Interesting article. Sitting in a room filled with popular histories and few heavier scholarly works my answer is, not much. The real issue to me is how informative is the history vs. how much of it is about pushing a point of view. There were two recent popular histories on WWI. The first was, as near as I can tell, a cataloguing of poets that took part in the war. The second was a good overview of the war. I'm sorry. I'm sure a good catalogue of poets in WWI is important. Can it be labeled as such rather than trying to maski it as a general history? But seriously, such tripe as "A People's History of the United States" and the "Politically Incorrect Guide to US History." need to be seperated from the serious, though "middle-brow", works such as Keegan's "First World War."
Thursday, May 26, 2005
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No no, a catalogue of WWI poets is NOT important. Though the book sales would have been less if they had called it "Poets of WWI, where they lived,where they died, and what rubbish they wrote."
That was majorly irritating book. Especially when they told you in all the reviews and the cover information that it was a history of the war.
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