On Oct 27, 2006, at 5:15 PM, Richard Dixon wrote:
> Inexplicably, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation printed the original  
> Coolidge hand-written letter in its Research Committee Report in 2000,  
> but used the Gordon-Reed letter as the “printed version.”  Today,  
> Monticello continues to reference the Gordon-Reed version on its  
> website with no explanation that it is in error.

In fact, Monticello cites the previously published--and presumably more  
accurate--transcription of this letter on its Web site, here:
http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings- 
jefferson_contro.html (see the bibliography at the bottom).

(I seem to recall seeing that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation also at  
one point included this letter in its estimable Family Letters Project,  
http://familyletters.dataformat.com/default.aspx, but it doesn't seem  
to be there any longer--perhaps there were permissions problems with  
the letter's current owners.  In any case, if so, what they had online  
was a direct transcription, not Gordon-Reed's.  In general, the online  
presentations of the documents in the Family Letters Project are models  
of precise transcription, including color-coded indications of the  
writers' insertions and deletions.)

I might note that if one wants to be absolutely, scrupulously, utterly  
certain of transcription accuracy, it is necessary to adopt the gold  
standard followed by some, if not all, historical documentary editing  
projects:  after a document has been transcribed with as much care as  
possible, you sit there with a colleague, and one of you reads the  
transcription *backwards*, word by word, while the other follows along  
in the original.  Incredibly tedious, but guaranteed to produce  
inerrancy.

Short of that, though, we're all going to mess up sometime, and every  
historian knows that.  No one is going to be "condemned" (as Mr. Dixon  
seems to advocate) for a single slip-up.  Multiple slip-ups will get  
you a knuckle-rapping in a book review, however, as that begins to  
suggest a pattern of carelessness.  And consistent misrepresentation, a  
la Bellesisles--in whom it seems to have reached reckless, if not  
pathological, proportions--will get you drummed out of the scholarly  
community, officially or not.

If one is going to tackle the weak point in scholarly documentation of  
primary sources, it seems to me that one should turn one's attention  
not to the historians themselves--who do in fact strive for accuracy,  
if only because the stakes are so high--but to the publishing industry,  
including all too many academic presses, which have all but abandoned  
the publication of actual footnotes in favor of end-of-the-book notes  
that are ever more difficult and inconvenient to follow in conjunction  
with the text.

--Jurretta Heckscher

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html