Edward Owens, Pirate and Hoax: Shiver Me Timbers!

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The good folks at George Mason University (one of the most technologically sophisticated universities around--they brought us Zotero) have perpetrated a very clever hoax, creating a pirate, Edward Owens, an archive, an interpretation, and a Wikipedia entry. You can now find the corrected, exposed Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia with links to the sources that exposed this as a hoax. It's all smart, fun, and interesting. Especially to one who began her career writing on Ambrose Bierce and whose early mentor was historian Russell B. Nye.

Ambrose Bierce used to write newspaper columns under different names denouncing "Ambrose Bierce" and then would refute those in his own columns. Then he would take up the scurrilous debate in other newspapers, then would refute those. It was all him, all the way down, and no one has yet unravelled all of his hoaxes. He did, however, recently friend me on Facebook. I accepted the friendship.

My mentor Russell B. Nye was a distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a scamp. He and other historians at one point invented their own Civil War battle to parody the pretention of their field. They would give papers on it and, in the Biercean manner, would then denounce one another as frauds, then denounce the denunciations. The Nation at one point even published an account of all of this. And book buyers beware: Russ used to buy first editions at flea markets and then fake the inscriptions, "To Scottie, Love Hem" and so forth, and then donate them back to book sales . . . He did this hundreds of times. And he was astute at copying signatures and, as a historian, he knew how to get the details right.

Working on Bierce and working with Russ, has made me a lifelong skeptic and given me a reflex for fact checking and fact checking again. My students are all very happy about this. (Not).

It doesn't take the Internet to perpetrate a hoax, but it is always a good reminder that we must be careful and cautious and think carefully about the credibility of what we read. Here's the link to the Wikipedia entry on Edward Owens:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Owens