On Nov. 7, 1959, The Chicago Defender commemorated the centennial of John Brown's death: "The paradox of Brown's idealistic goals and his fearless methods are still being argued in college seminars a century later. Some would exonerate him on grounds of congenital insanity; others see him as a fanatic whose passions knew no bounds. Only a conspicuous few see him in the true perspective of history, as a martyr to a cause-human freedom." Nearly a half-century on, nothing's changed: We're still trying to settle the question of John Brown.

Nothing's changed-except for the enduring skew of Sept. 11. David Reynolds, author of a rich and detailed "cultural biography" of Brown, believes he was a martyr to human freedom, but the unavoidable shadow of Osama bin Laden darkens the story.

John Brown-"Old Brown," "Osawatomie Brown," "Weird John Brown"-died on a scaffold in Virginia on Dec. 2, 1859. He and his small band of followers were captured at Harpers Ferry, Va., where they'd seized the federal arsenal. Brown planned to distribute guns among local slaves, who he believed would rise in spontaneous revolt. He planned to lead his men, the ranks swollen with liberated slaves, into the mountains of the South, slowly spreading terror and freedom into the country of the slaveholders.

He miscalculated. Convicted of plotting against the state of Virginia, Brown was condemned to die. But he was an extraordinary prisoner, "exuberant" in his jail cell, eloquent in the courtroom and brave on the scaffold. He accomplished more by dying than he had by living. As every schoolchild knows, though Brown's body moldered in the grave, his soul went marching on.

How do we connect the violent career of this enigmatic man to 19th-century American culture-and his failed project to emancipation, civil war and civil rights?

We learn from Mr. Reynolds that Brown, coming of age in the 1820's, struggled in the turbulence of the emerging market economy. He failed as a tanner, cattle trader, horse trader, lumber dealer, real-estate speculator and wool trader. But he was good at procreation (three of his 20 children died accompanying him in his battles against slavery), and he was unwavering in his dedication to a militant Christianity that inspired his impassioned opposition to the "peculiar institution." Mr. Reynolds' passionate Brown was not a madman, even though, to less courageous souls, he has sometimes appeared mad. Mr. Reynolds argues that Brown's opposition to America's slave system intensified as the slavery crisis deepened, and he took action while others talked.

Brown moved to Kansas in 1855, joining the frontlines of the war over slavery. It's here that he first earned his reputation as a terrorist: In May 1856, he and his followers murdered five men at Pottawatomie Creek, hacking them to death with polished broadswords. The act was brutal, but the victims were not innocents. This was an act of war, Mr. Reynolds argues; Brown took the battle right to the pro-slavery border ruffians. And in doing so, he showed slavery's defenders that at least some among the abolitionists were not afraid to use force.

A few months later, Brown and his men fought valiantly against pro-slavery forces at the battle of Osawatomie. And thanks to good press, Brown's legend began to spread. Mr. Reynolds traces the legend back to the 19th-century cultural world he knows so well. In earlier books on the American Renaissance and Walt Whitman, he explored the rich literary world of mid-century America. Brown is not a literary figure, but his connections to Thoreau and Emerson and others of their Transcendentalist circle were crucial to the workings of his fame. Had the various sages of Concord not sanctified "the arch-Abolitionist John Brown, he may well have remained an obscure, tangential figure-a forgettable oddball. And had that happened, the suddenly intense polarization between the North and the South that followed Harper's Ferry might not have occurred."

For good or ill, this literary turn sets Mr. Reynolds' book apart from the many previous studies of Brown. It shares our contemporary obsessions with terror and with the media. One of Mr. Reynolds' goals is to reveal the logic of Brown's plan to end slavery by examining it "in light of the slave revolts, guerilla warfare, and revolutionary Christianity that were major sources of inspiration for him." But he also uses Brown to move the New England Transcendentalists back to the center of the great drama of mid-19th-century America. Emerson and Thoreau did not sit back uninvolved as the country moved toward war. Indeed, according to Mr. Reynolds, without them it's hard to see how Brown could have "sparked the Civil War." But it's also true that Brown is just about the only operative link between the Transcendentalists and the unfolding crisis of slavery and secession.

Mr. Reynolds also seems to want to use Brown to bring African-American culture back to the center. Brown "would trigger the Civil War through his antislavery terrorism-and this terrorism itself was largely black-inspired. To see John Brown as the main link between African American culture and the Civil War is to recognize that blacks were prime movers in American history." Brown may have been the least racist of the white abolitionists, but Mr. Reynolds leaves us with the impression that Brown possessed a somewhat truncated view of African-American culture as the source of terror, but not the source of love or grace.

A reader might be excused for wondering if Mr. Reynolds wasn't worn out by Brown's contradictions as he came to conclude his long book. (This reader also wondered why he titled each of the 18 chapters with a word that begins with the letter P: "The Party," "The Puritan," "The Pioneer," "Problems," "Pilloried, Prosecuted, and Praised," and so on.) He returns, as we would expect, to the vexed question of terrorism-and runs into trouble, as so many others have, with his defense of Brown. Yes, he was a terrorist, Mr. Reynolds argues, but "he had a breadth of vision that modern terrorists lack. He was an American terrorist in the amplest sense of the word." That curious phrase is meant to suggest that even though Brown was a religious fanatic, he was an American fanatic who welcomed into his band followers of all faiths (or no faith) and then led them in a struggle for a pluralistic, democratic society.

Brown was also more eloquent than your average terrorist, better with words than Ted Kaczynski or Timothy McVeigh. "John Brown alone wielded both the sword and the sword-pen." And he kept his focus on race, killing only in response to pro-slavery outrages. "Without the racial factor," Mr. Reynolds writes, "Pottawatomie seems like heartless butchery and Harpers Ferry appears inane and quixotic. With the racial factor, both make sense."

Mr. Reynolds can't quite leave it there. Brown fought for human equality, exercising "the right of the individual to challenge the mass." Yet once Mr. Reynolds introduces this American individual back into the story of John Brown, his sharp focus on Brown's heroic challenge to white racism grows wobbly. "America has become a vast network of institutions that tend to stifle vigorous challenges from individuals. Such challenges are needed if the nation is to remain healthy. There must be modern Americans who identify with the oppressed with such passion that they are willing to die for them, as Brown did." A noble sentiment, to be sure, but Brown was also willing to kill as well as to die, and by the end of the book Brown's violence has slipped to the background: The martyr has upstaged the terrorist.

Brown is powerful because he was both martyr and terrorist-and that's what makes it as hard now as it ever was to reconcile the conflicts of this complicated man. John Brown was captured and hanged once in Virginia, but he still eludes our capture: one white American who was not a racist, but one white American who also embodied the tragic contradictions of our flawed Republic.

Ann Fabian teaches American history and American studies at Rutgers University.

Last time I graded a batch of undergraduate papers for a big lecture class, I spent more time online searching for the sources of peculiar phrases than I did correcting grammar or engaging ideas. Why would anyone (other than a bookish pirate) call a character from The Grapes of Wrath a "saucy wench"? Ask the good folk at www.sparknotes.com, from whence this lazy sophomore had lifted most of his paper. I printed out the source, made a copy of his paper and sent the whole package off to a dean's office charged with handling violations of academic integrity.

I told the student I couldn't return his paper because it looked to me as if he'd copied it off the Web. "You get an F," I said. He shrugged. But before the dean got around to his case, he turned in a second paper. This one seemed pretty good, until I found an identical paper deep down in the pile. He'd gotten a little trickier: I couldn't trace this one with a simple Google search; to find it, I had to subscribe to an advanced SparkNotes service. The whole episode was depressing.

The students who cheat-particularly off the Web-seem to be missing the gene that provides a moral compass on issues of intellectual property. Or maybe there is no such gene and they simply missed the day in elementary school when the overworked teacher reminded the kids to make a note of where they find the information they download off the classroom computer.

It's harder to excuse the group of cheating or maybe careless grown-ups whose stories inspired Peter Charles Hoffer's compelling Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud-American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin. A professor of history at the University of Georgia, Mr. Hoffer is the former chair of the now-disbanded Professional Division of the American Historical Association. Past Imperfect is a brief for the Professional Division, whose task was to determine whether an individual historian, charged with malfeasance-plagiarism or faking data-actually violated the association's Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct.

Mr. Hoffer works through the details of these four famous cases from the last decade. Stephen Ambrose, author of best-selling books on Lewis and Clark, the transcontinental railroad and D-Day, had a habit of building gripping narratives by lifting firsthand accounts from books by other writers. To readers, it seemed as though the remarkably productive Ambrose had found all the primary sources he used, and he often cited them without properly acknowledging the writers who had discovered them in the archives. The charge may seem fastidious, but it was wrong for Ambrose to present as his own the words of other scholars. It must have been disheartening for them to watch Ambrose grow rich and famous using their work.

Ambrose misappropriated sources; Michael Bellesiles apparently made his up. Mr. Bellesiles was a professor at Emory when his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was published by Knopf in 2000. He must have known that the National Rifle Association would not much like his contention that gun ownership was rare in early America and that the Second Amendment was meant to apply to militias and not to individual citizens. The book won praise in the press and prizes from the profession. But Mr. Bellesiles was very careless about the probate records that supposedly supported his case and less than forthcoming with the committees from his university set up to investigate the charges against him. Had he visited the archives? Did the records he said he'd used exist? Were his notes destroyed by a flood? Though Mr. Bellesiles lost his job, his book is still in print.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, biographer of the Fitzgerald and Kennedy families, Lyndon Johnson, and Eleanor and Franklin, was careless too in her use of sources. Her publisher paid off one of the writers whose work she copied, but at least Ms. Goodwin has been somewhat more candid than the others about her mistakes.

Mount Holyoke professor Joseph Ellis' case is the strangest of the four. Mr. Ellis lied to his students about scoring touchdowns, leading platoons in Vietnam and fighting for civil rights in the South. He was a busy man in the 1960's, when he was also in graduate school at Yale and teaching at West Point. His defenders said that at least he didn't lie in his books or lie to advance his career. Mr. Hoffer, however, uncovers subtle patterns of invention that he thinks changed the way Mr. Ellis wrote his histories. The "bravado that Ellis injected into his fabrications went into his later books … made them different, and better, than his earlier efforts." The more he lied to his students, the more artful his history became. In the end, all his college could do was to take away his endowed chair and force him to take a leave from teaching.

There's plenty here to inspire the amateur analyst, but Mr. Hoffer is not interested in individual pathologies or even in the individual moral failings of these writers. Their cheating ways go right to the ailing heart of the history profession, which, to its detriment, has dropped the ball on governance. There's something very wrong in the house of history when the right-wing Weekly Standard passes as the profession's whistleblower and chortles over careless mistakes by liberal historians.

History matters to Mr. Hoffer because it tells us who we are as a people and a nation. Our views of the past shape the way we make policies and elect Presidents. In the first years of the Republic, the revolutionary generation took a deep interest in the history of the experiment that was the United States. History was to pull a people together into a sort of national consensus. Little matter that Indians, women, slaves and servants had no place in the national story; the tales of heroic New Englanders would stand for the experience of all.

We have changed this history, of course, but Mr. Hoffer suggests that our inclusive, contentious, diverse and self-critical history has come at a cost. Professional historians have lost a battle in the culture wars. Mr. Hoffer's case studies expose an enormous gap between the critical histories we write for our graduate students and colleagues and the appealing popular narratives that sell well and turn historians into celebrities. These four fell into the gap and bartered their historians' souls for money and fame. The lucky ones, like Ambrose, landed in a marketplace where the profession has no power even to shame.

It's hard to say what Mr. Hoffer's fine efforts can accomplish in that marketplace. Joseph Ellis' new biography of George Washington sits in stacks at my local bookstore, piled up between other bestsellers-Jon Stewart's America (the Book) and The South Beach Diet-and maybe not too far from books by the two newest members of the plagiarizing fraternity, Harvard's Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and Laurence Tribe. I really don't want to buy Mr. Ellis' book. Why should I boost his profit on the work he did during his term of academic exile? But Peter Charles Hoffer's Past Imperfect sets up a drama I can't resist-the lying historian meets the President who could not tell a lie. Is this Mr. Ellis' act of contrition? Will his famous imagination finally falter in front of an honest man? Or will this solid Founding Father crack into the mysteries of which Mr. Ellis is so fond? I've just sent my daughter out to pick up a copy.

Ann Fabian teaches American history and American studies at Rutgers University.

McDougall. HarperCollins, 638 pages, $29.95.

Every chronicle of European settlement of the New World must

include a boat. The boat you choose will shape the story you tell. Start with

the Niña , the Pinta and the Santa Maria ,

and you wind up with explorers, adventurers and Spain's Catholic empire. Start

with the Mayflower , and you wind with

pilgrims, pioneers and New England's religious dissenters. Start with a slave

ship, and you wind up among laborers stolen from Africa. Start among the

European passengers crammed into steerage on an immigrant steamer, and you wind

up-sometimes-with a version of the American dream fulfilled.

In Freedom Just Around the

Corner , the first of a planned three-volume narrative history of the United

States, Walter A. McDougall makes a surprising boat choice. This American

history begins on a Mississippi steamboat, Fidèle ,

the ship of knaves, fools and schemers on which Herman Melville set The Confidence-Man , his dark satire on

mid-19th-century America. Mr. McDougall's America, like Melville's, is a

country of confidence men, rogues, hucksters, impostors, sharks and pretenders.

But the rogues who depressed Melville inspire Mr. McDougall, a

professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the

Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heavens and

the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985). According to Mr.

McDougall, the great genius of America has been to harness the human tendency

to hustle and turn it to the ends of nation-building and continental conquest.

"To suggest Americans are, among other things, prone to be hustlers," he

writes, "is not to accord them a nature different or worse than other human

beings. It is simply to acknowledge Americans have enjoyed more opportunity to

pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in

history."

We know we haven't been equal-opportunity schemers, but in Mr.

McDougall's America, white women and enslaved Africans trick the system too.

That's what makes us Americans. To the nation's founders, other things mattered

too-faith in progress, religious liberty, imperialism, racial hierarchy-but the

country was really born with a hustler's soul. Hustling is what we do best. We

move forward, creating new ideas by corrupting the old. According to Mr.

McDougall, the net result of our "creative corruption" is the country and

culture of the United States, whose creation Mr. McDougall confidently labels

"the central event of the past four hundred years."

Did we need another narrative history of the United States? For

generations we produced them regularly, finding the imp of American success in

geography, technology, demography, mythology, the frontier, good government,

God and good luck. Even with its hard-boiled embrace of the American hustler as

the American type and its title borrowed from Bob Dylan, there's something

old-fashioned about Freedom Just Around

the Corner . Is there really such a thing as "the American character"?

Mr. McDougall thinks so. And with confidence in his confidence

men, he leads us back through the making of America. He retraces the patterns

of settlement, the schemes of European patrons and the imperial aspirations of

European courts. He finds smart Freemasons everywhere. His narrative moves

remarkably from battles on the frontier to battles within Puritan souls, from

diplomatic intrigues in courts and capitals to the complex political

compromises behind the American Constitution. Once the nation is up and

running, Mr. McDougall breaks the flow of his history to present each of the

states admitted after the first 13. In this volume, he offers capsule histories

of Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi,

Illinois, Alabama, Maine and Missouri; in each case, he tests out on a smaller

scale the play of greed, ambition, aspiration and hard work that made the

nation as a whole.

Mr. McDougall also spotlights a cast of favorite American

hustlers whose portraits he sketches with wonderful economy. He likes a

particular kind of hard-working, clever, self-inventing character: the

itinerant preacher George Whitefield; the ubiquitous Ben Franklin; or, perhaps

nearest his heart, the "thinking, drinking, laughing, slovenly country lawyer,"

Chief Justice John Marshall, and the brilliant Alexander Hamilton, who knew to

"fashion government so as to encourage

individual greed for money, power, and prestige under sturdy legal procedures

that do not dictate what people

should strive for, but only how they

must play the game." A few women make it into this group: the clever and

seductive Caty Greene, wife of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene and

first patron of Eli Whitney; and the outspoken traveler Anne Newport Royall.

But he's no friend to Thomas Jefferson, a man who appears in

these pages as a lazy, selfish, cowardly hypocrite-a

quartet of vices which combine to exclude him from Mr. McDougall's pantheon of

"creative corruption." Jefferson's creativity was never sufficient, in Mr.

McDougall's mind, to redeem his corruption: He ducked service in the

Revolutionary War, never faced the truth about slavery, and exaggerated his own

cleverness. Mr. McDougall won't even allow him the Declaration of Independence:

"the original passages in Jefferson's draft declaration were not good, while

the good ones were not very original."

Mr. McDougall is a witty writer and a brilliant and opinionated

historian. He has devoured several decades' worth of scholarship and digested

the articles and monographs into compact arguments and telling anecdotes. His

footnotes sometimes are as interesting as his text, although the dramas staged

at the back of the book are about writing history, not the making of nations.

Freedom Just Around the

Corner is an impressive accomplishment. But I believe it's worth quarreling

with Mr. McDougall's neo-Federalist version of American history. He warns

against a naïve reading that holds the past to present standards, dismissing

those who fault the Founding Fathers for ignoring the needs of Native

Americans, women and slaves. Indeed, as he puts it, "the roles scripted for

women and imposed on Indians and blacks during the founding were necessary

supports for the advances in civil liberty Americans did achieve. Once that

subtle, ironic insight sinks in, much of nineteenth-century American history

begins to make sense as well." I'm not sure this insight is so subtle, but

perhaps it's Mr. McDougall's way of acknowledging that although freedom is

always "just around the corner" for everyone, that corner promises to be far

easier to turn for some than for others. If that promise of freedom is just

another of the con man's come-ons, then Mr. McDougall has taken his ironic

realism too far.

But it's not the lack of idealism that disturbs me most about

this volume. It's that Mr. McDougall sees so little downside to his hustler's

schemes and plots. Perhaps these plots worked well for the first 250 years of

conquest, when Europeans and Euro-Americans worked their way across the

continent, killing off Indians, making Africans work, building towns and

factories, and fashioning a system of government that turned individual greed

into common good.

But what happens when the great creative work is done, when the

magic that turns vice into virtue no longer functions? Perhaps we should

consider some alternatives to Mr. McDougall's heroic hustlers: other, better

sides to the American character and a different, more varied cast. Some of us

may be as Mr. McDougall imagines us to be-ironic, hard-headed capitalists whose

vices have become virtues in the marketplace. But I like to think there are

Americans who have tried to hold to ideas and to fashion institutions outside

the voracious, all-consuming market. Mr. McDougall may need these other

Americans if he wants a moral compass for the next volumes of his history, when

his "free people" begin to feel the consequences of choosing always the

short-term prospects, when his good country faces the truths about slavery and

goes to war, when his creative capitalists begin to see environmental waste,

and when arrogance dismisses the subtle arts of diplomacy.

Ann Fabian teaches American studies and history

at Rutgers University.