ANOTHER BLOW TO HISTORIANS’ CREDIBILITY: The Denmark Vesey slave revolt conspiracy, taught as fact for decades, apparently never happened. This is appalling.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall emails that this is not in the same league as Bellesiles’ scholarly misrepresentations. That’s true. But it looks to be an example of politically inspired wishful thinking presented as fact. And this kind of thing is probably far more widespread than reliance on nonexistent sources.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Geitner Simmons has some more thoughts. Meanwhile Josh emails again:

Trust me, I’ve spent years working through court records from 17th Century New England. And I make a fetish of exactitude in the way I work with documents. But this is something that was taken for true at the time. The old-school Ulrich Philips historians of the South thought it was true. The newer, post-Kenneth Stamp guys thought it was too. Now Johnson *seems* to have shown — I haven’t given it a close enough reading yet — that historians assumptions led them to take too much at face value the accusations the court alleged, etc. That’s not a scandal. That’s just solid revisionist history writing. Assumptions about black resistance probably played a role in preventing earlier scholars from seeing this. But this is the normal process of historical investigation at work.

Well, okay. But the professional historians quoted on the subject seem to see it as a bit more than that.