A historian’s code

I like it.

However, #6 is simply silly.

Another item should be added that “respected” historians who engage in plagiarism (goodwin, ambrose, ellis, et al) will be outed, drummed out of the service, and forever shunned for their sins.

So true. Should be required reading for all students and budding historians.

Concur.

Interestingly, the same set of rules could be applied to my paying job, software development. Of course, beautiful coding in LotusScript is not forever and well-written code will almost never be read. There was one developer we knew who changed the header line in every program he touched to identify himself as the author. We mock his memory continuously, though he has been gone from our company longer than I’ve been with it.

I wonder if because I’d been trained as a historian, with a special love of footnotes, I have more respect for commenting my lines of code….

With all due respect to both Glenn Williams and Dr. Stewart, parenthetical citations are here to stay, with footnotes becoming subsequently obsolete for matters of textual reference. If you need to illuminate some fact that pertains to the text or elaborate on the methodology by which the source was acquired–which to read your code, it seems you would like to do–endnotes which are cited at the end of the chapter would be the logical place to do it. APA (and like it or not more and more places are turning out students who write only APA) recognizes these days that the purpose of intext citations is solely to point to the reference citation, not to clutter the text or distract the reader. The fewest words possible intext to point to the correct source, along with endnotes that are easy to find, fulfill the author’s purpose. That is, presuming the author’s purpose is not to be obscure about his/her sources, which of course some are for various reasons.
I have the benefit of degrees both in English and History and since I have taught my share of composition classes, documentation is something I understand.
However, I am extremely pleased, no, thrilled, to see the charge to historians to change their opinions when new facts come along.Do you know how difficult that is.
I wondered, for example, how the famous Jefferson historian (who will remain nameless) would take the news of the DNA testing of Sally Hemings’ descendants. It was a pretty dark time for him for a while, as the Monticello position statement legitimizing her children was publish, but within 5 years the anti-Hemings faction had found itself an out and published a retraction. His writing was preeminent in this. Fueling this was the fact that one of the main family legs, who had been passing for white, listed Jefferson’s uncle as their father, knowing that if Jefferson was in the family tree, Black blood could not be denied. Until this family could correct this error, which they had intended to do, since they did not deny the relationship in family circles, new facts cannot move history forward.

Or look for a minute at our most famous assassinations: Lincoln and Kennedy. Ask yourself. Would there ever be enough evidence to change the way that history is written about them? Surely enough already has been presented to prove a grand conspiracy in both cases, yet so strongly has it been resisted by proponents of the official story that most do not even know such evidence exists let alone recognize the extent of its legitimacy. Can you imagine what it would take to contradict definitively the history in those thousands of books? Just the fact that there are dozens of living historians who would muster their might against it means history isn’t going anywhere. What are they supposed to do, start their research over, publish second editions, retractions–and in the case of some, apologies? Not likely.
They have the upper hand, the proverbial high ground. Remember that when the official story was written, there were those near to if not within the government who had excellent reasons for the official story to read the way it read.