Dave, my earlier snarky post certainly wasn’t aimed specifically at you, but i appreciate your replies anyway.
I suppose the only thing i would add is in response to point E.
It is certainly true that there is quite a history of academics assuming that lay people have no idea about history. This goes back to the birth of professional, university-based history in the late nineteenth century (before that, most of the great historians were “gentlemen amateurs”). Furthermore, many historians assume that the only people that they need to address in their work are other professional historians, and not the general public. I think it is this sense of aloofness that has alienated so many people, as well as the fact that some academic historians simply have trouble telling an interesting story, even when they have very interesting material to work with.
But, lets look at it from the other side of the fence for a minute. Suppose you’ve spent five or six years researching your topic, which is not unusual. You’ve read just about every article and book written about slavery in America. You have spent long, tedious weeks in archives and libraries from New Orleans to Richmond going over planters’ diaries, plantation accounts and logbooks, store records, the files of local businesses and newspapers, the diaries and financial records of slave-traders, court records, etc., etc., etc. You then put this all together in a 500-page book, which includes 150 pages of footnotes showing where you got your evidence. And a few flag-waving undergrads like Muad’dib, who’ve barely even opened the fucking freshman-level textbook, turn around and call you a PC thug who doesn’t know what your talking about.
I’m not crying too much over the lot of the professor. I think academia seems like a pretty good life–that’s why i want to be an academic–even though the pay is pretty awful considering the amount of time spent getting an education.
Nor do i think that their training and experience should make professors the only ones qualified to discuss such important issues. These are national stories, and everyone is allowed an opinion and a voice, not just the “experts.”
But i do think that a certain amount of respect is due, as in any profession, for the amount of work that has gone into gaining one’s qualifications and learning how to research, collect, analyze, and report on historical events. Want to disagree with the conclusions? By all means, go ahead. But it’s a little unbecoming, and pretty damned offensive, to suggest that the purpose of all this work was nothing more than an unreflective and anti-intellectual attempt to paint America as an unredeemably evil society. Even if people don’t agree with the conclusions, they could at least have the courtesy not to assume that those conclusions are the result of bad faith scholarship.
This, of course, does not really address the issue of what is actually taught in the classroom. On that issue, i can only really speak from experience, and say that while most of the professors that i have come into contact with (as an undergrad in Australia, and a grad student here in the US) have been on the left-liberal end of the spectrum, they have not been the types to present a simplistic, anti-white view of history. They concede the difficulty of these issues, and they realize the need to judge historical characters within historical context.
On an unrelated matter, you’re the second person in the last few weeks who has referred to Hopkins as The Hop. Qadgop the Mercotan, who got his MD here, used the term a while ago, too. I’ve been here three years, and you two Dopers are the only people i’ve ever heard use the term. Is it some old-timer’s thing? 
And as for the hurricane, it’s pretty piss-weak in this area, as far as i can tell. The weather reports on the local news stations have, as usual, been engaged in hysterical over-reaction to the whole problem. They’re really rather embarrassing.
