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Last week turned into AI week; I have a feeling that this week is going to be about history.
Let's start with David Barton.
This week, the Wall Street Journal ran a fairly comprehensive profile of Mr. Barton, thanks to his well-funded, activist campaign to advance the idea that the separation of church and state in the United States is a myth, and to promote (his own version of conservative Christian) religion as part of American public education.
This link should take you to a non-paywalled version of the article, and I'd encourage you to read it:
www.wsj.com/politics/policy/texas-who-is-david-barton-460d7029?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I'm aware that some followers of my account are also fans of David Barton, and that's your privilege. I'd just like to point out, with the help of the article, that Barton is not a historian.
For two reasons.
First, he has no training in how to handle historical sources and evidence.
"Historian" can be a closely guarded term. When I was doing my PH.D. work in American Studies, there was a pretty substantial segment of the academic history world that discounted anyone doing interdisciplinary work as "not really a historian." That impulse remains in academia. But I took all of the courses in historiography, research methods, and philosophy of history that the history Ph.D. candidates took. (Plus the literary theory courses that they didn't, but that's another topic.)
Mr. Barton did not. He has a bachelor's degree in religious education from ORU. That's it.
(Summary here: www.concordmonitor.com/2025/10/07/my-turn-david-barton-texas-education/)
Can you write history without having a degree in history? Yes, of course, if you commit to the rigorous, difficult task of learning how to handle sources. There is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Barton has done so. Instead, we have this:
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David Barton, a sprightly 72-year-old conservative political activist, strolled inside to his prized collection: tens of thousands of founding-era American documents and artifacts he values at millions of dollars.
Barton darted among glass cases and rattled off the highlights of his trove: a Revolutionary War-era shot flask, a 1795 handwritten prayer proclamation from Samuel Adams, and what he says is a lock of George Washington’s hair.
A former math and science teacher with no academic training as a historian, Barton has used this vast collection to position himself as the intellectual architect of a movement advancing a conservative agenda in policy and education.
“I own the stuff,” Barton said. “So I know more about this history than most of the professors.”
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Owning stuff does not a historian make.
(Both John Fea, at thewayofimprovement.blog/2026/08/24/quick-thoughts-on-that-david-barton-article-in-the-wall-stree..., and Warren Throckmorton, who did an excellent interview for our podcast at podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/are-homeschool-history-programs-accurate-w-dr-warren/id1704363746?i..., have weighed in on this.)
But that leads us to the second reason why Barton is not a historian.
His primary motivation isn't to write an accurate account of the past. It is to promote a narrow political point of view.
Barton isn't alone in this, of course. A number of historians (who actually HAVE historical training) fall into this category. Howard Zinn (I am not a fan) comes to mind.
But Barton's is not only political, but tied to a single party position that spans a whole range of issues unrelated to the founding fathers and their religious positions.
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On a typical day, Barton spends hours fielding texts and calls from contacts in think tanks, legislatures, Congress and the White House, his son Tim said. He often works until 3 a.m., with a John Wayne movie in the background.
A former vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas, Barton counts Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) among his allies.
“I was introduced to David and his ministry a quarter-century ago, and it has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do,” Johnson told a gathering of state legislators in 2021.
Last year, before the federal cuts to USAID, Barton met with State Department officials in Washington, D.C. In a conference room at the agency, he laid out how the U.S. had limited foreign aid before World War II, he said....
Barton and his nonprofit also regularly counsel a coalition of hundreds of state lawmakers on issues, from the evils of in vitro fertilization to the importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance, he says.
He and this network have been in action since the Supreme Court in 2022 swept aside a decades-old legal test that had kept religious displays and practices out of public schools.
Texas state Sen. Phil King, a longtime ally, worked with WallBuilders and a religious-liberty law firm to draft a bill requiring a Ten Commandments display in every Texas classroom.
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Historians should have proper training in how to evaluate and understand sources.
Historians should not be working in service of a political party.
If one of those criteria is compromised, be wary.
If both are violated, walk away.
Here endeth the lesson.
Are Homeschool History Programs Accurate? w/ Dr. Warren Throckmorton
podcasts.apple.com
Podcast Episode · The Well-Trained Mind podcast · S5 E5 · 1h 3m6 hours ago
I am so grateful for my kids' teachers at Well-Trained Mind Academy in history. From the start, they reinforce that history is an active conversation that we participate in daily. My kid had an assignment this week where she selected a photograph and wrote her memory of it, then interviewed me for my recollection of the event pictured. Of course our accounts were different, and it led to such a great discussion of what makes us remember certain things and how the perspective of the writer greatly impacts what information is passed on.
Aw I love Howard Zinn.
I just get a paywall?
Thank you for writing this. He was a regular speaker at homeschool conferences when I was a kid, and he recently "helped" rewrite the social studies standards for the state of Texas public education system. As a public school teacher of 14 years, I have serious concerns about the historical validity of the new standards he helped write. I appreciate this very factual viewpoint.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. My family went to hear him speak when I was in grade school. It has taken me a long time to sort through what things I learned that were true versus what things I learned that were misrepresentations, at best.
As an academic, I find your second argument much more persuasive than your first one.
Dr. Wise Bauer, do you have a recommendation for the best one-volume overview of American History written by a fair-minded person NOT within the Christian tradition, but not jaundiced against it?
Why is his interpretation of American history so important to him?
I remember someone telling me how much they loved Barton because he taught things they never learned in public school. 🫣
I am not a big fan of monopolies, and I think we have developed something of a monopoly on education, particularly in the authority we automatically give to credentials. A degree can tell us something about someone’s training. It does not establish the quality of someone’s scholarship. One of my favorite historians, Edward Gibbon, had no university degree at all. His work is worth engaging because of the quality of his historical research and arguments, not because of a credential. It took earning degrees for me to understand how unnecessary a degree is for many self driven individuals. Yet today we often act like Dorothy’s Lion, who needs a ribbon to be brave, or the Scarecrow who needs a document to use his brain. I am not a particular fan of Barton off the cuff, and I agree that his claim that “owning historical documents makes him more knowledgeable” is laughable: more a political brag done in poor taste than any valid point. But his lack of a history degree does not prove that his historical arguments are wrong any more than his political involvement does. I would rather someone wear his political commitments on his sleeve than pretend he has none. At least then I can see the slant and account for it. As E. B. White famously observed, all writing has a slant. Political involvement should make us scrutinize someone’s work. It should not substitute for scrutinizing the work itself. And when a historian claims to have no political opinion, that does not mean those influences are absent from his work. Barton should be judged by the sources he uses, how accurately he represents them, what context he includes or leaves out, and whether his conclusions withstand examination. I think the same standard should apply to historians whose politics I find much more congenial. So I will take the criticisms here seriously, but I am going to read Barton’s arguments myself before deciding where he is right and where he is wrong. And on the broader question of the “separation of church and state,” I think every individual claim deserves to be examined rather than dismissed with the phrase itself. The phrase can be used correctly, but it can also become a rhetorical shortcut that labels a subject as something that supposedly should not be part of government instead of addressing the actual constitutional or historical question. I do not agree with that reasoning.
What’s it feel like up on the Mountain of “I have a PHD. I’m smarter than the rest of you. I’ve read more books - so I’m qualified to say who is a historian and who isn’t” looking down on lesser mortals? I suppose Jesus was “unlearned” and “uneducated “ as well? John 7: 14 Not until halfway through the festival did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. 15 The Jews there were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?” 16 Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. 17 Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. 18 Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.
I'm a conservative Christian with a degree in history, and I share your concerns about Barton. The Christian call to honesty and integrity means that Christians seeking to do work in history ought to do it with great care to represent the past accurately. Btw, I respect the title of historian and don't claim it for myself since I only have a bachelor's degree in it. I know I would need more thorough training and work in the field for that title to apply to me.
Thank you!!!
My students and I read John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” this week. John Winthrop used the phrase "a city upon a hill" in his 1630 lay sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity”, to describe the high standards and visibility expected of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was their first Governor. Winthrop delivered the speech aboard the ship Arbella before reaching New England. He quoted Jesus's words from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14): "A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid". Winthrop stated that all eyes were watching them. He warned that if the settlers failed to follow their covenant with God, their failure would bring shame and public ruin. Then we watched Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey sign a law on August 10, 2026, that removes all state restrictions on killing babies after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Quite a fall.
If you don’t have the training to handle sources, you’re not doing history — you’re pushing an agenda. That’s the difference that Barton misses every time.
The curriculum we used was amazing... but you wrote it. Once when attending a homeschool convention, one of the sessions I elected to attend was on the founding of America. It was not as I expected, as the speaker basically used Barton's material, making it a disappointing session. On another completely irrelevent note, years ago when living in Virginia (Newport News/Hampton area) you met my daughter. She loved your history curriculum, and you were a mini celebrity among my kids. When you passed through where she had a part time job, she realized you were "the Susan Wise Bauer." But she acted professional and didn't want to say anything to you besides the customer service she gives to every customer. Of course, I felt you would have loved to know she was a homeschool kid who had gone through your books, but she was too shy. We chose your curriculum because it was well written. Personally, I still pick it up on occasion.
I got a copy of one of Barton's controversial books years ago and flipped to the Acknowledgements page to see what historians had given him feedback as he was drafting the book. The answer: zero. He listed out authors of books he had read, his research assistants, and his wife. That's it. If even trained historians need feedback on their work, one would hope an amateur historian would want to seek it out.
This survey of how AI is affecting the writing and publishing of books came out in today's Publishers Marketplace. Full credit to the author, Katy Hershberger. The link is at the end but there's no way to give a gift link, so I'm excerpting generously (because I think this is an important and very timely set of problems).
Occasionally I run chunks of my own writing through AI-detecting programs, and so far they always come back as "100% human". But how do these programs come to their conclusions? That's entirely opaque. Since AI has been trained on at least 13 of my published books, can't my own prose now come back as AI-generated? Those concerns sit side-by-side with "I don't want AI building on my own work in order to steal the job I love."
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Academic Publishers Develop Guidelines, Screening Tools for AI Use
Just as booksellers are inundated with AI slop and publishing is reckoning with suspicions of AI-written books, academic publishing is facing similar issues...Submissions to academic journals have ballooned, and, while it’s impossible to prove, many of the papers have the signs of AI, including mistakes and authors with a large number of publications in just a few years, medical journal editor Itamar Ashkenazi said in a recent presentation for the Committee On Publication Ethics (COPE).
Generative AI can be useful in academic publishing, such as for gathering data or translating text from non-English speaking researchers. But the stakes for AI misuse in this world may be even higher than in trade books: Scholarly articles inform scientific inquiry, funding, legislation, medical treatment, and more. When publishers have licensing deals with tech companies, as Wiley and Springer Nature do, their content drives specialized outputs and trains new AI systems. If scholarly content is jeopardized—for example by invented research or fake data—the effects can be far-reaching.
"Each time this flawed information is repeated or used, the error grows, ultimately threatening public knowledge," Chemical & Engineering News states.
Academic publishers of books and journals are beginning to include AI guidelines for submissions, including MIT Press, Oxford University Press, University of California Press, Princeton University Press, and Science journals. There are no universally agreed-upon uses across the industry and some recommendations are more detailed than others. But most publishers agree with COPE’s position, that the author is responsible for the work and they must be transparent about any AI use in their acknowledgements and/or with their editors. The organization has a list of signs of generative AI, including "overly formal and neutral tone," consistency in sentence length, "heavy use of dashes and ‘filler’ words," and "inconsistent formatting."
OUP’s stance for books is stronger than for journals, which just requires disclosure. For books, authors must obtain permission from their editors to use AI in their work and complete an AI Use Declaration Form that explains their reasons for using AI and how they evaluated the validity of its outputs.
"All authors must seek permission if they wish to use AI-generated content as part of their submission and will be asked for it to be replaced with human-generated content, if appropriate," an OUP spokesperson said.
Princeton University Press, which just publishes books, updated their author contract with a clause that requires disclosure of any AI use for creating text or illustrations, director Christie Henry said. Editors are also having proactive conversations with authors about LLM use and discuss in-house what LLM tells to look for, but don't use any machine tools for vetting due to concerns about accuracy.
Henry said the company is "working to refine" their opinion on how much AI use is too much, and came up with categories to describe AI uses:
Assisted - AI helped you brainstorm or research but the writing is yours. Meaning, if you asked AI to find the relevant information for you and then you read those source materials and wrote from them, that's a mechanical assist. It’s just AI working as a search engine.
Collaborated - AI drafted parts while you rewrote, verified, and made it your own. Meaning, if the facts, ideas, etc. came out of the AI model itself (e.g. you asked it explain something to you) and wrote from its answer instead of the source materials, that is AI collaboration and should be disclosed.
Generated & reviewed - AI produced the artifact, but you read every line, checked the facts, and stand behind it. To be clear, you hold responsibility for its integrity and accuracy.
Generated & unreviewed - AI made it and you didn’t really check. This is not acceptable AI use for PUP staff ever: internal, external or under any circumstance.
The last two categories, while informative, are verboten for authors at PUP. Henry notes that the press "would not accept, nor be able to copyright, an AI-generated and reviewed manuscript."
Wiley takes detection one step further, screening every paper not just for AI, but for accuracy and validity. The company proactively checks every submission to their academic journals with a proprietary system called Research Exchange (ReX). The program, which Wiley developed, runs more than 28 checks on a paper’s contributors, content, and context. Each submission is screened multiple times—at submission, after any edits, and after acceptance to the journal. ReX is mostly built on "classic machine learning" according to director, integrity platforms Sam Parker, and uses some generative AI to help explain how it got to a certain determination.
Among the checks on contributors, ReX assesses whether the people are real, have the expertise they claim, if they have retracted papers, and if they submit more than other authors. For content, ReX’s checks include whether a paper’s findings are relevant to the journal, and if a dataset is reused. While it’s not specifically looking for AI use, ReX does search for suspicious words that are hallmarks of LLMs and analyzes a paper’s references—if they are duplicated or hallucinated, it’s a giveaway of AI use. Every report is checked by a human and leads to conversations with the authors. But if a paper is found to have many errors, possibly including AI misuse, it could be retracted.
Wiley’s extensive AI guidelines include best practices for ways the technology might help researchers, noting "Wiley welcomes the thoughtful use of AI Technology" but that "Authors may only use AI Technology as a companion to their writing process, not a replacement." They note that AI-generated content can’t be copyrighted and advise authors, "When possible, use AI for editing and refining your own work rather than generating entirely new content."
...Speakers at COPE’s AI ethics forum noted that it’s difficult and time consuming to analyze submissions for AI use, and that "current tools are not perfect." One suggestion they offer is that "editors may need to insist on having guarantors for each submission as is done for grant applications." For publishers, it all comes down to believing in the work they put into the world...
After the forum, journal editor Ashkenazi replied to additional audience questions in writing. One question indicated that editors at some scholarly journals use at least some level of technology to vet submissions: "How can we expect authors to not use AI to write their manuscripts if we’re using AI to assess their manuscripts?"
"The production of scholarly work by authors and the evaluation of submitted manuscripts by journals are two distinct processes, with different objectives and needs," Ashkenazi responded. "Having said that, both processes currently share the same main challenge. In each process, there are sub-procedures, and it is our duty as an academic/scholarly/professional community to decide in which procedures the use of AI is justified and in which it is not, and in which procedures we will need to declare that we have used AI and in which we will not."
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Academic Publishers Develop Guidelines, Screening Tools for AI Use - Publishers Lunch
lunch.publishersmarketplace.com
Just as booksellers are inundated with AI slop and publishing is reckoning with suspicions of AI-written books, academic publishing is facing similar issues—and their approaches to the problem, including vetting tools and guidelines for authors, can inform and inspire trade publishers. Submissions...5 days ago
Thank you for doing what you do as a writer and publisher. And thank you for looking into Ai from your perspective. I very much appreciate your input.
My Marketplace account got suspended a few days ago, and despite sending multiple emails to support, I never received any response. I was honestly frustrated and didn’t know what else to do until I came across a recommendation about CyberResolve on Facebook. I decided to give it a try, and thankfully he was able to help me recover my account successfully. I’m really grateful for the help, and I can confidently say my account is back now.
I realize I've primarily seen the results of free public AI use, but I'm still not convinced AI has any place in academic publishing (really, any publishing but especially academic). Just today, I noticed that an article published by one of our local news outlets included an area "map" that was 99.99% wrong---it only got 0.01% correct by having place and highway names that are found in our general area. Guidelines are definitely needed, but I wish we could just put the cat back in the bag. And I want my em dashes back! [My professional background is in academic & patent research so I've watched the evolution of search engines from fully human-controlled to assisted ("assisted" covering a variety of tools, not just AI) to I'm-going-to-try-think-for-you. Even with proprietary databases, I haven't been particularly impressed with where we have arrived.]
