Brent,
What you say below reminds me of Andrew Burstein's uncomfortable appearance in Annette Gordon-Reed's _Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings_. He said something completely at odds with his basic commitments, apparently because Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, et al., had said it first.
Kevin Gutzman
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From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tarter, Brent (LVA)
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2012 9:35 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] wikipedia
In my opinion, Wikipedia is not much better or worse that many of the print sources in our libraries. That's where many Wikipedia entries originate, anyway.
Establishing what is fact and what is not is more difficult than non-historians realize, and it is not always reliably done by the rules of verification that journalists used to employ, which requires two or three independent verifications. What's an independent verification? I have heard several historians in the past talk about verifying dates or names by searching reference works until they find two or three that agree. However, reference works are like biographies, monographs, and many other kinds of historical scholarship. They are derivative to greater or lesser degrees.
Having worked through all of the reference works ever published on Virginia subjects as well as contributed to several, I am quite convinced that many statements of fact in some popular sources are derived from earlier statements in earlier sources, which is a repetition, not a verification. If you have time and patience, you can frequently trace a statement of fact, whether accurate or inaccurate, back to its source.
For instance, in early issues of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, in the first series of the William and Mary Quarterly, and in an abundance of family histories you can find guestimations about people's ages based on assumptions that a person had to be at least as old as 16 or 18 or 21 to buy or sell land, serve on a jury, or be admitted to practice law before a court. (Those assumptions may, themselves, be in error, too.) That gave somebody an estimated probably-born-by date. Later borrowers from those sources had a tendency to disregard the tentative nature of those estimates, and within one or two reitterations the estimated times of birth became actual dates of birth with no additional thinking or research.
I am old enough to remember Creeping Socialism from the 1950s and 1960s and often think about this phenomenon as Creeping Certitude.
It ain't no such thing. Repetition of a statement is not independent verification. With only one primary source for a fact, you probably have a reliable bit of information, but you still have to exercise caution and good judgment. Caveat emptor, or perhaps caveat lexor.
Always carry a grain or box of salt with you to take with what you find online or in print.
$0.02 worth from
Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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