Next to the study of literature, the discipline of history has suffered most from the depredations of multiculturalism, political correctness, and all the unlovely epistemological cesspits that congregate under the rubric of “postmodernism.” Even the idea of empirical truth—an idea without which the discipline of history is impossible—has been widely and variously attacked, as the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle shows brilliantly in The Killing of History (Free Press). We were heartened, therefore, when we heard that a group of distinguished historians, including Donald Kagan, Eugene Genovese, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Forrest McDonald, and Alan C. Kors, had decided to form the Historical Society, a new academic group “open to all who want to do serious history.” Currently, the profession of history in this country is dominated by the American Historical Society, an increasingly ideological organization that stand ...

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