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Just when historians of the United States were booking flights for their 2005 annual meeting in San Francisco, the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the sponsoring scholarly society, announced that the conference would be moving to San Jose. Anyone familiar with the charms of these two cities will appreciate the sacrifice the OAH was making. The reason for the change was a hotel union dispute in which the OAH sided with labor. In the History News Network's online forum, several historians weighed in on the decision. Not surprisingly, the majority of responses, mainly from social and labor historians, affirmed the OAH. On the other hand, a couple of historians objected to the politicizing of the profession. One of these, Alonzo Hamby, distinguished professor of history at Ohio University, asserted, "[T]he OAH exists to promote the study of history and advance the interests of its members. One of the ways it does this is by holding a well-planned, accessible annual convention with scholarly panels, an exhibition hall, and functioning employment services." Hamby did not indicate that these responsibilities included avoiding cities like San Jose, but he did write that no matter the politics of individual historians, the OAH was acting irresponsibly.

Past Imperfect by Peter Charles Hoffer Public Affairs, 2004 287 pp. $26

Peter Charles Hoffer's Past Imperfect ends where the OAH's decision began. Reviewing a series of recent scandals among scholars of American history, Hoffer laments a situation in which learned societies like the OAH can take the union's side in a labor dispute but refuse to enforce scholarly standards. Hoffer examines specifically the plagiarism cases of Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, the falsification of documents by Michael Bellesiles, and Joseph Ellis' distortion of his own past. Hoffer had served on the Professional Division of the American Historical Association (AHA), the other major professional historical organization in the United States. The task of this committee was to ensure that historians maintained historical standards, and to evaluate those cases, such as the four cited here, where scholars had apparently violated professional norms. What the AHA's committee did, however, was to turn tail and run. It had to. As Hoffer explains, in 2003 the AHA instructed the committee to stop hearing complaints about cases of professional misconduct.

Hoffer's book, then, is a bit of kiss and tell, revealing how he would have adjudicated the cases of Ambrose, Goodwin, Bellesiles, and Ellis, given the authority to do so. He concludes by noting an irony of the AHA's decision to abandon adjudication of scholarly breaches: in 1995, the organization moved its annual meeting at considerable expense from Cincinnati to Chicago because of city ordinances that discriminated against homosexuals; but in 2003 the AHA lacked the resolve to condemn plagiarism and lying within the profession. If professional historians could collectively decide not to tolerate sexual or racial discrimination, Hoffer concludes, "It is long past time for all of us who teach and write history to take the same kind of stand against professional malfeasance."

This sentence ends the book and gives some indication of the crisis afflicting the historical profession. It is a twofold problem. One part is the growing gap between the experts and the amateurs. Who will control the narrative of America's past: distinguished chairs from Ivy League universities, or the overweight office manager squeezing into a gray uniform to reenact the Battle of Bull Run? Will it be the staff of historical museums, or best-selling authors? The second aspect of the crisis—more or less a consequence of the first—is the public's loss of confidence in professional historians. Here is Hoffer's posing of the predicament: "Economists, political scientists, journalists, and cable television's fast-talking all-purpose pundits have taken the scholars' place as spokespeople for our past and oracles of our future." The reason for such professional usurpation, he suggests, is historians' own "fascination with the arcane and obscure, amounting at times to intellectual narcissism," thereby cutting their "ties to ordinary readers." "Once upon a time," Hoffer writes, "history meant everything to Americans, and historians were revered and trusted. . . . But not today, and perhaps not tomorrow."

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