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Three comments: I often wonder how Don Williams has the time to put together his long, detail-oriented posts. Then I realized that this one sounded familiar. He posted almost exactly the same set of comments as an OAH on-line response to the Michael Bellesiles statement "Disarming the Critics" which appeared in the November 2001 OAH Newsletter. 2. John William Ward's _Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age_ may be old, and it may be a landmark book in the development of American Studies, but Ward was trained in both history and American Studies, and in fact was a member of the history departments at both Princeton and Amherst (he chaired the Amherst history department) before becoming president of Amherst. His work cannot be dismissed as somehow not history. 3. Historically, the question about militia at the Battle of New Orleans is still open. C. Edward Skeen's study of militia _Citizen Soldiers in the War of 1812_ (1999) is not complementary about their performance in general. At least one recent scholar considers all the first hand accounts of the Battle of New Orleans to be highly self-serving and prejudiced, noting Latour's to be "the most prejudiced and mendacious account of the New Orleans campaign to survive". My point is not that Williams is wrong, but that the historiography remains lively and with room for different interpretations and that the facts are still up for grabs. Joan R. Gundersen, Ph.D. joangundersen@netscape.net
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