Word: handline
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...collection of ominous essays and magazine reprints, Handlin charges his profession with moral violations. He grades each period of historical study and finds the record worsening with time--giving the lowest marks to the 1970s. But historians began slipping up much earlier, altogether missing the goal of accurate interpretation...
...Handlin partially blames the discipline itself with the failure to stick to its moral rules. In a preposterous effort to attract students to college history departments, Handling says, the "misdirected search for clients obscured the genuine values of the discipline." History tried too hard to be like other social sciences and bend with the times. Students wanted something useful in the real world, but history's archaic tenants failed to fit the description. So some professors tried to bend with the times like other social scientists, which as Handlin said, could only lead to the end of the discipline...
...have no fear history majors, Handlin is here to save...
Inattention to research skills inevitably leads to the problems in telling the truth, he argues, Handlin pokes his finger here and there at the naughty historians, mentioning places and points where they have strayed from the ideal. However, his explanation of what went wrong doesn't surface until halfway through the book, after he gives a detailed list of research how-tos for the history major. Handlin repeatedly argues that speculation on the psychological behavior of historical figures does not belong in a history book: subjective data on Hitler's bisexuality or Nixon's insecurity are the stuff of trashy...
...Handlin has sharp words for those who have fallen prey to the theory-without-evidence mode of historical accounting. He believes in sticking to the facts--even though at times the "provable facts" were actually incorrect. Works such as U.B. Phillips' American Negro Slavery, written in 1929, distorted the facts of history when they included as a "proven fact" that blacks were racially inferior. Although we are never told quite why, Handlin finds these illusions forgivable...