.....So based upon present-day evidence, Webster came across as very much a fringe crackpot, someone whose research would hardly be taken seriously in respectable circles, with the favorable if very brief mention by Churchill being merely a puzzling anomaly. However, I discovered that this was actually not the case.
During the early 2000s, I’d spent a number of years building a content-archiving system that contained the near-complete archives of a couple of hundred of our leading publications of the last 150 years, and it proved very useful in obtaining a much more balanced evaluation of Webster and her works.
I discovered that a long list of her books were in that system, together with their contemporaneous reviews, and the latter demonstrated that although quite controversial, she had hardly been regarded as a fringe figure at that point. The New York Times, the Nation, and Commonweal had reviewed her books, as had such very influential publications of that era as the Saturday Review of Literature, the Bookman, and the Outlook. Leading academic journals such as the American Historical Review and Political Science Quarterly had done the same, while Foreign Affairs had noted and briefly described a couple of her books.
Some of these reviews, especially those appearing in liberal or leftist periodicals, had been sharply critical, challenging her “conspiratorial” reading of historical events in much the same way that modern day writers almost uniformly did. But she had also had her strong defenders as well.
For example, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History of Harvard University, published a long and highly favorable 1920 review of her book on the French Revolution, which he characterized as “extraordinarily interesting” in his very first sentence. Although he went on to admit that her thesis was “not wholly new,” he emphasized that it had never “been worked out in such detail,” nor with such completeness. As a result, he said that the book must “be reckoned with by anyone who wishes to recognize and understand the springs of popular movements, then or now.” The long review in the New York Times also certainly accepted all of her research on the true history of that event as important and correct.
Academic periodicals were similarly mixed. The fairly brief review in Political Science Quarterly emphasized the “immense amount of contemporary material” she had brought to bear in support of her “most novel and astonishing interpretation of the great event of the eighteenth century. ” And although the discussion in the American Historical Review was rather negative, it still admitted that English publications had been “much impressed” by her book, explaining that the Spectator had declared it “a veritable revelation.”
This very wide divergence of verdicts on Webster and her works was emphasized several years later by Prof. Abbott, who opened his 1925 review on her Secret Societies book in the prestigious Saturday Review by declaring:
There is no person now engaged in writing history concerning whose work there is such sharp divergence of opinion as there is in regard to Mrs. Webster…she has been the object of more praise and of much more attack than almost any one since Macaulay. That circumstance is due alike to her choice of subject, her point of view, and her method of approach. Revolution is always an extraordinarily difficult topic for historical treatment. Its passions long outlive its events…the publisher who warned Mrs. Webster of the probable results of her labors observed to her, “Remember that if you take an anti-revolutionary line you will have the whole literary world against you.”
Thus, one hundred years ago a top Harvard historian writing in one of America’s most influential publications had repeatedly praised Webster’s research. But a century of relentless ideological pressure had subsequently marginalized her and her books to such an extent that they had become dismissed and almost forgotten as the conspiracy-nonsense of a fringe crackpot. This remarkable transformation has probably gone unrecognized by almost all of today’s mainstream academics , for whom Webster remained invisible.
Taken together, these appraisals by leading past scholars persuaded me to take her work seriously, especially her lengthy volume on the French Revolution that had so impressed Churchill....
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-political-conspiracies-and-the-french-revolution/
