Monday, June 04, 2012

Getting Jefferson Wrong

David Barton is a strange fellow, who has built is reputation on the dubious platform of telling lies about the Founding Fathers -- as well as the more conservative-friendly strategy of bashing college professors.  (Hey, it was how William F. Buckley and Dinesh D'Souza got started.)

Apparently, some college professors are fighting back.  Not the relativist /deconstructionist/ poststructuralist types against whom Barton fulminates, but rather a pair from Grove City College, a Christian school conservative enough that its mission statement explicitly rejects "secularism and relativism."

Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter have recently published Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President.   Here's a review by RD's Paul Harvey; here's a link to the book.  Here is Throckmorton and Coulter's website.

Our own life has been blessedly unimpaired by the likes of Barton; we like our history reality-based, and so do most of the people around us.  But if you've had to deal with this guy's acolytes, you may want to check out Throckmorton and Coulter.

1 comment:

Mark Christianson said...

I saw Barton's book at the bookstore over the weekend. I thought the title (The Jefferson Lies) was rather ironic.