“It was only a matter of time before this kind of thinking spread to history. Politics has always colored the ways that people interpret the past, but The Politically Incorrect Guide politicizes history in a new way, reducing all scholarly inquiry to a mere stance in the culture wars.“
Slate‘s resident historian David Greenberg tears apart Thomas Woods’ enormously popular conservative hatchet-job of US history, and pins the blame for its ilk on a Faustian bargain made by right-wing intellectuals: “Conservatives who believe in open intellectual pursuit understandably blanch at the popularity of a book like this. The problem, however, isn’t a lone piece of agitprop but a cynical alliance that conservative intellectuals forged with those who hold their ideals of scholarship in contempt. It’s not surprising that the anti-intellectual currents they’ve aligned themselves with are proving too powerful for them to control.”