11/20/2003

Author and professor Gary Gallagher thinks reenactors embody a specific theory of history, if this news story is to be believed.

Although he is part and parcel of the sad legacy of Nevins, Catton, McPherson, and Sears (for a time he was publishing two or more books per year in that tradition), Gallagher deserves credit for having enough perceptiveness to understand that there are schools of thought and that he belongs to one of them. This at least distinguishes him from the "my way or the highway" crowd dominating Civil War literature since the Centennial.

His Lost Cause researches seem to have led him to metahistory. Good.