I must first of all confess my surprise at finding myself participating in the debate about David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis, a book far afield from my own areas of expertise and interest. And I won’t be saying anything about the book itself. Instead, I will offer a counterpoint to Keri Leigh Merritt’s rebuttal of the defenses of Potter’s book. There are portions of her provocative and contentious post I’m partial to. Yet as I will argue in what follows, her vision of historical scholarship as a form of advocacy grounded in commitment to a particular political cause rests Read more