Marginalia (6)

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions,
false memories, false namings of real events.
-Adrienne Rich

Generally, by the time one gets around to reading --
or writing -- history, everyone involved in it is dead.
Or at least really old.

While I can sympathize with a poor memory for long-ago
dates and events, and I often disparage my own time sense¹,
I hold historians -- and biographers -- to a higher standard.

"Primary" sources are problematic and unreliable enough,
[see _McClellan's Own Story_, or any wrestling autobio]
but viewing characters and events through the additional
filter(s) of secondary works can slowly drive one crazy.

E.g. Charles Russell Lowell was in the cavalry during the
Peninsula, and then was a McClellan aide for a few months.
His biographer is a good writer... but
the bio has errors.

I had skipped ahead into the time period I've been looking at,
and almost immediately tripped over my own jar: George Smalley
was a reporter for the New York Tribune, not the New York Times.
Understandable mistake, yes. Minor, yes. Wrong? Absolutely yes.

The biography also refers to an incident mentioned elsewhere,
but it seems to assign it a different time of day than most.
Given the lack of fact-checking in the rest of this book, do
I just ignore it as an outlier, or should I check the source²?

Forget "write what you know" advice; it's really more like
"write only what you are willing to know way too much about."
It's official: I know too much about the battle of Antietam.

*sigh* I don't mean to complain, mind you - the outline is
finally working and pages are painfully getting written. But
there's so much yet left to do and the days, they get shorter.

¹I know what day of the week it is. For the date I consult my computer clock.
Also, I have a 50-50 shot as to which year my mother died.
²If I decipher the footnotes aright, the source materials are in archives at Harvard.
I do have friends in Boston and it would be great to visit there again, but...

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them
as much as you please.
-Mark Twain