Jeff Riggenbach

Jeff Riggenbach (1947–2021) was a journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A member of the Organization of American Historians and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, he wrote for such newspapers as the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle; such magazines as Reason, Inquiry, and Liberty; and such websites as LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and RationalReview.com. His books include In Praise of Decadence (1998), Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009), and Persuaded by Reason: Joan Kennedy Taylor & the Rebirth of American Individualism (2014). Drawing on vocal skills he honed in classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston, Riggenbach also narrated the audiobook versions of numerous libertarian works, many of them available on Mises.org.

Articles

Hazlitt as National Teacher

11/01/2010 Free Market Jeff Riggenbach

The Free Market 28, no.11 (July 2010) During the academic year that encompassed the fall term of 1964 and the spring term of 1965, I was a freshman in college. I was also in my first year of...

Gore Vidal and Revisionism

08/03/2012 Mises Daily Jeff Riggenbach

Gore Vidal's "American Chronicle" series proved that there was, in fact, a substantial market for skepticism about the glorious American past.

The Education of Robert Neuwirth

11/28/2011 Mises Daily Jeff Riggenbach

Robert Neuwirth is a journalist who is preoccupied with this question: What do people do when the state has made satisfaction of their wants, their natural desire to improve their lives, almost impossible? He’ll give you much to think about, and he’ll provide much contemporary evidence while he’s at it for something he really doesn’t yet believe or even fully understand.

Publications

Why American History Is Not What They Say

10/24/2012 Jeff Riggenbach

Jeff Riggenbach’s book is a godsend for anyone who needs a crash course in revisionist history of the United States. What is revisionism? It is the retelling of history from a point of view that differs from the mainstream, which always treats the

Media

Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’

08/17/2010 Jeff Riggenbach

Fahrenheit 451 acknowledges that powerful impulses toward mindless conformity and suppression of deviation exist in the population itself — that, on a deep level, many, many people want to be "protected" by the state from the risk of being offended and from the necessity of thinking...

Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction

03/30/2011 Jeff Riggenbach

Seeing a Hayekian angle in William Gibson's science fiction novel, Pattern Recognition, may lead more thinkers to Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society and his other work.

Standards and Textbooks

03/16/2010 Jeff Riggenbach

Textbook commissions, especially from Texas, decide what ideas will be within any book. Political pressure now makes textbooks promote special interest groups.