Talk:James Shepherd Pike
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Is the statement
- This book destroyed his credentials; he was never taken seriously among the liberal-left again.
NPOV? RJFJR 17:26, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Distorting viewpoints hurts Wikipedia
This article was up for an awfully long time solely with the false claim that Pike was solely an abolitionist. This article not only falsely characterized his views but lacked any source for its claims. That's too bad for the Wikipedia project. Skywriter 00:22, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
A net search for rjensen or Richard Jensen, defender of, apologist for and writer of paean to Strom Thurmond [1], will turn up that he is both a Wiki editor and owner of a conservative list. On Wikipedia, rjensen often tries to hide that he is unabashedly right wing in political orientation under the guise of either "neutrality" or "scholarship". I believe his viewpoint should be included because Wikipedia is inclusive but that rjensen's actions in removing the work of other editors who represent opposing viewpoints should be firmly dealt with. Other Wiki editors need to bear in mind that when rjensen adds or edits copy, he adds the most conservative and often the most racially offensive references, text and photos he can find. This problem afflicts the entire discussion of Reconstruction after the Civil War and most articles that link to it where rjensen is very active. So there is an inbred bias in these articles that are fundamentally hostile to an honest assessment of the history of African American people and that are favorable to sources that have long been discredited by at least the last two generations of mainstream historians.
One of the most shocking abuses of Wikipedia editing by rjensen has occurred in the bio article on James Shepherd Pike in which rjensen all but erased the contributions, which were added, of Robert Franklin Durden, former chairman of the department of history at Duke University.
Why is dishonest scholarship, such as this, on Wikipedia?
Durden wrote the definitive biography of James Shepherd Pike and yet rjensen removed all references to Durden's work from the biographical article except the footnote, and one article available only by subscription.
On the cover of his book, Durden wrote that he was prompted to write his book James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850-1882 to answer this question: "how did James S. Pike come to write The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government?" "The book, published in 1873, is a firey indictment of Radical Reconstruction and the Negro's role therein; indeed it is the verbal equivalent of Thomas Nast's bitterly satiric cartoons of the period." Why is this important? To understand the way the history of Reconstruction was written, one must go back to Pike's work of fiction (that paraded as history) which influenced an entire generation of historians who subsequently influeneced the writing of textbooks in the United States for the first half of the 20th century. Durden examined the original manuscripts and detailed how Pike had made up his version of Reconstruction.
Richard Jensen's deletions of Durden's work is serious because, in a full-length book, which the subject deserved, Durden compared Pike's fictionarl account to original manuscripts.
Pike's fictions are the linchpin of many of the racist textbooks written about Reconstruction in the early 20th century, all now firmly rejected by mainstream historians, yet thse are the texts that rjensen quotes extensively from on Wikipedia.
So while it disgusts me to see what Richard Jensen is trying to do to the article on Eric Foner, seen in the article history on the the contemporary historian known most widely for overturning the viciously racist accounts of Reconstruction history, it is not surprising that Jensen did this. It is the reason for the distortions in a wide range of articles that link to the Reconstruction, articles that are more than mildly repulsive because they falsify the history of African Americans and the struggle for Civil Rights. The articles that rjensen dominates are unfair to all readers because they distort history in non-benign ways.
Aside from Foner's contributions, there is too much solid work done by entire recent generations of scholars on the facets of the history of Reconstruction and the civil rights movement for rjensen's versions to be taken seriously by serious scholars. He pushes a viewpoint long ago discarded on the dust heap of falsified history. It is a shame rjensen has the time, in retirement, to work these articles nonstop day and night. Others have countered the narrow and racially biased viewpoint of this Energizer Bunny that champions the Dunning School which is based very much on the fictions written by James Shepherd Pike but few of us have the leisure of time to fight rjensen's history of bigotry on Wikipedia in a sustained manner.
I will add that when I saw Richard Jensen's erasure of the contributions of Robert Franklin Durden, biographer of James Shepherd Pike, from this article on Pike, I greatly cut down on my contributions to Wikipedia in disgust.
Here's one of several examples from the history of that article. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Shepherd_Pike&diff=61529346&oldid=61220384
Do not take my word for this. Get a copy of Durden's book on Pike and decide for yourself.
Skywriter 20:21, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
To demonstrate that I am not 'whistling Dixie,' I will add that the dominant photo, the largest cartoon on Reconstruction is deeply offensive to African Americans and most everyone else. Now I can hear rjensen defending its use and its size (!) with the claim that Eric Foner found and used it first. My reply is that Foner put it in context. The Reconstruction article does not do that, and all things considered, this graphic is both hostile to, and does violence to the history of African American people and it is not reflective of the work of Eric Foner, Richard Nelson Current, Robert Durden, Leon Litwack or the many other giants of Reconstruction scholarship. This article and those that link to it are an embarrassment to Wikipedia and humiliating to African American people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Free-bur.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Free-bur.jpg&action=history
There were many graphics that Richard Jensen could have been chosen to be the centerpiece of the Reconstruction article. That Richard Jensen, owner and editor of the editor of Conservativenet, [2] chose and uploaded the most vile graphic he could find, tells volumes about the rjensen agenda.
Richard Jensen actually uploaded this piece of filth to a second article that linked to Reconstruction and I took it down. Skywriter 21:38, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
