• Deadpool and Hawkeye do not see eye-to-eye!
i-clone-celebrities asked: You know how important primary sources are! YEAH! As a librarian, I also know how important they are (and also how many people DON'T know this), so I wanna say CONGRATS! I love accuracy. My sister in spirit.
LOL! I think of the Head Bureaucrat on Futurama: “You are technically correct. Which is the best kind of correct!”
I was telling this professor about how the primary basis of the belief that Disney hated Jewish people goes back to one book: Hollywood’s Dark Prince. I went into that book fully expecting it to be true to a point, because anti-Semitism was not uncommon in that generation. But when I came to the chapter where the author discussed it, his sole source was a former employee who said another employee may have been fired because of his Jewish name. No other proof, no other sources. And when I juxtaposed that against a simple imdb search of screenwriters for Disney at the time, I found that many of them were Jewish.
He also posited that Disney was having an affair. And his evidence of that was one picture of Disney at a business dinner sitting next to a woman. I went in to the book ready to accept a lot, but he had no proof of anything and the shoddiest bibliography I’ve ever read.
The professor then told me about a well-known anecdote about the ancient Carthaginians. He kept going farther and farther back into the secondary historiography to try to find a primary source for the anecdote that the Carthaginians salted their land after destroying their buildings to assure that Rome would not be able to grow anything on the conquered land. When he got to the first historian who said that, he wrote and asked nicely for the primary source. The historian wrote back saying that the professor had caught him! That there were primary sources for Carthaginians destroying their cities, but the salting the earth bit he added because it sounded like something they would do!
Always check your sources, people!
