Joshua E. Kastenberg, University of New Mexico School of Law, has published “Ford is an Anarchist” and “History is Bunk”: William Archibald Dunning and Jesse Siddall Reeves as Precedent for the First Professional Historians Testifying as Expert Witnesses in United States History in the Mississippi Law Journal. From the introduction:
Automobile magnate Henry Ford infamously stated “[h]istory is . . . bunk,” evidencing his disdain for academic history or even the need to know something of the past. . . . Yet, from July 29 through July 31, 1919, he required the testimony of Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning [and] one of Dunning’s former students, Ohio State University professor Francis W. Coker . . . to counter University of Michigan professor, Jesse Siddall Reeves, who gave powerful evidence in a Michigan state trial undermining Ford’s claim that the Chicago Tribune libeled him. . . . The Ford v. Chicago Tribune trial that lasted over the summer of 1919 is absent from judicial decisions and law review articles alike, but it marked the first time in history that professional historians testified as experts for adverse litigants in a jury trial.
--Dan Ernst