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I wasn’t sure what to title this and if I think of a better one I’ll change it.
Some years ago I read Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August which deals with the first month of The Great War (aka World War 1). She tells of the vital error made by General von Kluck who, on the final appproach to Paris, deviated from the Schliffen Plan that should have seen the war in the west over in months, if not weeks. There’s much written on the Web about him and this.
The mistake by Kluck led to a very bloodly battle lasting several days and over half a million casualaties . At one point it became necessary to for te French to reinforce a certain section of the battlefront, but there was no transport available. The military governor of Paris, General Gallieni came up with an idea.(At least history gives him the credit for the idea.) All the taxis of Paris would be commandeered to ferry the troops to the needed position.
Now if I pursue the idea I have, I won’t need to mention the details. However, there seems to be variation in the number of taxis used. Was it 600 or was it 500? Was the number of men transported this way 6,000, 5,000, or 4,000. I’m sure if I dug deeper there would be other numbers.
So the question is, How does one know which history sources to trust?
The thing that may make for story is alternative history. If the war in the west had ended before the end of 1914 much of the world we know today would be changed. Perhaps at the top of the list would come Hitler. The little corporal would never have gained power even if he’d become a corporal. Probably, even, no Nazi party. Maybe the Berlin to Baghdad Railroad would have been built. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling so there is no way to foresee what would have happened to Palestine which had been part of the Turkish empire for a very long time. Would there have been a Bolshevik Party, let alone a Bolshevic Revolution? Hence, no Soviet Union. And on and on. Germany would not have lost her Empire; the Kaiser kept his throne.
I have to go back and prevent Kluck from making his mistake. Of course, I would make my own and that would lead to other world altering events. A great series could result. I don’t have the lifetime
left to write it though. OH, well!Great idea Jim. Go for it! There isn’t a right and wrong the way I see it. The alternative is up to you. True, recorded history is far from being unbiased. So you should probably be careful in your use of sources. It’s a hard thing. Do you have the right information?
Write the story you want to write.
I’m in the process of taking an online college course on research. One of the things they suggest is to look for scholarly resources that are more likely to be accurate — especially for anything with historical detail like that.
Weird Jim wrote:I have to go back and prevent Kluck from making his mistake. Of course, I would make my own and that would lead to other world altering events. A great series could result. I don’t have the lifetime
left to write it though. OH, well!I’ve just come across an Althist timeline that has the prevention of Von Kluck’s mistake. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. Probably good because I hadn’t a clue how to prevent Kluck from making his mistake. Now I can start (if I start) with Paris having already fallen, or at least with the French Sixth Army falling back in disarray.
I rarely trust research on the Internet to have the information I need. There are some sites I trust, but Wiki is not one of them. I might do basic research there, but I go to books for anything absolute that I need. It’s true that there will still be variations in books, but if you choose your historians wisely, and stick with them, you at least have a solid base to work from.
I would trust, for instance, my copies of the Cambridge Ancient History books over anything else. They’re also cited as the base work for a lot of other histories, so this is going to the source. In fact, when I look at a new history book, I often check the bibliography to find what works were read to create this book.
However . . . if you are going to write alternate history or fictional history, sometimes it’s best just to choose the scenario and in the end cite your resources. Make a choice and build around that set of facts.
Since research was my profession for a while…
First of all, assuming you want to base your fiction solidly in fact, it is never wise to fully trust any resource – not even an original source. Records can and do lie. I’ve personally encountered some of those. And every published work has its limitations. I am not saying that there aren’t better and worse sources to choose from – there certainly are. But there are issues which crop up in even the most reliable works – until recently, even reputable historians were blaming the Nazis for the massacre in the Katyn Forest. And it wasn’t as if they had no reason to suspect the Nazis of being willing to commit mass murder; it was a plausible story. But now the truth has come out, and it was the Soviets who were guilty of that particular killing.
In times of war and confusion, it is not always easy to figure out the truth. Those who have a motive for concealing it – and there are always people with motives for concealing the truth, whether it is to protect themselves, or simply to allow them to construct an alternate explanation which can somehow benefit them – are sometimes able to convince everyone of their version of what happened. Even when you don’t have anything as disruptive as war going on, things can happen. Take the Salem Witch Trials. There was a lot of hysteria, and the accusations got wildly out of control, so the official version of a hysteria driven by a few adolescent girls isn’t entirely wrong. But, in Puritan society, adolescent girls weren’t commonly taken very seriously, let alone girls who had confessed to even dabbling with anything to do with the Devil. So, why did anyone listen to them this time? Look a little deeper, and you’ll discover there were solid, practical (political and financial) reasons for those driving the trial to want many of the accused out of the way. Then, of course, once you set something like that loose, you can’t exactly stand up and say, “Well, we’ve already put to death all the people I wanted to get rid of, so we can stop now.” In fact, you have to pretend this is all serious and real, unless you want to turn the mob you stirred up against you.
I researched a man whose family had always said he was murdered, even though that wasn’t the official cause of death. This happened in Massachusetts, in 1919, a time and place when records weren’t particularly unreliable. So I checked the death certificate. It said he died of an accidental fall. But, the medical examiner had crossed out all the boilerplate describing what he was supposed to do to verify this, and typed in that he had “viewed the body”. The coroner’s records gave different and even more shaky details, the newspaper account of the “accident” gave a third story, blaming a motorist for injuring the man who died and another man, then driving away. (The other man, presumably, was the one who got in a fight with him. And if there had been a motorist, why no police investigation? Which, of course, is why the story changed.) Look a little deeper, and you discover, at that exact date, in that city, there were strikes and a huge amount of labour violence – and there are documented cases of the medical examiners ‘fudging’ their records to cover up suspicious deaths. But, if you just looked at a certified copy of the death record, you wouldn’t see what the medical examiner had done, only the cause he’d listed. And you might believe it.
Now, before you rip your hair out in despair, this uncertainty can be a good thing for the fiction writer. It leaves you at least a little wriggle room to assume something a bit different than the commonly accepted version. If you know enough about research to understand the things that can go wrong and mislead you, you can even include scenes where the characters are laying the false trail which becomes the commonly accepted version. But you’ve got to know enough details of what is known to ground all this in something plausible.
As for Wikipedia, it does have a couple of uses. First, as a quick way of reminding yourself of things you already know but can’t recall perfectly. If you know the subject well enough, you should spot any problems – and if you think to yourself “I don’t remember that”, there’s a good sign you want to verify it before you use it. Second, if your totally unfamiliar with whatever you want to research, Wikipedia can give you a quick overview, then you can check the sources which are cited, search for the broad terms you’ve just picked up, etc. And, in keeping with the main point of this post, there was a study which showed Wikipedia wasn’t actually any less reliable, statistically, than one of the major encyclopedias. The first rule of research is that you should never trust any source completely, and it’s the last rule as well. Everything in between is just details.
Edited to add: In case anyone is wondering, the point is not that Wikipedia is a great source. It is that a published encyclopedia is not likely to be any better. Any overview, or source which covers a huge range of topics, is highly unlikely to get every detail right. A source that focuses narrowly is much better. For example, in the OP’s example, I’d start with Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August. Not a history of the entire war. A book that focuses, obsessively, on the beginnings of that war. She’s also one of the better historians around, period. After that, I’d look for published diaries, letters, or anything else written by anyone who was in that time and place. They won’t necessarily be right. They could have simply heard a rumour and be repeating it, but if you read carefully, you should spot that. Then, you go to the histories which cover the war and see what they have to say. Only then will you be in a position to guess who’s right.
Jim,
if you want to research the Sclieffen plan look up John Keegan. He was a brilliant historian and went through the Sclieffen Plan (s) – there were several versions – and made the observation that Sclieffen himself realised the plan would not work. This was because there was not enough road space for the number of troops involved and so he simply pencilled in a whole heap of troops who could never have got to the front in the first place.
Everyone on the German General Staff knew this but they decided to gamble anyway.
There is also an excellent book by Gordon Corrigan called ‘Mud, Blood and Poppycock’ which debunks a lot of myths about the First World War.
if I might put aside my modesty, I would also direct you to my book. Hope this helps.
And as a general guide to deciding on the trustworthiness of sources, my own test is.
1. Who created it and were they in a position to comment knowledgeably about what they were seeing?
2. Did they have any motive for bias or prejudice?
3. Was it created at the time of the events or does it benefit form hindsight?
The nature of the “mistake” that prevented German success in the Western Front has always been in debate since it happened, and as far as I’m aware there has never been any broad consensus about it among serious historians. Some go so far as blaming the Prussian general staff for preparing a plan that wouldn’t work unless Germany started the war and invaded first, while others think the Germans actually did better than they should and this advantageous position allowed them to launch the Michael Offensive later in the war — only to fail because no one had developed an appropriate doctrine for exploiting and consolidating the spectacular successes made possible by the new stormtrooper tactics being developed by all sides, and/or because the USA had pitched in to provide a numerical superiority that offset the loss of Russia in the east. And of course all sorts of theories in between.
And of course the good thing about this from the OPs point of view is that it is possible to choose the explanation which works for the story they want to tell.
History isn’t always so accommodating. 
zette wrote:I would trust, for instance, my copies of the Cambridge Ancient History books over anything else. They’re also cited as the base work for a lot of other histories, so this is going to the source.These are available online and for download. Did I see free? The are others there, too. One for music.
Edit: No, It doesn’t seem to be free. But I can’t find the original site I reached.
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