Historying On

With 95 + temps all week, school switched to half days. Which is fine. Girls delighted. We said, 'School is in. Find something to do when you get home. Homework, read or something.' 

New Jersey's rogue alligator is still on the loose. 

We're back to posting on Gab. Why not?

Anthon Howes writes about an interesting problem of history and history writing, which he calls replication. To simplify, just how do we know what the historian is writing is true? Howes goes on to note a few instances where myths are repeated as facts. There's always footnotes, but footnotes can be wrong. 

To Howes' examples we'll add a myth of our own. Floating out there in the history of the War Between the States is a factoid that 50,000 Canadians fought in the Union army. A historian, we forget who, set about tracking this down. This entails following the sources, footnote after footnote till one gets to the last footnote. It turns out this 'fact' was attributed to a speech made after the war.* But there's no documentation to back up the claim. And yes, the Union kept meticulous recruiting records. 

Fact is not the same as interpretation, though over time a common interpretation settles in. Yes, the War Between the States was about slavery. For a long time Grant was considered a butcher, by ourselves among others. This thesis is not supported by a careful examination of the record. The Sherman tank (see what I did there?) has long been belittled, but in recent years some historians and enthusiasts have argued that the Sherman's speed, maneuverability and reliability make up for the lack of armor. 

Go ahead and google the 50,000 moose eaters in the Union army thing and you'll find this. For that matter, while we know the 50,000 number is wrong, we're not 100 percent sure the fake fact is attributed to a post-war speech. Are there mistakes in our published work? Certainly! Even our Moscow handler caught a few errors. 'You moved decimal one spot to the right, Will.' That's what editors do. heck, this is in our FB memories today, '''Just when I thought you couldn't get any stupider-' editor's words to me...."' That was the real Ed, by the way.

Staying on the history beat...we heard Tucker remark on something his father used to say about people with intellectual pretensions, 'He reads magazines.' Quite right. This describes most journalists today. They read magazines.  Not even, they read Twitter threads. Barry Soetoro had a magazine level understanding of most issues. We're a stone-cold expert on certain historical topics, the American Revolution, the AEF in the Great war, etc. After several reading projects, we know a hell of a lot more about The War Between the States (there it is again) then we did a few years ago. Hmmm...there's a topic for a post.*

And yet more Will and history...This is kind of cool, 'No discussion about the ROK Special Forces, or the South Korean military in general, would be complete without a mention of their performance during the Vietnam War. Long story short, as William Stroock pointed out in an February 2012 article for Warfare History Network titled “South Koreans in Vietnam: A Force to Be Reckoned With”: “Tough, battle-hardened South Korean troops were justly feared by Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars alike during the Vietnam War.”' Look at us, getting cited and shit. Not the first time. That's how you know you're legit.

We guess the author included our old article in his piece about modern ROK commandos because he needed to hit his word count, a problem we know all too well, and decided to add a bit of history and context. Sort of related, during our professorial days, we had a Marine student who served with ROK troops in Afghanistan. He said for Christmas they put on a Kung-Fu show. Don't ever close with the South Koreans. As we said of a character in Seven Stories, they hate communists and love fire fights.   

*Ironically we have people on hand to ask questions about our previous novels. 'What was the thing, with the guy, in the place?' To which our people might respond, 'That was Nimitz, Will.' Man, when we wrote A Line through the Desert we could go into deep detail about every last page. 'Page 23? That's where Jake wonders about the color of Patricia's bra followed by the knowledge that finding out was now a distinct possibility.' In 20 years, our brain has turned to mush and oozed out the side of our head [You had a brain?-Ed].