According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books.
There are none.
According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.”
The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history.
True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R. G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism.
Niall Ferguson | “History and Anti-History” | September 5, 2024
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Thank you for posting this, Dr Clark. I was hoping that Niall Ferguson would publish a response.
Thanks for sending this interview with Andrew Roberts!
Does the Heidelblog have an introduction to history resource page? I heard you talking about a resource page on writing techniques, Dr. Clark. What about history and philosophy?
God Bless all the staff, Keep the good work.
João de Sousa Luz – São Paulo – Brazil
We don’t. I’m sorry. Will try to work on this.
It used to be the Left was responsible for revisionism of history. Now, it’s Christians-see David Barton, embraced in many home school curriculums, and a sorry lot on the Right. Amazing.
Hard to believe that some on the right do the historical revisionism practices similar to Howard Zinn and the left, but we are there. Doubly tragic when Christians do this, such as David Barton, and then have home schoolers use his material. In such a way, is ignorance perpetuated.