Further..
Quote:
Speaking of questions that have gone unanswered, some that were posed in Post No.259 and repeated in Post No.280 have still not been answered. They arise from Stephen Dieter's published review of THE MAKING OF  BILLY BISHOP. To repeat:
© Which passages does he believe have been inadequately foot-noted ?
(d) How would he compare the level of scholarship (particularly in primary vs secondary sources) of Greenhous vs others such as McCaffrey or Bashow ?
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I felt that the footnotes in
The Making of Billy Bishop were lacking. I understand that not every single word, thought or impression can be notated. In reading the work, and reviewing the footnotes as I read it I found occasions where I wondered where text had been sourced. I know of at least one other person who, after reading this work, shared similar thoughts.
As for the level of scholarship, I'll brave this one although I'm not entirely comfortable with it. The one advantage Mr. Greenhous has over others is that he is a professional historian. He has trained in, and to the best of my knowledge has worked in, this field his adult life. Mr. MaCaffery is a journalist and I must concede that his profession can cause one to view his work differently. I do not know LCol Bashow's educational credentials so I shall not comment on that, except to say that he is a professor of History at RMC.
I think that Mr. Greenhous and his work do provide a counter-point argument to the accepted history as it exists. If this work allows people to view something from a different perspective, then I as a hopeful historian applaud it. Where the problem comes about is when people pick up this work and carry the grudge going into page one.
As I wrote to you off-line, Mr. Halliday, when I received the bound galleys of this work, I placed it on my desk for over a week to allow me to make sure that, in my mind, I was going to be fair to this work. I believe that I asked you in that same e-mail if you thought that was fair. You never replied.
I have only been studying this field for 13 years now (including an Honours degree upgrade and an incomplete Master of Arts degree part-time), and I will be the first to admit I have a lot to learn.