a casual understanding of evidence. It’s bunk.”
But why do people, even historians, fall for it?
Schocket said it comes down to well-documented patterns of thinking – anchoring and confirmation bias.
Anchoring means if someone is given an idea that will “influence future choices or decisions, regardless of other information you should be processing.”
Similar, yet distinct, is “confirmation bias, “the propensity to seek information that confirms… our world view and dismiss evidence that disputes our worldview.”
These flawed patterns of thinking are evident in all disciplines. Among his examples was a study of experts working at the Pentagon in which their biases were identified and pointed out to them ahead of time. But they still exhibited these thought patterns. Those who were most knowledgeable were more susceptible, he said.
Some disciplines, such as critical studies, anthropology, and gender studies, incorporate some self-reflection that involves “thinking about your position in relation to your subject.”
That’s “a good place to start,” he said. “It’s necessary but not sufficient. … It still doesn’t get to the cognitive biases that underlie all the ways we think.”
He called for a practice that “integrates these sort of insights into how we are thinking, into our scholarly practice, and into our teaching at very fundamental levels.”
That means “examining how we think … when we encounter our material.
“Our brain is a tool, no less than any other instrument we use. It has marvelous capabilities, but also limitations, and the better we understand all those, the better we’ll know how to think,” he said.
“So we’ll never get rid of bunk history or bunk anything else as long as we’re human. But maybe thinking about bunk history can help us inch toward what we strive for in all the broad liberal arts, to better equip us to navigate the world and better understand what it means to be human.”
