Grant Review of two books on Grant by Dr Belle Grenville-Mathers

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Sergeant
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Jul 24, 2017
https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2270

Dr Belle Grenville-Mathers reviews two books on Grant that many are familiar with: Grant by Ron Chernow and The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant by Charles Calhoun. Her review of Chernow's work, while generally very positive, does take him to task for some inconsistencies in his research and for repeating stories from all available sources, credible or not, without much examination of their credibility.

Charles Calhoun, whose book is reviewed very favourably by Dr. Grenville-Mathers, has an author's response accompanying the review. It's well worth reading.

My favourite part of Calhoun's response is this:

"For the professional, of course, an indispensable rule calls for the historian to approach each source with a healthy dose of skepticism. The reviewer recognizes that although reminiscences, memoirs, and similar works may provide supposedly revealing anecdotes, their invocation by writers nearly always sacrifices accuracy on the altar of adornment. The most suspect of such retrospective ‘sources’ are those that purport to reproduce actual dialog long after the events in question. The historian should also be wary of secondary works that quote such sources and thus compound the original distortion....No American presidency is more encrusted with myth, misconception, or controversy than Grant’s."
 
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