Dispatches from the Creation Wars

What Marshall and Barton Want

Posted by Ed Brayton on July 30, 2009
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It looks like the wingnuts on the Texas Board of Education got exactly what they wanted when they named Peter Marshall and David Barton to the group of “experts” to advise them on the social studies curriculum:

“The foremost problem that I see is that there is not nearly enough emphasis or credit given to the biblical motivations of America’s settlers and founders,” Evangelical minister Peter Marshall, the president of the Massachusetts-based Peter Marshall Ministries and one of the experts on the panel, told ABCNews.com.

And that’s what it was all about from the start. They wanted someone who would push Christian Nation nonsense into the textbooks. Since they couldn’t find any actual historians to do so, they found fake historians like Marshall and Barton.

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Comments

  1. #1 Cubist
    August 1, 2009

    sez chris rodda: “I’ve already made so much of my book available for free that I’m getting close to the point where nobody will need to buy the book.”
    There is evidence that providing providing a whole book for free over the internet can actually boost sales. I refer to the Baen Free Library, an ‘arm’ of the science fiction publisher Baen Books which, as its name suggests, makes various titles from the Baen catalog freely available to all as unrestricted downloadsand, at one and the same time, as physical ink-on-paper artifacts which can be purchased in the usual manner.
    In addition, the National Academies Press (academic publisher) makies a goodly chunk it its entire catalog available thru both ink-on-paper (which they sell) and PDF (which they allow anyone to download for free).
    It might seem that making a book freely downloadable might result in plummeting sales of that book’s ink-on-paper edition, but both NAP and Baen Books claim that this is not so — and they have the sales figures to prove it. It might be worth your while to investigate this matter further…