I'm afraid my previous post may have been a bit too off the cuff so to speak.
Yes, we do learn things we may not have known before.  New documentation is
discovered in a trunk somewhere that changes a date we used to think x
happened etc.  I agree that documentable corrections should be made on
things that are presented as authoritative.  One lesson I learned getting
my degree in history is that every study is second hand.  Every written
work has a bias.  I think the problem in the example of the marker was not
one of facts, dates, locations etc. but of the bias of the marker's
content.  I also think instructional media should be updated.  The audience
demographics may have changed; the reason believed to be important for
maintaining the site may have changed; words may need to be larger or lower
to the ground to meet ADA requirements etc.  I just fear the loss of
anything from the historical record.  That is just a personality flaw of
mine.
Vincent Lyon

At 05:46 PM 3/9/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>I would like to think that we do actually learn something more about history
>as time goes by, as study piles up upon study, learned book upon learned
>book; that we could actually write a better historical marker today than we
>could have 50 or 80 years ago. It's not ALL relative, is it? If you know the
>information itself in a marker is dead wrong (not just from a different
>slant or point of view than the present) don't you have an obligation to get
>it corrected? Do we stop updating our interpretation, retraining our
>docents, and rewriting our labels, when we have newer and apparently better
>information or insights?
>
>I think the concept of interpreting the time period in which a marker was
>written (historiography not history) is a little subtle for a public only
>pausing by the roadside for a quick history fix.
>
>Carol Ely
>Museum Consultant
>Louisville
>
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Vincent T. Lyon
Robert Crown Law Library
Stanford University
650-725-0810
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