Word: handlins
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What specific insights? Handlin felt they were important enough to uphold entire works, but not relevant enough to explain to his readers...
...Handlin includes a string of essays for the new historian on how to deal with evidence more carefully: how to read a word, count a number and so on. He cites an under current of feeling in historical writing call "faction," a bungling combination of fact and fiction. For the '70s, faction appears to be in vogue...
...Handlin calls Gore Vidal's Burr and 1876 "inventions that disguised the poisonous portrayal of the early Republic in a fantastic tale of corruption, greed and sex." In a chapter entitled "The Diet of a Ravenous Public," Handlin rips the 'factional' historians to shreds. He assails Ragtime, calling "racial prejudice the crutch on which the book limps along," and renders equal treatment to critics that lapped...
Poor Professor Handlin--his true life's work has been abused and distorted by faction writers. Mario Puzo, author of Fortunate Pilgrim, betrayed the historical method in fabricating "the shiny Godfarther" less than ten years later. And television, that boxed perpetrator of evil, flaunts docudramas such as "Washington Behind Closed Doors," and "Truman at Potsdam...
...Handlin has even found the recipe. Take a family, black not Italian, he says and trace it back to Africa. Make sure it's your history recalled by your grandmother and no one will know the difference because you are its living witness. Handlin says Haley really added yeast to his story when he devoted "85 per cent of his attention to the period before the Civil War, the time least subject to reader verification, the time most readily freighted with nostalgia and fantasy for their benefit...