Chapman billy wrote in message m...
In article ,
says...
(snipped)
Tim Hanke is not a historian, and I don't take him seriously as a writer on
history. What I write about history is not altered by whatever he writes.

Tim Hanke certainly isn't a historian, but he does appear to have read a
fair bit....

'Historians are not accountable for the difficulty of learning to read.'
--Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

Dear Simon,

Someone who might have read many popular books on health care does not become
professionally qualified to practise medicine in a hospital. One can find
something in print to support nearly every conceivable view of history (for
instance, from Daniel Goldhagen to David Irving on German history 1933-1945).

Any really interesting historical subject tends to involve considering some
incomplete, inconsistent, or conflicting evidence. Yet not every source in
print is of comparable reliability or value, and professional historians are
generally better than amateurs at separating the wheat from the chaff.

"For my part I've gone back and forth on the A-bomb decision so many times
I can't have much confidence in hard conclusions."
--Stephen Ambrose (28 January 1993, letter to Gar Alperovitz, on the United
States's atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945)

'History is never a trustworthy guide to the thinker.
It is, at the best, only a staff, and a most unreliable one at that.'
--Albion Tourgee (Murvale Eastman)

--Nick