Talk:Charles Higham (biographer)

message: Higham may have overstated a few things about himself - the French Academy has no mention of awarding him any major prize - all I could find is a minor award presented by Ionesco for the Dietrich biography.  The Poetry Society does not mention him in any archives, so it is likely he got a very minor mention somewhere.  "Regents Professor" at UCSC is not an academic position, but one usually for one quarter.    strongly suggests Higham exaggerated his role in finding footage of anything. Collect (talk) 15:36, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  problems in claims 

message: It's the nature of conspiracy theories to drag in ever more suspects, and this study of Lincoln's assassination casts a wide net indeed. Higham (American Swastika ) implicates not only John Wilkes Booth's band of conspirators, but Confederate secret agents in Canada and Northern Democratic and Copperhead politicians and businessmen, including Union general George McClellan. Connecting them, Higham contends, was a network of semilicit wartime trade between North and South, facilitated by Lincoln and encompassing both his supporters and his enemies. Higham ties together a variety of Civil War figures and goings-on to suggest the hand of treacherous moneyed interests in Lincoln's murder, but he insinuates far more than he demonstrates. Much space is devoted to Confederate subversion operations and raids that had nothing to do with Lincoln's murder. Major claims—that Confederate agent George N. Sanders played a leading role in the assassination plot, or that assassination conspirators were motivated by considerations of Lincoln's "usefulness" to their own trading activities—are tantalizing, but not sufficiently substantiated. The McClellan-Booth link rests precariously on an anonymous report of a New York supper the famous general and the famous actor supposedly both attended. Scholars will be puzzled at Higham's interpretations—Copperhead congressman Clement L. Vallandigham is described as an "anarchist"—and stymied by his inadequate and sometimes garbled source notes. General readers will note that the text feels disorganized, a tangle of factoids. Conspiracy theorists and Civil War buffs may want to take a gander, but overall this book adds little to our understanding of the assassination.
 It would be difficult to write a tedious account of beautiful and appealing Jennie Jerome (1854–1921), who gave birth to future British prime minister Winston Churchill, but celebrity biographer Higham (The Duchess of Windsor ) has managed to do just that. In gossipy but unexciting prose, he details the minutiae of Jennie's birth and childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., as the daughter of Leonard Jerome, a corrupt and criminal investor who frequently traveled in Europe. In 1874 Jennie, against the family's opposition, married Lord Randolph Churchill, who, with his wife's eager backing, became deeply involved in English politics. The couple spent much of their time in and out of sexual liaisons and scandals until Randolph's death in 1895. They also ran up huge gambling debts. Jennie married twice more (the second union ended in divorce) to much younger men. The author's attempt to turn a flashy, compulsively promiscuous socialite into an early feminist fails miserably, although the fact that Jennie established a magazine and built a hospital for wounded troops during WWI is of interest. Winston, who was conceived before his parents' marriage, makes brief appearances. Replete with sensational details, this account nevertheless fails to bring its subject to life.
As far as I can tell, Higham was a skilled manipulator (and possibly a faker as well) of "documents", an inveterate Rupert Murdoch-employed gossip-monger,  a mediocre poet of little renown, and  (as PW notes) a generally "tedious" writer.  Collect (talk) 18:09, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  PW review of his Lincoln book  and Churchill book