Brandeis history professor David Hackett Fischer — author of Washington’s Crossing and (Oxford 2003) and Paul Revere’s Ride (Oxford 1994) — provides this favorable book review of Mount Holyoke College history professor Joseph J. Ellis‘ (author of Founding Brothers (Vintage 2002) and biographies on Thomas Jefferson and John Adams) new book, His Excellency: George Washington (Knopf 2004).
Professor Fischer notes that Professor Ellis’ book is skeptical of the “conventional idea of Washington as a leader who won the trust of others by honesty, virtue, dignity, and character; a man not consumed by ambition or avarice, but driven by his ideals, and devoted to the principles of the Revolution:”

He dismisses it as a fiction and even a deliberate falsehood, “fabricated” in large part by Washington himself. In its place, he argues that the true Washington was a man of “tumultuous passions,” “aggressive instincts,” “bottomless ambition,” “personal avarice,” and “a truly monumental ego with a massive personal agenda.”
Many men who knew Washington agreed on the passions but believed that he gained full control of them. Ellis argues to the contrary that Washington never mastered himself, and “his aggressive instincts would remain a dangerous liability” through his career. The thesis of this book is that Washington’s life was a continuing struggle against dark inner forces, which led to an “obsession with control,” which in turn caused him to favor control mechanisms for America, including a highly disciplined regular army, strong central government, and hierarchical society. . .

Some elements of Ellis’s conflict model are solidly confirmed by other sources. Jefferson wrote of Washington, “his temper was naturally high toned, but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendancy. If however, it broke its bounds, he was most tremendous in his wrath.” Adams added, “He had great self-command. It cost him great exertion sometimes, and a constant constraint.”

Read the entire review. Professor Ellis’ latest book is yet another in a long line of fine books over the past decade that have focused on America’s Revolutionary War-era leaders.
But wait a minute. Just how good are these books? In this review, Matthew Price reviews University of Georgia historian Peter Charles Hoffer” new book, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud — American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (PublicAffairs 2004) contends that the history profession has condoned sloppy scholarship and an “anything-goes” ethical climate:

Hoffer revisits the now-familiar cases of a quartet of historians brought low by scandal in 2002: former Emory University professor Michael Bellesiles, who was accused of falsifying data in “Arming America,” his controversial 2000 study of 18th- and 19th-century gun culture; Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who were both found to have used material from other scholars without full attribution; and Mount Holyoke’s Joseph Ellis, who was rebuked for spinning tales of his nonexistent Vietnam combat record in classes and newspaper articles. According to Hoffer, these were not just isolated incidents but symptoms of a wider problem — one that goes far beyond the headlines to the very way history is written and consumed in America.

. . . Hoffer is particularly harsh on Bellesiles, who resigned from his job at Emory and was stripped of the Bancroft Prize in the wake of the controversy over “Arming America.”
To his defenders, the former Emory historian was the victim of a conservative plot, spearheaded by the National Rifle Association, to discredit Bellesiles’ conclusion that, contrary to the image of the musket-wielding patriot, few early Americans owned functional guns. But in Hoffer’s telling, Bellesiles engaged in deliberate “falsification” of his data. Furthermore, Hoffer asserts, Bellesiles published his book with the trade publisher Knopf (which eventually withdrew the book from circulation) rather than a scholarly press “in order to claim . . . immunity from close professional scrutiny.” (While an investigative panel formed by the AHA found no outright falsification, they condemned Bellesilles’ evasiveness about his source records, many of which could not be traced.)
As for Goodwin and Ambrose, who are also published by trade presses, Hoffer brushes aside their claims that the instances of missing footnotes or insufficient citations were just unintentional and isolated lapses in otherwise sound work. Whatever the intention, Hoffer writes, the end result is the same: “plagiarism,” which under AHA standards, he notes, does not require actual intent to deceive. (He brings greater sympathy to the case of Joseph Ellis, whose scholarship itself was not questioned, suggesting that the same imaginative powers that led him to lie about his life story may have helped him write more subtle and nuanced books.)

Read the entire review.