I am not sure why this particular line of discussion is so troublesome.  But evidently it is.

Anytime that we are undisciplined and permit our frustrations to over ride our rational faculties, and succumb to the temptation to indulge in sarcasm and related rhetoric, the over all quality of conversation declines. Most of us, most of the time, are attempting to sustain a civil and reasoned conversation about Virginia history.  Sarcasm is rude and uncivil, not the least because it undermines the attempt to pursue a public discussion conducted to rational standards.  

I am open to discussing the possibility that the conventional wisdom regarding slavery is wrong.  Melvin Ely recently published a path-breaking study of the experience of free black people in ante-bellum Prince Edward county, in which he demonstrated that the conventional wisdom regarding *that* subject was wrong.  So its quite possible to challenge the conventional wisdom, and to do so without resorting to sarcasm or sophistry.

But if we are going to have that kind of discussion, we are going to have to address the arguments I and others have presented as to why the WPA narratives are skewed.  Simply rejoining "well, their judgments are more authentic than yours because *they* lived it," is uncritical and unreflective.  It is insufficient because it refuses even to acknowledge the possibility that the narratives, recorded in the mid to late 1930s, might be skewed.  That is not just bad history--that's bad thinking.  If engineers, physicists, chemists, doctors, and other rational professionals proceeded by refusing to analyze critically the data on which they base their conclusions, we would wind up with bad bridges, unworkable science, and medical quackery.  

I'd like to think that we here can do better than that.
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University