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EXCERPT:
Three graduate students sat around a table with the great historian Forrest McDonald. In the twilight of his career, he no longer taught anyone that he didn’t himself choose. That mostly meant only a handful of master’s and doctoral level students. I was fortunate to be one of them. In a 2016 obituary, the New York Times called him the “historian who punctured liberal notions,” and no notion, liberal or otherwise, did he take more glee in puncturing than poor scholarship. On this occasion, McDonald, who wasn’t particularly religious, began our discussion by holding up a copy of Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller A Distant Mirror, a history of the fourteenth century, and read aloud this passage from her forward:
“While I recognize [Christianity’s] presence [in the Middle Ages], it requires a more religious bent than mine to identify with it.”
McDonald closed the book demonstratively and tossed it on the table.
“And with that,” he declared, “read no further and throw it in the trash. Tuchman casually informs the reader in the opening pages that she hasn’t bothered to understand the mindset of the period about which she has presumed to write a history. Since the Christian faith is unimportant to her, she dismisses it as unimportant to her subject. What insight can she possibly offer about the motivations of the people of that time? Tuchman is admitting that she has no authority to write such a book.”1