In May 2022, journalist and historian Otto English published his book Fake History: Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped The World. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the intersection between myth and history.
But Fake History is everywhere, and often we are complicit its spread without even knowing it. So how do you spot it? I’ve included a few helpful tips below:
The Skeptical Historian’s Guide to Spotting Fake History
1. Where does the information appear?
Beware of claims which only appear in one source, especially if that source is an autobiography or an official history. These types of sources can give some great background information, but they’re notoriously unreliable as primary documents. If an event happened, it won’t just appear in one source from the time, but will be in multiple places: check newspapers, diaries and public records for corroborating information. If you’re in Australia, Trove is a great place to begin fact-checking. If you can only find a reference to the story in a single source, chances are it didn’t happen.
2. Do all the players have names?
In his autobiography, Winston Churchill told the story of how he had made a cleaning lady at Whitehall a Dame Commander of the Realm after she discovered important war time papers that had been carelessly left behind on a table by a colleague. She took them home safely and had her son deliver them personally to 10 Downing Street. Churchill then details how he fought tooth and nail with the government, who were horrified at the thought of a mere cleaning lady being given such a high honour. He stuck to his guns and successfully made the woman a Dame and her son a Knight, and hurrah for the people! By the time he wrote his autobiography, Churchill claimed he couldn’t remember their names, if he’d even been told them in the first place. This tale has been copied almost verbatim by every Churchill biographer since, despite it having several glaring holes.
Firstly, the Prime Minister of the UK can’t just give out awards as they see fit, such things have to be debated in parliament. Churchill claims this was debated, but the minutes of parliamentary debates are public records and this debate isn’t anywhere in the records. Secondly, the names of those given such awards are also public records, so if Churchill couldn’t remember, he could have gone and looked them up. Later historians have done this, and none of the women awarded the title of Dame in WW2 had worked as cleaners prior to receiving their award. The cleaning lady didn’t exist, and neither did her nameless son. No wonder Churchill couldn’t remember them! Historical events where major players are unnamed is a good indication the event has been made up.
3. Who does the story benefit?
Remember, history isn’t the past, it’s an interpretation of past events. Using the example above again, by the time Churchill wrote his autobiography, he was aging and the British Empire which he loved and to which he had devoted so much of his life to was crumbling. People in the various dominions and “colonies” no longer saw themselves as British or believed that their affairs should be subject to continuing British control. He himself was also starting to be seen as less or a mighty hero and great statesman, a true people’s prime ministers, as word of the atrocities he’d authorized in Kenya & India began to emerge. This story about the mythical cleaning lady is just the kind of feel good story a fading man would want made public, to bolster his fictitious reputation as a true “man of the people.”
Another good example is Albert Speer, a Nazi and member of Hitler’s inner cricle who successfully reinvented himself after the war to suggest that he had been nothing more than a man who liked buildings and had the misfortune to get caught up in Adolf Hitler’s genocidal government. Speer knowingly and willingly used slaves from the concentration camps in his factories to build weapons and had been involved in the high level discussions about setting up the work-and-death camps. He was a Nazi through and through, but by reinventing himself as “just a misfortunate architect” he was able to serve a relatively short prison term (ten years for mass murder!) and then go and build rockets for NASA. The story benefitted him and no one else. If the tale you’ve come across has benefit for only one person, it’s probably fake.
4. Is the language correct?
Uncomfortable as it is, when examining an event from the past using primary source documents, you’re likely to come across prejudices common to the era, including deeply offensive and inappropriate language. A primary source that does not use the terms which were common at the time is a highly suspect source. A good copy of a primary source document, which has been made by a historian, will either include these phrases, often with a note to the reader indicating they have been quoted verbatim and do not reflect the historian’s views, or will mark out where they were. Peter FitzSimons does this in his book “Breaker Morant” when a group of men are discussing black South Africans using deeply offensive language common at the time. Instead of using the word when quoting the men, he writes “n—-r”. A document which has had these kinds of words removed entirely without note should be treated with extreme caution, as you will have no idea what else has been removed in the process of making it more palatable.
5. Is it even possible?
This is the big one. The best, most oft repeated stories tend to have a tantalizing “what if” quality about them, that leaves professional and amateur historians constantly wondering what might have been. For instance, there is a popular story about Henry Tandy, VC, who, while fighting in Flanders in WW1, came face to face with an unarmed German Lance Corporal: Adolf Hitler. Unable to bring himself to shoot an unarmed men, Tandy didn’t fire and we all know what Hitler went on to do. It’s a magnificent story, and one that has been repeated time and time and time again… but it didn’t happen. In fact, Hitler himself made it up when he met Chamberlain at the infamous Munich Conference. Tandy’s biographer confirmed this, pointing out that while Tandy did spare some unarmed German soldiers, Hitler wasn’t in Flanders on that day, he was on leave elsewhere. What’s more, when asked about it himself, Tandy was non-committal and said he would need more information before he could say definitively whether he had met Hitler or not. After all, no one knew who Hitler was in 1918, and (even if Tandy had seen him, which has been established as being impossible) he wouldn’t have looked anything like he did twenty years later.
There are many sliding door moments in history, but we need to be careful about putting too much store by them. Always ask yourself, is this likely, and then go back through the above four steps: can it be verified, does it benefit someone to have this story told, is everyone named and accounted for, and is the language correct for the time. Interestingly, when you peel back the layers of Fake History, what’s underneath is often for more interesting than the shiny goldleaf someone tried to stick over it. History isn’t sacred, it’s meant to be questioned, considered and reinterpreted. If someone tells you otherwise… it’s definitely FAKE!