Good and bad history: The curious case of milk and water
A bit of good history – the man who watered the milk, and how the court dealt with it in 1822.
But that seems a nice way to introduce a call for submissions, for the Carnival of Bad History, which will be here on November 21. So what’s the Carnival? Going to the source, what’s included are:
* Bad presentations of history – This is the easy one. Review bad historical movies, books and teevee. How anachronistic are those uniforms? How improbable is that alternate history novel? Did kindly frontier doctors really talk like that?
* Bad uses of history – When pundits, politicians, and talking heads get hold of history they often twist it beyond all recognition or justification. Tell us about the mangaled metaphors, unjustified parallels, or outright lies you find in the public sphere.
* Historians behaving badly – Historians manage their share of embarassing talking head appearances, plagiarism scandals, and corporate sell-outs. We don’t want mere unpleasant gossip. Contributions in this category should be of historians behaving badly in their professional capacity as historians.
Should be fun! So send in your posts like that – or take this as an invitation to really vent your spleen, then pass on the link. Please email natalieben AT gmail DOT com.
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[...] Carnival of Bad History: A monthly carnival exposing, critiquing and ridiculing bad history, including misrepresentations of the past, dubious analogies, and historians behaving badly. The current edition is at Archy. The next edition will be at Philobiblon on 21st November. [...]
Pingback by Investigations of a Dog » History Blog Carnivals — November 11, 2006 @ 7:24 pm
Carnival of Bad History, or of Bad Historians? Far too much good material here, I’ll bet.
My current irritating example is an entry in the “Encyclopaedia Idiotica” which deals with the blunders which led to the Sepoy Mutiny. Remember the old cartridge-grease story? The author of the EI retells it and is going along pretty well until he falls into the fatal “man-trap”–he tries to show off his knowledge of martial detail–in particular the sort of weapon that required the unacceptably-lubricated cartridge. Somehow, the old Enfield musket is “vanished” in favor of the much later Lee-Enfield. the author goes into just enough detail to show that he “knows what he’s talking about” with regard to firearms–but seems to have missed the minor point that the .303 wasn’t the weapon in question.
On one hand this is a trivial point, and it’s “guys” who are most likely to squawk, but it’s an obvious mistake and one that any competent editorial assistant should have caught (like some of my late-night typos). Whre was the editor’s fact-checker when this book was being copyread?
Probably giving policy advice to Bush and Blair.
Comment by david ware — November 15, 2006 @ 6:12 am