The historical topic that I chose for this exercise was George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, which took place on Christmas Day, December 25, 1776, during the American Revolution. The painting dedicated to this event is probably one of the most notable in American history; it shows a courageous George Washington as he heads up a column of troops crossing the icy Delaware River. Looking at the Wikipedia page for this event the sources used for information on the page seem fairly reliable. The sources range from published books to reports from national parks in the area and museums. Most of the sources seem reliable, but there are a few sources that do not seem as reliable. For example, one source on the page is from a television show called Liberty’s Kids, this animated tv show came out in 2003; generally, television shows exaggerate rather than portray history as it truly was.
Looking at the history of the article, and by that I mean that changes that have been made to the article over the years, I noticed that this article was edited fairly often, at least twice a month. I noticed that when changes were made to the article they were often small changes in grammar or specific words and that there were a few people that were constantly making changes to this article. There was one person in particular that changed the article back to its previous form about every two months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington%27s_crossing_of_the_Delaware_River
The website that I looked up on Whois.com was history.com, which is the website for the History Channel. I found out that the website and the channel are owned by A&E Television Networks which, A&E, is actually another television channel which broadcast a number of reality tv shows. Thinking about the shows that they have on the History Channel, the format is very similar to that of A&E network; many of the shows are based on historical events but are historical fiction, using actors to play out scenarios and scripts which exaggerates these events.
http://www.whois.com/whois/history.com
When reading about the student blog I believe that the sources Jane Browning used were based more on trying to verify information by gathering what she could from local inhabitant and from first hand, in person accounts. Reading through the bibliography, it seems that Browning used Wikipedia and a number of internet websites as sources of information. There were a few stories that came from books or news article, but most of the sources did not seem as scholarly as expected for a senior project. Reading through the blog, I realized that apparently Jane Browning is not a real person and much of the information that she found was fictional. I think the point of reading through this blog was to learn about how easy it is to fabricate believable information and how information can take a life of its own. I think it also makes a statement as to how important it is to use sources that are based on factual information.
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