Word: insightfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that their sense of what constitutes proper behavior by a U.S. President is not so different from my own. But I am shocked to learn that the men responsible for delivering the news to such a large segment of the U.S. population could be so lacking in insight that they were surprised by the transcripts' revelations...
...better historian than other men, Jules Michelet once observed, it is because I have a larger table. The French historian's graceful bow to the supremacy of broad and easily retrievable research over insight has now been carried to devastating extremes by the authors of this provocative book. Fogel, 47, is a professor of economics and history at the universities of Chicago and Rochester. Engerman, 38, is professor of economics and history at Rochester. Together they are the leading edge of a new wing of historians known as cliometricians because their methods marry Clio, the muse of history...
Because the book also takes up the authors' beliefs about how so many historians misread the past-through misuse of figures, inadequate training in economics and statistics, reliance on isolated eyewitness accounts and subjective "impressions"-it offers a fascinating insight into how historians work, and how living political attitudes affect views of the dead past. Any stigma will do to beat a vicious dogma. Accordingly, says Time on the Cross, the trail of historical error began with the rhetorical zeal of abolitionists. Justly considering slavery a crime against God and man, they did not hesitate to exaggerate its iniquities...
Slippery Statistics. Traditional historians already regard the sociologists and statisticians now invading their discipline as so many Visigoths likely to ruin the already declining quality of written history, substitute accounting for breadth of vision and insight, and eventually relegate old-school historians to peripheral pursuits like intellectual history. In the past, the humanists have managed to hold off the invasion with light scholarly musket fire. Statistics and averages are misleading. (Everyone knows the story of the nonswimming statistician who drowned in trying to wade a river with an average depth of three feet.) Sociologists are well known for expending...
Jack's language was cleaner than Dick's. This insight into the comparative virtues of the Administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Nixon was made last week in the Washington Post by JFK's press secretary Pierre Salinger. If transcripts of Kennedy's Oval Office conversations existed, asserts Pierre, they would have revealed Jack's easy authority over his staff. There would have been no need to have the letter P placed before his utterances, as it is in the Nixon transcripts, because Kennedy aides always called the boss "Sir" or "Mr. President." Pierre burnishes...