Article: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/166/oa_edited_volume/chapter/1127340
“Q: What happens when you teach students how to lie?
A: They learn how to be historians.”
The article “True Facts or False Facts —Which Are More Authentic?” T. Mills Kelly starts off with this bold question and answer. The main point of this article is stressing how hard it is for people to distinguish primary sources from secondary sources, as well as “fakes” or “Hoaxes”. Kelly goes on to talk about this problem of finding out which stuff is primary and which is secondary, but Kelly also makes a claim that these fakes can also be helpful to historians. Kelly warns that accounts of events can sometimes be a blend of fact and fancy and that everything about primary and secondary sources should be questioned on their authenticity.
“the history which he imaginatively recreates as an artificial extension of his personal experience will inevitably be an engaging blend of fact and fancy, a mythical adaptation of that which actually happened.”
This quote from the article really makes me reflect on some of the readings I’ve had, as well as some of the videos about historical events I’ve watched. I do find myself sometimes questioning the authenticity of these accounts from different people during traumatic events, and I often think about how these details might have been re-written later down the light in order to fit the narrative better. One example that comes to mind is the Assassination of Julias Ceasar in Rome. Having seen multiple videos on this topic, I have noticed some inconsistencies, for instance, in the last words of Julias Caesar. If you look up just that “last words of Julias Caesar”, you’ll find a couple of different variations of what could have been his last words, as well as some accounts of him not saying “Et tu, Brute” at all, and that it came from Shakespiere’s play about Caesar’s life more than 1000 years later.
“After the seventh week of the semester my students began building their own historical hoax”
The Author Kelly makes a good point when discussing why they let their students read less reliable resources throughout the course, about how they can learn to distinguish real from fact and learn when historians are overexaggerating, or when they might have left out something. Though this final project of creating a Hoax does seem like a very interesting concept, I worry that this class might have focused a little too much on creating their own Hoax, and not using more reliable sources throughout the course in order to get a feel for the real authentic stuff. Overall, using less reliable sources to teach the class seems like a good idea to me, as long as they don’t solely rely on just those sources.
