On Wed, 8 Oct 2014, Mike Willegal wrote:
Though we are lucky enough to be able to talk to many people that experienced the events, first hand, I have found that interviews done 30, 40 or 50 years after the fact is fraught with the difficulty of people remembering exactly what happened. Many people ?remember? what has been most frequently reported over the past decade or so. Researchers in Civil War history have found the same thing and are more and more relying upon contemporary evidence such as journals, newspapers and letters.
For the book I am authoring, I started keeping track of mistakes, such as wrong dates and misspelled names, in my sources, including from previous "history" articles and books and my own interviews. I have found only around 20 mistakes. In some cases, I have found that my interviewees have misstated facts and dates (in most cases from the events they personally participated in the 1970s and 1980s). I have gone back to the interview subjects with my other cited facts and they have agreed with me, but they state that they don't remember. Some of the mistakes are in the contemporary documents (such as misspelled surnames in court documents) or history papers having wrong dates or misarranged chronologies (such as saying some software was invented after it was shipped) even when only a couple years removed from the events. Do you have any advice on how to document history mistakes, so later researchers don't hit the same issues -- or so later historians don't follow the wrong path? Some ideas I have considered are to add footnotes or comments to my bibliography that explain that the cited source or even sources misspelled some name or stated a wrong date and then explain briefly where the correct or assumed correct details came from. I don't think I want to explain about the mistakes in the content itself as it will be distracting. A different type of mistake is where someone acknowledges someone more significantly than they deserve or maybe more than the recipient believes. In other words, taking more credit and giving more credit than is due. For example, for over 30 years, for a software technology, various "stories", corresponding release notes, and histories said a developer had invented the work. When I interviewed him, he told me he didn't know why the developer who really did the good work gave him the credit but he wanted me to be clear in my work that the other person was the proponent and key inventor behind the technology. I wasn't able to interview the other person, but since my contact did fully partipate in this software technology, I plan to use his version of the story. Explaining about the different versions of the story may be distracting in my book. (But also thinking about it from another view -- maybe both of them wanted to credit the other.) For what it is worth, the person who documented the credit is well known for acknowledging many others in his detailed software release notes, interviews, and documentation. It has been very useful for me to find others to interview -- but in many cases, they told me their work was insignificant. I guess some people like to give credit to many others for their own work, which may cause mistakes in history. How do you document history mistakes? Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{'