"Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"

[victor steinbok]

I read the description a bit differently. I thought it mocked "modern
Republicans" for a simplistic view of history. If anything, I see
"picture" misplaced as it means "view" here. So I read the whole piece
as a lecture designed to through a monkey wrench into the conservative
perspective (modern or otherwise) of the French Revolution and
post-revolutionary culture, rather than the review of a complicated
perspective that these conservatives might have. It's history
confronting perception, not an investigation of perception.

VS-)

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> I didn't know there were conservatives and
> liberals among the modern historians of the 18th
> and 19th centuries.  (Yes I did, but that's
> another story.)  Or "light humorists."
>
> Victor, this "complicate" came from an invitation
> to a Newberry Library Eighteenth-Century Seminar,
> the abstract for which follows my signature.  I
> doubt that the presentation is aimed at "modern
> republicans" (even though it will "bear on" the French Revolution).
>
> But for a book that *is* aimed at -- well, she
> calls them "historical fundamentalists", see Jill
> Lepore's _The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea
> Party's Revolution and the Battle over American
> History_ (Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), esp. p. 16.
>
> Joel

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