As the host of the first monthly installment of the Carnival of Bad History, I’m happy to report that July has been a great month for atrocious history. And so without further ado....
Let’s start things off with a riddle:
Q: What do the White House and Lake Wobegon have in common?
A: All their inhabitants are above average—though some are more so than others.
HNN and the Chronicle of Higher Ed carry summaries of a recent study by UC-Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, who claims to have estimated the IQs of all 42 American presidents. According to Simonton, all have been above average in intelligence, but George Bush’s likely IQ of 125 falls below that of most other presidents (don’t worry, though—Simonton assures us that Bush is “certainly smart enough to be president of the United States"). Some further nuggets: John Quincy Adams was the smartest president; Thomas Jefferson was pretty sharp too; Andrew Johnson, not so much. If someone has access to the full article in Political Psychology, please let us know about Chester Arthur.
Nazi alert: At Atlantic Review, Joerg Wolf wonders why the National Review compared Joschka Fischer to Nazi Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and why some English-language commentators seemed so confused about what anthem German fans sang at the World Cup (hint: you didn’t hear them singing "Deutschland über alles").
And since you can’t throw a proper Carnival of Bad History without Holocaust deniers as well as Nazi references, here’s a press release about a courageous—but anonymous—group that claims it’s distributing a questionnaire to professional historians all around the world to find out why Holocaust “revisionists” get no respect. Hmmm ... maybe it’s the really bad history? Anyway, keep an eye on those faculty mailboxes!
Build it, and they will imitate it: At Interesting Thing of the Day, Joe Kissell explores how Bavaria’s Ludwig II wanted to create the appearance of a medieval castle without sacrificing mod cons or his taste for Wagner, and ended up shaping the face of American theme park architecture. See Joe's post on Neuschwanstein Castle .
From faux medieval castles to war faux-tographs:: Brett Holman of Revise and Dissent submits some images of air and ground warfare for your consideration: Am I fake or not? (Cross posted at Airminded).
Best of the worst: Ahistoricality recently rounded up his/her own favorite examples of bad historical analogies and arguments from the past year for Ahistoricality Index Alert.
To celebrate the 4th of July, Andrew Rihn offered Happy Filipino-American Friendship Day at And time yet for a hundred indecisions.
Bad History in the Classroom? Dr. History ventures where many fear to tread, surveying student complaints about professors’ biased teaching at NoIndoctrination.org. The good doctor finds Historians More Likely to Indoctrinate Students and asks why that might be.
One fruitful source of bad history lies in the impulse to justify present policies by reference to the past. Sometimes, that’s because pundits and politicians just get the history flat-out wrong. Often, it’s because the analogies they attempt to draw are fundamentally inapt. And what’s almost as fun as the bad analogies themselves (my recent favorite is Military Tribunals = Lend Lease = The Emancipation Proclamation, courtesy of John Yoo) is the complaining from each side about the other’s alleged misuse of history. Meilleur Disque Dur Externe
Harry Truman, for example, has been caught in a recent tug of war between supporters and opponents of the Bush Administration, with each side accusing the other of the dread crime of historical revisionism. And the nastiness hasn’t stopped yet. Meilleur Imprimante 3D
Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens has been policing what he sees as faulty comparisons between the current Iraq war on the one hand and previous wars in Vietnam and Algeria on the other. In strictly historical terms, Hitch may get the better of his opponents, but at the cost of illustrating another principle: a bad historical analogy may weaken your argument, but swatting down someone else’s bad analogy doesn’t necessarily make your own case any stronger.
Obviously, plenty of folks out there are having no trouble writing bad history. But if you’re unsure how to get in the game yourself—not to worry. Jonathan Wilson of The Elfin Ethicist has you covered, with his pointers on How to write tendentious history. Meilleur Stylo 3D
One final tip: bad prose can make bad history deliciously worse. Fortunately, help is available at the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (you know, the folks whose motto is “Where ‘www’ means ‘wretched writers welcome.’ ”) Check out the recently announced 2006 winners, and be sure to scroll down to the historical fiction category, where Carmen Fought of Diamond Bar, California, won runner up for this:
The McCain boys strode off proudly to fight in the Civil War, one for the Union and one for the Confederacy, neither of them giving a single thought to who would play them in the television movie of their story, which would be decided more than a hundred years later by 20-something casting agents who kept getting the Civil War and World War II mixed up. Meilleur GPS en 2018
OK, folks, that’s it for this edition of the Carnival of Bad History. Thanks for dropping by, and thanks to everyone who submitted entries.
The next Carnival of Bad History will be hosted at Liberty and Power on August 21. You can submit your blog article using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
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