Title
Class Year
2016
Document Type
Blog Post
Publication Date
3-11-2015
Department 1
Civil War Institute
Abstract
Last semester, I received a very memorable critique on one of my more polarizing blog posts. In it, a reader derisively referred to another of the CWI Fellows and me as “truth-driven crusaders” for our commitment to healthy historical engagement. Finding it an appropriate if not excessively romanticized description of the work we do as historians-in-training, my friends and I have since then appropriated the term to describe ourselves. I feel obliged to admit here that the antagonism signaled by the term “crusader” makes me a bit uneasy, but I like to think that we “crusade” against certain ideas, and not the people who hold them. Some interpretations of history are worth fighting for or against—with rhetoric as our weapon, though, not swords and spears. [excerpt]
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
Lavery, Kevin P., "Crusading for the Truth" (2015). The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History. 88.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/compiler/88
Comments
This blog post originally appeared in The Gettysburg Compiler and was created by students at Gettysburg College.