This day was a bit of an odd one as we clearly fell a bit behind in the additional non-textbook readings and did all of them today rather than the days they were assigned for, one of these was an article called “Quarrel over Weimar Book” which was supposed to be discussed on Wednesday but we spent all class talking about Ranke instead.

The lecture started with covering relativism in history rather than objectivity. We did this by reading a passage from a book by Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob. It argues against Ranke’s idea of a complete, objective, history. These three argue that history is relative to who is telling it, and as history democratized it has changed. It used to be dominated by upper class white men, which my professor joked that he is one except the upper class part, but then more women and other marginalized people joined academia and things shifted. This lead into the reading “Quarrel Over Weimar Book,” here’s the article if you want to read it, I think it may be of interest to you. So the main idea of this article was about a guy named David Abraham, his book The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, and his fall from grace. The book is about how a very progressive social democracy could fall into fascism, and Abraham argues that it was the role of big businesses, which is a Marxist perspective although I am unsure if Abraham is/was a Marxist at all. When I looked it up I found this article from HistoricalMaterialism dot org, and they call him a Marxist but I still don’t know. But anyway, a historian named Henry Turner, who was actually cited here on Lemmygrad in a thread on CapitalismInDecay, had a problem with Abraham’s book and went on a sort of witch hunt to destroy this book and Abraham. It is all described in the NYT article but I will detail what was discussed in class. Turner went to Germany to check Abraham’s sources, turns out Abraham miss-quoted a lot. Why didn’t peer reviewers catch this? Well because they are not paid to do that, peer reviewers get essentially nothing for their labour and because of that they don’t have time or funds to just fly to Germany to sift through the archives. There is also a level of professionalism and trust the peer reviewers expect from authors so that can also make errors possible. The class was pretty hard on Abraham, saying that his mistakes were deliberate and that he was being too flippant in addressing this controversy (what with saying that all books have mistakes). It was then said that Abraham’s main argument was apparently that Capitalism leads to fascism. My professor then said that he is drawn to this idea, that big business would support fascism. Abraham was never able to become a professor or historian and instead went to law school and became a lawyer. Such a wild situation.

The next reading we went over was a textbook controversy about the differences between California and Texas. We were also tested on this reading. It was pretty standard stuff, just showing the differences between what is in each textbook and who is on the board when choosing what is going to be in the book. In California had a board of teachers while Texas had a mix of teachers, parents, pastors, and business representatives which is so telling considering in the Texas edition there is a highlighted story from the perspective of a border patrol officer and illegal immigration while in California they centred stories from immigrants. Both textbooks were peer reviewed but are so different. Textbooks are made for the state (or province in my case), not teachers. The border patrol story lead to my professor asking us if that addition to the textbook was just to show a differing perspective or was the officer malicious. Was he just giving his view? The students said it was just a different perspective and not a deliberate lie like Abraham. At the end my professor said that this shows that there isn’t a universal history like Ranke said, and that neither textbook was wrong. I am surprised that no one brought up the fact that the border patrol officers job is to be suspicious of anyone at the border so maybe his perspective is really skewed. But what do I know.

Class ended and I went straight home. I did want to go to office hours but I had a bunch of stuff to do at home so I had to leave right away. Fun fact, I really do hate taking the bus home because it is always so packed. I usually wait for several busses to pass until I get on because I don’t want to get in a sardine tin. I wish I could just take the train home but my dumbass city has yet to expand the rail into my area, it’s been years since this project was started.