One of the most irksome
issues in the world of history is the dreaded “uncited fact!” (dun dun dun dun!)
This issue is usually made manifest in freshman history papers that use a quote
or discuss an event that one knows one has read but can’t remember where, so
one just adds it to your paper and hopes for the best.
This problem is the most
widely revealed on the internet where the average person can post anything they
want (like myself and this blog). The most frustrating example was when I was
talking to a gentleman about Woodrow Wilson and he insisted that Woodrow Wilson
was part of the KKK. Now don’t get me
wrong Woodrow Wilson was not a bright shining star when it came to civil rights,
in fact by most standards (if not all) he would be considered a racist. That
being said there is no evidence that I have found that says Wilson was a member
of the KKK and I told this gentleman so. The gentleman then insisted that he
had proof and pulled up a web site riddled with ads with the title “15
presidents you didn’t know were in the KKK.”
I enjoy clickbait articles as much as the next guy (that’s a lie I
really hate clickbait). This is not
evidence, especially when consider that it is completely uncited! It did not
tell you where they got there evidence.
The gentleman then said that history was just stories told from one
person to the next and apparently moved on with his life. History has to be corroborated with evidence
so we as a people can know what truly happened in the past.
I was reminded of this
issue of uncited-ness when I posted a tweet regarding Christmas trees. I have been reading up on the history of some
Christmas traditions and I could not remember exactly where I had read that
only 1 in 5 Americans owned Christmas trees in the late nineteenth century. So, I ended the tweet with
#uncitedfacts. I propose that every time
you find yourself trolling the internet and you find that I put #uncitedfacts,
you should double check the fact in question. Provide a source to either support or dismiss
the fact that I post. As a professor of
mine once said, “History is a conversation,” history should be discussed,
debated but most importantly history should be true.
By the way, It was 1900 that 1 in 5 Americans had a Christmas tree (I still don't have a citation for that). Checkout the Historian Twitter account @historianforeva or the Historian Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Historianforeva
