In a shock to no one, Bill O’Reilly’s latest book on Abraham Lincoln has a few errors:
On Friday I wrote about the decision of Ford’s Theatre not to offer Bill O’Reilly’s bestsetlling new book on the Lincoln assassination at its bookstore because an expert National Park Service reviewer found the work to be riddled with factual errors.
Now, in a review in a leading Civil War magazine, a second expert has flunked O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln,” calling it “somewhere between an authoritative account and strange fiction.”
The review (which is not online) appears in the November issue of North & South, the official magazine of the Civil War Society.
“The narrative contains numerous errors of people, place, and events,” writes reviewer Edward Steers Jr., author of more than five books on the Lincoln assassination. He goes on to list about 10 errors of fact in “Killing Lincoln,” which O’Reilly co-authored with Martin Dugard and which has been atop bestseller lists for weeks.
I’ve started up a hashtag on Twitter, #oreillyfactsaboutlincoln, for people to add their own creative “facts” about our 16th President…
Oh brother… With all due respect to the author of this article as well as the author that wrote the article that pointed out “all of the errors” in Bill Oreillys book, the errors that were pointed out were tiny spelling errors in names and things like that. This is just ridiculous. If this book had been written by a lefty there is NO WAY we would be having this conversation. Come on.
Sorry dude, it’s a bit more than spelling
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/1.....coln_book/
@1 Maybe the kinds of errors cited in the article linked @2 don’t seem important to the kind of person who swallows Bill O’Reilly’s propaganda whole; but in the world of serious scholarship, if you’re gonna challenge historical orthodoxies on a subject as heavily vetted as Lincoln, you’d better have some evidence to support your revisionism, or you’re asking to be ridiculed.
There’s nothing wrong with challenging orthodoxies — if you go about it in the right way. That’s what searching for truth is about. But nobody, not even Einstein, can get away with sloppy work or throwing darts.
Ttons of popular books and movie scripts take liberties with historical truth. That’s fine, so long as the purveyors of popular entertainment don’t make outlandish authenticity claims lacking basis. If you want to rework history to your interpretation of popular tastes in order to sell books, then call it a “novel.” But don’t pretend something is history when it’s not. That’s called “fraud.”
Steers adds that one entire passage of the book about co-conspirator Mary Surratt is flat-out untrue: The authors write that: “She was forced to wear a padded hood when not on trial, and that she was imprisoned in a cell aboard the monitor Montauk, which was “barely habitable.”
None of this is true.
Mary Surratt was never shackled or hooded at any time.
She was never imprisoned aboard the Montauk, but taken to the Carroll Annex of the Old Capitol Prison before being transferred to the women’s section of the Federal Penitentiary at the Washington’s Arsenal.
Concludes Steers:
“If the authors made mistakes in names, places, and events, what else did they get wrong? How can the reader rely on anything that appears in ‘Killing Lincoln’?”
Did oreilly get the part wrong where the “card carrying communist” Booth and the “cut taxes and get rid of regulations are my highest priority” Lincoln (Lincoln, oddly enough, wearing only a top hat and a loofah) had the high speed horse and carriage race through the city ending up in the shoot out in the theater with blazing Kalashnikovs and Glocks where Lincoln took out 130 confederate ninjas before taking a bullet.
That’s whats in the new Texas history books.
If this book had been written by a lefty there is NO WAY we would be having this conversation.
…because such an egregiously erroneous book, if written by a lefty, would never have been published to begin with, much less be a best seller.
Remember when someone proposed that Lincoln was gay? It was widely dismissed.
So I go to Amazon to look up this new expert: Steers, and see what he has written. Blood on the moon. Reviews are so so, with references to many errors, spelling and editing mistakes.
To use his words: Wonder what else is wrong.
Then I go to the Ford Theater website (http://www.enssc.com/default.aspx?store=549) and guess what…they don’t carry Steers book either. Hmmm, maybe it’s not too well “researched and correct” either….
I find that quite ironic. Steers tries to establish himself as an expert hopes he can sell some books to the anti-O’Reilley crowd.
Sheesh
Bill O’Lielly was going for a Guinness World Record:
The most money made while shoveling total horseshit to gullible right wing sycophants.
The joke’s on O’Lielly’s brown nosing fans.
I’ve never watched more than clips of that joke making an ass of himself.
Here’s the classic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5qU4qudJYk
To #2&3: Ok so here are the other errors that your citing as a reason this book should be discredited:
1. The book mentions the “oval office” which wasnt built at the time.
Seriously? I think the OVAL OFFICE is pretty much synonamous with the presidency. It isnt a stretch to think that Bill Oreilly was referring to the Presidency in general when he said “oval office”.
2. He says the farm where booth was hiding was 200 acreas when its really 500 acres (give or take).
Unless he is filing for some kind of building permit on that property, what difference does it make if its 200, 500 or 1000 acres? Ug!
3. He said the sercretary of state spoke with an Alabaman drawl but really he spoke with a Floridan drawl.
Ok, and this CHANGES HISTORY how? Does that one fact make the entire gook invalid? Give me a break!
Everybody keeps saying that “if Bill Oreilly made those mistakes just imagine how many other mistakes he made”. But heres the thing…. If his book actually CONTAINED BIG, IMPORTANT, SUBSTANCIAL MISTAKES, we would be talking about those right now instead of spelling errors. This is so nitpicky. LAME. LAME. LAME.
You know, I kind of agree with party. This does seem to be a tempest in a teapot. The reviews agree that oreilly played was sloppy with his fact checking and sort of made up some narrative elements. Big deal, oreilly wrote a third rate book that nobody will read or even remember in a few years.
# 10: Is that a reference to the U.S. Secretary of State, or the Confederate Secty of State? Seward was a very influential figure who almost got the Republican nomination himself. But he was from upstate New York, I doubt he would have had a Floridian accent. At the time of the Civil War, Florida was very sparsely populated, with most of it’s population around the Pensacola region.
But more importantly, as was stated earlier, there are numerous academic historians who have devoted their lives to the study of all things about Lincoln. Doris Goodwin just published a great book “A Team of Rivals” which goes into considerable detail into the evolution of Lincoln’s political ideology and career, as well as those who were his rivals for the nomination but went on to make up his cabinet. She spent the better part of a decade just on that work, even though she had an impressive array of background knowledge on ths subject even before she started. She also has no political agenda that I could discern.
Knowing that there are a couple dozen or more of nationally recognized authors still living who have devoted much of their life to researching and writing Lincoln, what does Bill O’Reilly stand to accomplish by writing a revisionist book on the subject? Did he really read through the volumes of personal correspondence of Lincoln, as did the others? Did he read the letters, biographys, etc. of others who had contact with Lincoln to see what they said about him?
No, he starts on the assumption that he knows more than those scholars, then borrows liberally from them to make his own book, but in the end manages to repeat errors which were previously written but discarded as the errors were dismissed by others having more knowledge.
In the end, it just goes to show that O’Reilly is so arragant he thought he could write a book on a subject he knows little about, to fit a pre-conceived idea which sprang out of knowhere, and expect it to be accepted with accolades. Because he only surrounds himself with people who keep telling him how smart he is, he has come to believe it.
To #12: I was mistaken. Bill Oreilly did not make a mistake about the secretary of states drawl. It was the man who was supposed to assasinate the secretary of state that had a florida drawl. My mistake.
As far as your comparison to goodwin goes, she is a very intelligent historian. No argument there. But maybe part of the problem were having with Bill Oreillys book is that were holding him up to the same standards that we would a historian. Cant the American public tell the difference between a highly educated historian and a tv personality? Is that really Oreillys fault? Maybe the problem here isnt that Bill Oreilly made some minor mistakes in a book. Maybe the problem is that weve lost the ability to compare apples to oranges. Why does everything need to be viewed through the same lens?