>But my read of the Ginzburg clip sounds like a conspiracy, although
>referenced as a 'large-scale, coordinated campaign'.
In the next sentence Ginzburg called it a conspiracy.
>when the 'particulars' become available to me
What's great about Ginzburg is the way he makes those particulars available. He's one of the most truly compelling and interesting historians working now. If I were to recommend one book of his to read it would be this one:
http://www.amazon.com/History-Rhetoric-Proof-Menachem-Lectures/dp/0874519330
History, Rhetoric, and Proof Carlo Ginzburg
One of the world's leading historians delivers a pathbreaking analysis of truth and rhetoric in the writing of history.
Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography. In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle's Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla's tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust's commentary on Flaubert's style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth.
Ginzburg discovers a middle ground between the empiricist or positivist view of history, and the current postmodern tendency to regard any historical account as just one among an infinity of possible narratives, distinguished or measured not by the standard of truth, but by rhetorical skill. As a whole, these lectures stake out a position that both mediates and transcends warring factions in the current historiographical debate.