Historians' agendas
Written by seaspeas on 2008-02-21 11:30:42
As a former graduate student in history, I can attest to the fact that the history department in most universities is one of the most liberal cohorts on the entire campus. Just as an example, when I was teaching a course dealing with early American history, one of the topics was the Second Amendment. My professor explicitly told me not to honor as legitimate any responses that suggested the Second Amendment allowed people to own firearms for personal use. He said "that just isn't historically accurate." I was shocked that his own radical interpretation (which he has a right to have) was to be established as truth rather than a source of discussion.
I ultimately led the discussion section as an open-minded teacher should, accepting comments and arguments about both sides of the issue.
The point here is that I am not surprised that a group of university historians, who derive their only legitimacy from the letters after their names, filed on behalf of a failed policy of gun control.
Read their brief carefully. You will notice that they mention frequently that original statements referred to the right of protection, but they manage to move on without accepting the significance. In history, all documents and events are about understanding the significance, and these historians chose to analyze the importance of statements only when they adhered to their world view.
I was chastised early in graduate school for supposedly developing my own opinion first and then proceeding to find facts to back it up. And rightfully so, because that's not objective history, and it's exactly what these professors did.
A further irony is that they criticize others who pick and choose statements for political expediency, when they are just as guilty of that themselves. Only their crime is worse because they hide behind an impenetrable status of "professors" who have been doing this kind of work for years.
What's right is right. No amount of neo-Progressive revisionist history will change the truth. History departments today are infatuated with cultural and social history, fields whose foundations rest upon relativism and a refusal to assert anything as truth, only "our interpretations of what is true."
Owning firearms was not something given to us by the Constitution. It was a natural right that was -protected- by the Constitution. To interpret it any other way is to deny the authors' intentions and, thus, history itself. |
