Discriminations lays out another case of historical malpractice, the alleged slave conspiracy engineered by Denmark Vesey. Apparently, modern scholars have embraced the case of an African-American freeman who was found guilty of purportedly engineering a massive race revolt by a racist legal system that ran a kangaroo trial. Historian Michael Johnson has determined that Vesey was probably innocent of the great conspiracy, which, when you think about it, adds to the horrific indictment of slavery. John Rosenberg at Discriminations writes:

Finally, however, the scandal Johnson has unearthed is not so much the "unrelenting carelessness" of so many historians re the documentary evidence that he discovered. It is that, in practice if not in theory, many historians have succumbed to the post-modernist claptrap of Fishian "metahistorian" Hayden White, cited by Johnson, who argues "that historians who go to the archives engage in meaningless ritual since what they find there only fits their preconceptions and what they write is, in any case personal invention." (p. 200).

I am going to hazard a guess that modern historians wanted the image of a powerful African-American freeman as a kind of wish-fulfillment. It's not surprising that they went off the tracks, but one has to be skeptical when historical finds match political motives. Tonight the Discovery Channel had an hour long show on the purported finding of evidence of female gladiator. There may have been women gladiators, but given the wish-fulfillment theme among the avant-garde about women breaking out of gender roles, I would want more evidence about the extent or reality of this phenomenon.