Social media bombards us with information, from the true to the misleading, the skewed to the dead wrong. The focus is on political deceptions, and rightly so. But that is only the beginning.
To be fair, the most vetted of history books contain mistakes. My most recent book, "Every Goddamn Day," published by the rigorous University of Chicago Press, nevertheless has a typo — a dropped "t" — which is unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable in a nearly-500 page book.
The story I always tell is of Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People," a majestic survey of our national story, written by an esteemed historian, published by HarperCollins.
One fact that really stood out for me was on page 355, when Johnson is talking about the national bank under Andrew Jackson. "The fact that Senators Clay and Calhoun put together a committee to inspect the vaults and reported them full did not convince the President, coming from such a source. (He thereby inaugurated an American tradition which continues to this day: every year, the Daughters of the American Revolution send a committee of ladies to visit the vaults of Fort Knox, to ensure that America's gold is still in them.)
"They do?!" I thought, immediately wanting nothing more than to accompany them. I could see it plain as day. The elevator deep into the sunless secure vaults. The ladies, with their big handbags, delicately peering between the bars at the piles of dense gold bricks. A call was placed to the DAR offices. "We've been getting inquiries about this," a nice woman said, or words to that effect. "We just published our history, and found no information about that."
"Oh the old biddies are lying to me!" thought I, reaching out to the U.S. Army news affairs at Fort Knox, who said, in essence: "No American citizen has laid eyes on that gold since 1942."
Ah. Simply wrong. An error. No wonder the book was so interesting. Johnson was making it up. (Unfair, I know. But it only takes a little spit to spoil the soup).
Look at the photo above. Why, at a glance, is it obvious that whatever the picture is of, it is NOT from the 1893 World's Fair? We'll let the comments explain why.
Model T Ford first sold in 1908.
ReplyDelete😁😍
DeleteBoy, the car traffic was worse than I ever imagined, back in 1893.
ReplyDeleteyes! no cars then
ReplyDeleteDocumentaries are notorious for their inaccuracies. They'll use any footage that remotely fits the topic. In 1943 John Ford made a propaganda film that recreated the Pearl Harbor attack. He had to use American planes for obvious reasons. To this day docs and news reports show this footage without any explanation or context.
ReplyDeleteI'm a member of that FB group. That image has been posted multiple times, and always with the same erroneous information. And it generates hundreds of replies every time.
ReplyDeleteThat image is not from 1893. It is from the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The Ferris wheel was taken apart in Chicago and reassembled for the St. Louis fair. The cars are part of an automobile parade that had originated in New York...though with the roads of that era, it's pretty amazing that they made it to St. Louis at all.
Note the trees in the background. There were no mature trees like that in Chicago's Jackson Park during the 1893 Fair. But the figure about the largest daily attendance is nearly correct. The actual total on October 9 was 751,026...most of them arriving by rail...via commuter trains, on the new "L" system, and on streetcars. Couldn't be done today.
After the fair, the wheel was reassembled at Wrightwood & Clark.
ReplyDeleteBut they charged people $2 a day to bring in their own cameras?
Cars were a giveaway. The lagoons were dug by mules pulling slipdrags, no machines. One error missed," america's" not capitalized. One error added, those aren't Model Ts.
ReplyDeleteYes. Model Ts had steering wheels on the left.
Deletethe steering wheel is on the left side now
DeleteI was appalled by a highly rated tour guide at the Vatican Museum who told us several things that further research turned out to be blatantly false (e.g. "here's the room where Galileo was put under house arrest." Turns out that Galileo was under house arrest at his house near Florence and that part of the Vatican hadn't even been built then.). It's another story what happened when I wrote them a bad review, but I did ask a friend in the tour guide business why this would happen. He explained that most people would rather have a good story than the unblemished truth.
ReplyDeleteI took Grizz's word for it and googled it and found the same picture a little clearer. That's the Falstaff Inn in the background with 5 cent beer. A New York to St. Louis car parade. Can't find anything on the cars. Looks like around 1903. Sure there we plenty of people looking at those people driving cars and thinking, what idiots, the car will never replace the horse, like what are they going to do, build roads, gas stations, how ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteGrizz is right, it’s 1904.
DeleteArthur