HISTORY: Historians

Tim Brown says:

"This has become a fascinating series. But how do you handle an even greater problem than that of history being written by the victors. Even more fundamentally, it is written by the very literate, leaving out of the process most of humanity, be they poor, undereducated or, during most of history, merely women. Were I convinced that academic historians were all, or almost all, seekers after the truth, neither problem would be unsurmountable. Regrettably, at least in my own field, which is mostly modern Latin America, most academics seem only to be seekers of the ideologically useful and/or correct, and damn the truth, with tenure and peer review weapons used to impose political censorship not promote intellectual freedom. How does one overcome these problems?"

My comment: Tim is correct. Peer review is often a form of censorship.

Ronald Hilton - 8/16/00