Newspaper Article

The Founding Father

Marty, Myron, Special to the Post-Dispatch

2004

Overview

[Joseph Ellis] quickly admitted his guilt, was suspended without pay for a year by Mount Holyoke and suffered immeasurable shame. Given his tarnished record, should he now be welcomed back into the ranks of credible and influential historians? Does his imagination perhaps run out of control in his research and writing? [Peter Charles Hoffer] addresses these questions in \"Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History.\" The Ellis case is one of four Hoffer treats in \"Past Imperfect.\" He makes no attempt to excuse the misrepresentations based on shoddy research made by Michael Bellesiles in \"Arming America.\" Reviewing it in the Post-Dispatch, I, like many reviewers, including the committee that awarded Bellesiles the Bancroft Prize, did not question his scholarship. I called it \"an erudite, convincing book.\" Now we know better. Despite the sound scholarship in this book, Hoffer probably cannot expect to be treated gently by the right-tilting pundits and politicians who attacked Bellesiles, [Doris Kearns Goodwin] and Ellis and, a decade ago, assailed the National History Standards. ([Stephen Ambrose] was faulted primarily by other historians.) Watch for them to dig for flaws in \"Past Imperfect\" and to go after him mercilessly if they can find them.

• Publisher: Pulitzer, Inc
• Subject: Books-titles / Historians / Hoffer, Peter Charles / Nonfiction / Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History