"A well-credentialed academic historian makes ridiculous and poorly researched claims which became widely accepted by professional historians."
This applies to so-called historian Robert Conquest, too, who received an adulatory obituary in the New York Times yesterday (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/arts/international/robert-conquest-historian-who-documented-soviet-horrors-dies-at-98.html). He is the source of major falsehoods about the Soviet Union during the Stalin years. Perched at the Hoover Institution, Conquest's method of research was: if we do not have evidence sufficient to draw our desired conclusion, we may take an unverified statement or anecdote as well-founded and interpret it so as to get to our (anti-communist) conclusion. After Conquest became famous, a few historians like J. Arch Getty disproved his major contentions, but they did not dare attack him directly. The NY Times ignores them. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
