Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader

  • Arthur Goddard, editor

$15.95

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Hardcover book, 884 pages
ISBN: 9780879260026
Stock Number: 0324


This encyclopedic work is more than an impressive collection of first-rate history writing on a range of critical historical issues. It’s also a tribute to the life and work of Harry Elmer Barnes, an eminent and influential American historian and sociologist. The many contributions – by former colleagues, students and friends, including Murray N. Rothbard and James J. Martin – range from documented essays to mellow memoirs.

An important work for everyone who loves history, good writing, and the best of America.

With dust jacket, source references, extensive bibliography, many photos, and index. (Dust jacket may have minor imperfections.)

Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968), historian, educator and sociolo­gist, was one of the most influential American scholars of the twentieth century. He taught economics, sociology and history at various institutions of higher learning, including Columbia University (1918-1929), the New School for Social Research and Smith College. His output was prodigious. He was the author of more than 30 books and hundreds of essays, articles, lectures and reviews. A listing of his writings in Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader takes up 47 pages.

His consistently clear, effective and knowledgeable prose earned him the appreciation of the educated public as well as praise from scholars. During the 1920s and 1930s he was regarded as an outstanding “progressive” author and educator. Of Barnes The Columbia Encyclopedia noted: “His wide interests generally centered about the main themes of the development of Western thought and culture. His ability to synthesize information from various fields into an intelligible pattern showing human development profoundly affected the teaching of history.”

He was a major figure in developing the school of history writing that has come to be known as “revisionist,” that is, the critical, scholarly examination of official or orthodox history, especially of the origins and consequences of wars. Revisionism, Barnes wrote in a 1958 essay, “implies an honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations. In the minds of anti-Revisionists, the term savors of malice, vindictiveness, and an unholy desire to smear the saviors of mankind. Actually, Revisionism means nothing more or less than the effort to correct the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude.”

During the 1920s Barnes played a leading role in overturning the propaganda myth of sole or primary German respon­sibility for the First World War. He remained true to his principles even after World War II when the American intellectual climate became markedly more constricted and conformist. His skeptical view of the official history of that great conflict, and particularly its origins and the US role in it, along with his outspoken criticism of conformist “court historians,” made him an ever more marginalized figure during his final 20 years.


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