I have to admit that I expected some pushback against the thesis of my paper (co-authored with Michael Makovi) “The Mainstreaming of Marx: Measuring the Effect of the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx’s Influence” from Marxists and other followers of the socialist philosopher. In this paper, we use Google Ngram as well as a separate […]
Last week, a preprint of my new article on Karl Marx’s citation patterns (coauthored with Michael Makovi) was posted on the Journal of Political Economy website. Our article investigates historical trends in how often Karl Marx’s name is mentioned in print materials such as books. The intriguing question is the year 1917 – the year
According to recent reports, both Princeton and Cornell Universities have opted not to take any action over multiple instances of plagiarism by historian Kevin M. Kruse. Notably, neither university disputes that plagiarism occurs in their publicly released statements. Instead, both have issued equivocal statements signifying that they consider Kruse’s copying of texts to have been
Kevin Kruse’s Plagiarism Scandal: Evaluating the Evidence Read More »
It’s been just over two weeks since I first called attention to signs of possible plagiarism in the works Kevin M. Kruse, a history professor and left-wing political commentator for MSNBC. Princeton University, where Kruse teaches, is reportedly conducting an investigation into the matter. Kruse’s Twitter feed, which normally contains a heavy stream of political
The Bad-Faith Defenders of Progressive Plagiarism Read More »
So it turns out that my earlier suspicions about possible academic integrity issues in Kevin M. Kruse’s scholarship were warranted. After finding hints of borrowed textual structures and word phrasing in a 2015 book by the Princeton historian, I decided to take a closer look at some of his other work. I turned to his
When activist historians redefine ‘plagiarism’ to protect their own Read More »
Historian Kevin M. Kruse is perhaps best known as a contributor to the New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project, where he wrote an essay linking traffic congestion to the history of segregation. Yet it’s another connection to the New York Times that may put the Princeton University professor under the microscope – specifically his use
Did Kevin Kruse plagiarize an article from the New York Times? Read More »
In their recent essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Reactionary Propaganda Rides Again,” scholars Naomi Oreskes and Charlie Tyson take issue with my own analysis of faculty political ideology in the Chronicle (“Tenured Radicals are Real,” September 24, 2020). Unfortunately, most of their essay resorts to conspiratorial ad hominem attacks on me personally over
Oreskes & Tyson Present a Dishonest Picture of College Faculty Bias Read More »
The Economic Historian blog has a fascinating discussion at the moment on the “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) school of historiography, and its attempts to grapple with the economic dimensions of slavery. I’ve been extremely critical of the NHC literature on account of its anti-capitalist ideological skew and its misuse of historical evidence, most recently
Just over two weeks ago, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman approached the New York Times and Washington Post with an astonishing claim. According to new calculations performed by the pair, the wealthiest earners in the United States paid an overall effective tax rate in 2018 that was lower than the bottom half of
Something’s fishy with the Saez-Zucman tax stats Read More »
A few days ago I received a strange and unexpected notification in the form of a tweet. Calvin TerBeek, a political science PhD student at the University of Chicago, claimed that he had evidence showing: “In 1967, Gordon Tullock, James Buchanan’s frequent public choice co-author, wrote a book review for National Review praising an effort