At Harper’s, Lapham writes in his preamble, he “came up with a risk-assessment model wired to the sound of the human voice.” (To translate: He likes writers with a strong voice.) Lapham uses that model here, too. “If, on first looking through a dispatch from the Yale University library or the White House Situation Room, I couldn’t hear the voice of its author, I let it go the way of the Carolina Parakeet,” he writes in his preamble. (That parakeet, by the way, is extinct--a lot like that expression, before Lapham exhumed it.)
Although most of his contributors--everyone from Thucydides to e.e. cummings--are crumbling in their caskets, they rarely sound stilted. Lapham's talent is to take these voices, flawed and otherwise, and to arrange them so that they harmonize at a pitch that perfectly complements his own politics. The journal’s first two excerpts, for instance, directly address the war in Iraq. It opens with British Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins’s call to arms in 2003. Taken alone, the lieutenant colonel’s words are conscientious--“If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day they go home to their family”--and gently funny--“The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.” But if a reader weren’t already skeptical of the mission in Iraq, then the next excerpt, “The Proclamation of Baghdad,” written eight days after British forces captured the city in 1917, would provides a hint of Lapham’s view: “[O]ur armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies but as liberators.” Liberators now, liberators then. These writings, which alone sound with tragedy, together sound with tragic irony.
There are two types of politically correct--politically correct and politically correct. The first, more commonly used, is the behavior, judged externally, of cultural sensitivity. The second, internally measured, is striving, with regard to politics, to be consistent with facts and beliefs--to be, with regard to politics, correct. Lapham largely forgoes the former in pursuit of what he believes will make the strongest case for the latter. Five of the eighty-eight readings are from women, which, since it’s a survey of history, is understandable. But, where it’s reasonable to expect equal representation, in the original content contributed by contemporary historians, there are no women at all. Fringe demographics, women and minorities, are rare. But fringe ideas, such as the 19th century art critic John Ruskin’s contention that war gives birth to art, or Betran de Born savoring the sweetness of war in Eastertime, are not. And Lapham, true to his word, treats them on their own terms, as exhibit pieces with their contextual information printed after them. But even concessions such as the excerpts he includes in praise of war are calculated to lend an air of careful consideration to his enterprise. In the endeavor to extend the truth, to be politically correct, even the politicization of research is permitted.