“With fat biographies of sundry Founding Fathers appearing every other month and bookstore tables still piled high with odes to the Greatest Generation, the public’s appetite for the American past appears as healthy as ever,” observes Matthew Price. But in a Boston Globe article, Price reports that University of Georgia historian Peter Charles Hoffer says “we’re being sold a bill of goods.” Hoffer says the profession is in trouble, and he has written a new book that is a withering attack on some of the “celebratory popularizers who often value rousing narrative over scholarly rigor and academic specialists whose jargon-riddled, often dour monographs ignore the ordinary reader.” For anyone who’s been keeping track of recent plagiarism scandals, his title says it all: Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud — American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin.