It's Always More Complicated

My dear rdrz will have heard me (for lo, they B heering the whingeing on the Moon) rant about certain popular works of history, sometimes by people who have some kind of relevant scholarly credential (and sometimes not) that have the pernicious effect of getting some complete misapprehension into the water.

And sometimes, at least within the scholarly community, you have people who NO BETTER undertaking the somewhat tedious task of historical revisionism (e.g. come on down, Helen King!) and bright or less-bright young things become apprised that you cannot take the popular and much-cited works as gospel, for, lo, they GOT IT RONG or left pertinent facts out, and so on.

The trouble with popular works of history is that quite oft, they fall into the hands of individuals who are perhaps not applying the critical methods that one trained in the discipline would apply, or do not realise that this is just one case in an ongoing debate, and sometimes, o deary deary me, they write plays or produce films (in the case of a certain canard, both) which are claimed to be based on HISTORICAL (or perhaps we should say, HYSTERIKLE) FACT.

I see that somebody has made a play out of Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box (2004): which was, at that time

condemned for perpetuating – or at least failing to refute – the myth that the father of behaviourism, BF Skinner, tested his theories by keeping his infant daughter in an environmentally controlled box.

SIGH.

I thought I'd also posted about one or two egregious examples of playwrights/novelists ripping off historians' work without attribution and letting it be thought it was ORL THEIR OWN WERK, but can't find the posts if so.