Talk:Caroline Elkins

message: Editors please use this page to discuss controversies about the Caroline Elkins' views and not engage in a revert war.
:Elkins will not respond to her many critics, so how can a proper debate happen?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.68.53.136 (talk) 06:18, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The wikipedia entry on Elkins is not a place to debate or rebut criticism. It is a place to state verifiable facts - not opinions of critics or admirers. -- Thaths 14:46, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

text: So there is a healthy debate happening in the media about whether those are facts or fabrications. The public sphere seems to me an admirable place for that debate to happen. The wikipedia pages are not, and should not be a place to try and convict or try and exonerate the subject in-absentia. It is so very easy to edit wikipedia articles to agree with one's point of view. Establishing real truth takes a lot longer. Thaths (talk) 20:24, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: The 'criticism' section of this page defies belief. Here is a professor of history in Harvard University who writes a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of British policy in Kenya in the 1950s concluding that it was, for want of a better word, barbaric. This conclusion offends nationalistically-minded British people so they orchestrate a campaign against this historian. Not a single historian who has examined Elkins's evidence has been asked for his/her opinion. Instead people who have no expertise in this area are used in this article to discredit this quite superb, if harrowing, history. Bad form (to put it very mildly). Dunlavin Green (talk) 23:06, 25 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: That claim might have some validity if the article didn't mostly quote opinion pices from london based authors.©Geni 18:09, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Eichener, it is you who evidently does not know what you are talking about. You also breached wikipedia policy by editing my comments and managed somehow not to be banned. You make claims against the reputation of an internationally respected professor at Harvard that she is "not taken seriously" and you have no support for this opinion; you just blurted it out. The article, as the above user notes, is based on the opinions of nationalistically-minded British writers who cannot abide the idea that maybe the white man's burden was in fact the black man's burden.  There is no attempt at neutrality, at balance. And you - you - expect to be taken seriously? The criticism section of this article is so fundamentally in breach of wikipedia's Biographies of living persons that it defies belief that it is still in existence. A bit like your views, to be honest. Dunlavin Green (talk) 01:15, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Bordering on defamation

message: :A recent perspective on Elkins’ work is provided in:- “Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya”.
Daniel Branch, Cambridge University Press. 2009. xiv-xv.
“Elkins repeated claims of torture in detention camps, similar to those found in the voluminous number of memoirs written by Mau Mau veterans. However, she went further than even those authors by arguing Britain had overseen an “incipient genocide“ that claimed the lives of “perhaps hundreds of thousands”. Such allegations garnered much attention, and the book received a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Among academics, the book has been less well received. The methodology behind some of the most contentious claims has been called into question. Moreover, respected figures from within the fields of Imperial and African history have fiercely criticised Elkins’ arguments”.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.148.93.134 (talk) 10:35, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  Who are these seemingly eternally elusive "respected figures"? As so often before the criticisms of her work appear to revolve around opposition to the fact that she has firmly, and squarely, blamed British colonialism for what happened in Kenya. There is no rational argument against her argument. She merely committed the "crime" of not dressing up her findings for a British audience. This campaign is getting tiresome. 86.44.43.208 (talk) 20:15, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticisms (once again)

message: I see some of these issues have been touched already, but it is my opinion, that wheather Elkins has been discredited or not by some of her opinions or work, that does not change the information she found in national archives. Im not sure why the tagline that ' controversial issues' may be located on this page appears, when I dont see anything controversial in any of the items as there is not debate on her biography about her work on her page. Are we going to tag every Nazi concentration camp article in the same manner?  The content is controversail to whom? I find it very odd, that some one for example, would find Anne Franks diary and then say, we can not talk about her expereinces or someone else can not talk about her expereinces becasue the person who reported it was discredited by academia, historically, academia has been wrong on many things.. look at some of the ideas on Darwinism, and the fact that some of the people that have discredited some of her work are African historians means what? The argument, really should be about the person and not the information she found in the national archives. 
Some people doubt the inforamtion that is choronicled by Jewish people in some of the concentration camps too, the Nazis and other general citizens that claim that the numbers of people killed were exagerrated,  usually that happens when systematic killings happen so it is expected that some will dispute her findings. Some people have discredited Darwin but Darwinism is still taught in schools. There are some topics in this world that are not confortable...but lets not pretend that nothing happened just becasue you dont like the author. That is the real the controversy in thie topic - the otomology. It seems like double standards.
 MsTingaK (talk) 01:39, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  controversy

message: Given the more recent releases of information this section could probably do with a reassessment.©Geni 17:48, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Criticism of Elkins' work

message: This section should not be included unless it can be directly linked to the subject. I would recommend its removal.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.193.11.45 (talk) 09:30, 6 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree. The criticism section has claims made about the veracity of the subject's work. If there are recent developments which show that the abuses alleged in the subject's work is being argued in court and being accepted by the UK government, it is very relevant to the subject and her work. Thaths (talk) 21:41, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Mau Mau torture hearings in the UK and it's outcome 

message: Can a few who are neutral(ish) give me an opinion on whether the criticism section is now POV free? OK to remove the tag? I've sourced to where Elkins has briefly responded—you can download that article for free via the link in the article or go here. FlutteringCarp (talk) 20:53, 12 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The Link is behind a pay-for-view. The free link referred to in the article (nor response) doesn't appear to exist (can you cite it explicitly please in case I am missing it). 2001:8003:70F5:2400:7943:9457:231F:621F (talk) 16:00, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neutrality assessment 

message: As has been noted by others on this page criticism of Elkins is not permitted even if cited by refereed Journals or refuted by first-hand accounts (which is permitted by the Page guidelines). This has led to the peculiar phenomena that would strike a first time visitor to this page of seeing a lot of people defending Elkins for the many criticisms levelled against her work and yet there seems to be a paucity of those criticisms listed here and none in the main Article page. 
For people from countries that are used to engaging in robust, scholarly debate ... welcome to the story-time stupor that characterises the American academic system! 2001:8003:70F5:2400:7943:9457:231F:621F (talk) 15:56, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  No Criticism Allowed?