Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP
Murray Rothbard writes:
All persons leave an irreplaceable gap when they die; but this gap is truly enormous in the case of Harry Barnes (1889-1968), for in so many ways he was the Last of the Romans. More specifically, he was the last of the founders of the "New History," that movement at the turn of the century which, headed by Barnes's friends and mentors Charles A. Beard, Carl L. Becker, and James Harvey Robinson, virtually founded the profession of historian in America and placed its entire stamp on historiography until the advent of World War II. And Harry Barnes was the last of the truly erudite historians. In a field of accelerating narrowness and specialization where the expert on France in the 1830s is likely to know next to nothing about what happened to France in the 1840s, Harry Barnes ranged over the entire field of historical study and vision.FULL ARTICLE
Comments (2)
The "issue" that was "so vital for mankind" was whether or not to resist Nazi Germany.
By this article, and others, the position of the late Murry Rothbard on this matter is clear.
And his position on this matter, as on so many others, was wildly different from that of Ludwig Von Mises.
Published: December 21, 2007 6:47 PM
Thanks to the Mises Institute for publishing this fine essay by Rothbard about the great historian Barnes. I look forward to reading Barnes' writing about Pearl Harbor--the Big Lie perpetrarted on trusting Americans by FDR and his left-wing cabal.
As Robert Stinnett's "Day of Deceit" has made clear, FDR and the Old Left were causual about dispensing death to innocents at home and abroad. Stinnett relates how FDR ordered the Navy (at a cabinet meeting) to conduct "pop up cruises"--intrusions by armed US heavy cruisers into Japanese waters during the tense months leading up to December 7th, 1941--as a means of provoking Japan into hostilties with the United States. For FDR wanted war with Germany, but Americans opposed entry into "Europe's war" by lopsided margins of 85% to 10%. FDR explained that he didn't mind losing "a couple" of cruisers in these attempts at provoking a Japanese military response, but he didn't want to risk losing "five oor six."
How many sailors work on board a cruiser? Several hundred? Would a president who favored losing those men for the sake of gaining entry into WWII through "the back door" recoil from the prospect of withholding intelligence from Kimmel and Short at Hawaii, thereby sealing the fate of nearly 3,000 US servicemen?
People who
Published: December 26, 2007 1:02 PM