The Chronicle: Colloquy: Responses

As a historian, I think Todd Gitlin makes an excellent suggestion: Morris's book should not be listed under history. This book plainly crosses borders that should not be crossed; one cannot make up sources, fake footnotes, create characters, and call it history. Post-modern blather aside, there is a difference between fact and fiction; that does not mean the past is fully recoverable, or that language knows no limits, but simply that the historian's craft is to evoke the past using the historical record. Morris is clearly practicing a different craft, and I for one do not accept it. If this were his dissertation, I would not sign it.

: -- Tim Tyson, Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison (posted 10/18, 10:40 a.m., E.D.T.)

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