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Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

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from: James O'Donnell

The First Draft of History?

Posted Thursday, April 19, 2001, at 6:54 PM ET

Dick,

Looks like they're running out of scrambled eggs here at the Slate breakfast nook, so we're going to start winding down. Maybe it's appropriate, given who we are, that I will end this week chatting with you reading a book, Correlli Barnett's The Audit of War. I'm just chugging along into it and fascinated by an issue it implicitly raises. It's about post-World War II Britain and how the illusions and dreams of that time confused and befuddled folks. I'm reminded of the old line that the newspapers are the first draft of history--and then I wonder how you ever get to the second draft. Most people never do. Think about what people think they know about the '60s now--and what a farrago of misinformation and ideological stew that really is. My deepest ache, when I think about high literacy and such, isn't the question of whether people are able to read sophisticated stuff but whether they do, and when, and why. It is possible to know the world in a way far more responsible and serious and objective than what we get from the news--but how many people can or will take the time to pursue that? The most discouraging thing about the Net for me is the way as an "expert" on things, I get endless e-mail requests (that I try to respond to as well as I can) that show both a hunger for knowledge and an unwillingness or inability to pursue that knowledge in all the places it really can be found. I want to think overnight and send one more note in the morning: some books that I think the enlightened general reader really ought to want to know about, the better to understand who we are and how our world works. Fergus Millar's The Roman Near East is my first choice. ...

jo'd

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: James O'Donnell

The First Draft of History?

Posted Thursday, April 19, 2001, at 6:54 PM ET
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Richard Lanham spent his active academic career teaching and writing about medieval and Renaissance literature at UCLA, but now spends his retirement fiddling around with electronic text. He is the author of The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. James O'Donnell is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and vice provost of computing. He is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
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