Harry Elmer Barnes
| Harry Elmer Barnes | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 15, 1889 Auburn, New York |
| Died | August 25, 1968 (aged 79) Malibu, California |
| Occupation | Historian |
Harry Elmer Barnes (June 15, 1889 – August 25, 1968) was an American historian who, in his later years, was known for his historical revisionism and Holocaust denial. Barnes taught history at Columbia University from 1918 to 1929. Afterwards, he worked as a freelance writer and occasional adjunct professor at smaller schools. Through his position at Columbia and his prodigious scholarly output, Barnes was once highly regarded as a historian. However, by the end of the 1950s, he had lost credibility because of the major role he played in the inception of the Holocaust denial movement.
Barnes was a writer who used his wide reading to summarize vast quantities of information and present histories that would be "usable" to his readers. He published more than 30 books, 100 essays, and 600 articles and book reviews, making him one of the most prolific writers in the social sciences.
Barnes took a PhD at Columbia in 1918 in history with a study in the history of penology. He was among the graduate students of William Archibald Dunning, who was influential in the history of the Reconstruction era in the United States. Barnes lectured widely between 1918 and 1941 on current events and recent history.
During World War I, Barnes had been a strong supporter of the war effort; his anti-German propaganda was rejected by the National Board for Historical Service, which described it as "too violent to be acceptable". After the war, Barnes' views towards Germany reversed: he became as much of a Germanophile as he previously had been Germanophobic. Barnes took the view that the United States had fought on the wrong side in World War I.
In the 1920s, Barnes was noted as a vehement advocate that Germany had borne no responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, and had instead been the victim of Allied aggression. In 1922, Barnes was arguing that the responsibility for World War I was split evenly between the Allies and the Central Powers. By 1924, Barnes was writing that Austria was the power most responsible for the war, but that Russia and France were more responsible than Germany. By 1926, Barnes argued that Russia and France bore the entire responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, and the Central Powers none. In Barnes' view, "vested political and historical interests" were behind the "official" account that Germany started World War I.
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