Close readers of the faculty lounge may recall that a few weeks back I posted about an essay on Yale history professor Allen Johnson's (to my reading) pro-Confederate history in the Yale Law Journal back in December 1921. As I'm working on a short essay on the renaming of Saunders Hall (and really more about who Saunders was), I see a pamphlet by Dunbar Rowland attacking Johnson for -- yup -- being a Northern partisan as he was editor of the Dictionary of American Biography. If you're interested in academic gossip circa 1931, this is well worth your time. Johnson's explanation of how he aspires to make the DAB free of sectional bias sounds a lot like his Yale Law Journal article. Also, I love the part where Johnson says that he commissioned southerners to write most of the entries on southerners.
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