First a note about ketchup.  It may or may not be a Heinz trade name, but
it's on my Hunt's bottle (with the circle R mark).  But did you know that
ketchup, catchup, and catsup are all in dictionaries as generic names?
 They're variations on a Malay word for fish sauce, so that's how the word is
derived, trademark or not.  Must remember to do a little additional
"research" at the supermarket...

As for the significance of corporate spin on "history," I'm a little
skeptical.  Certainly there are many examples of this phenomenon, but I think
it would take some solid research to determine just how prevalent it is.
 This idea could itself easily become folklore in the absence of careful
investigation.  Certainly Edison's success helped to keep the name of his
rival inventor, Nikola Tesla, in obscurity for generations--although I
suspect that the claims of Tesla's avid supporters that he was the greatest
genius and near-Messiah of the 19th and 20th century might be a wee bit
exaggerated.  I still cringe when people glibly claim that Edison "invented"
motion pictures, because this is a gross oversimplification, no matter how
important he was in that field.

Heleanor Feltham's remarks about theater history deserve some comment.  The
claim was made that the "texts" of "theater history lore" give the Savoy
Theatre as the birthplace of electric lighting for the stage, yet of the two
books (count 'em) on theater history in my home library, Glynne Wickham's "A
History of the Theatre," says that David Belasco's San Francisco theater was
"among the first."  As my main interest is the history of photography, I note
that Wickham states that Fox Talbot invented the first modern camera in 1840,
which is a gross, inaccurate, and misleading oversimplification.  First of
all, it was the process that was significant, not the camera, and a
Francophile might say that Daguerre "invented" photography.  This may
represent a national spin on history (Wickham is British), which admittedly
might be analogous to corporate spin.  What I see, however, is a historian
who is simply out of his element--or specialty--making statements about a
field in which he obviously lacks competence.  Wickham is a professor of
drama, not a photographic historian, and this particular error is
attributable to lack of expertise, not a corporate agenda.

This goes back to the discussion about generalists and specialists into which
I entered a few days ago, and it relates to my point about the mistakes which
generalists can make.  Wickham may be a specialist in drama, but when he
attempts to trace a technological relationship between photographic and
optical innovations, he begins functioning as a generalist and makes
mistakes.  Some generalists make glib pronouncements about specialized areas
without bouncing them off appropriate specialists, whether in books or museum
exhibit labels, and their mistakes, both of fact and illogical conclusions,
enter into the "lore" and get quoted by later writers.  I have a colleague
who is proud of being a generalist and thinks "details" are the province of
mere statisticians, mindless antiquarians, and other obsessive types--and in
whose writings I have detected a variety of alarming and unnecessary
mistakes.  Even in a discussion of our institution's history, this person
once made a number of rather silly errors which could have been avoided by a
brief perusal of our annual reports or a 15-minute conversation with a
longer-term employee.  Some of these folks are widely respected historians,
whose erroneous pronouncements are cited by the next wave of historians.

I have an acquaintance who teaches in an American Studies department and is
well-known in academic circles for his studies of documentary photographs.
 One of his best-known books is replete with laughable mistakes about
photographic technology; he doesn't even get the nomenclature right, and it
wouldn't have taken a photographic historian to set him straight--an advanced
amateur photographer could have helped him avoid the embarrassing gaffes.
 When I complained about these problems in a review of the book, I suppose he
thought I was nit-picking, but I felt that this sloppiness undermined the
value of his work.  In another of his works, he mentioned a famous Washington
landmark, and claimed that it was about three times taller than it actually
is--his point was the monumentality of the object--well, it simply isn't that
monumental, and I suspect he's never seen it.  My point is his
sloppiness--how can his conclusions be trusted?

I have discovered a few incidental errors or misleading remarks in exhibit
labels in my museum, evidently written by "generalists" or at least
specialists working outside their field of specialization-- specialties which
are represented by real live specialists on the staff.  It seems
counterproductive not to utilize the knowledge of specialists within one's
own institution.  I'm not beating up on my own museum exclusively, because I
know that this occurs elsewhere--I've heard complaints from specialists in my
field elsewhere, for example.  The attempt to make everyone a generalist, it
seems to me, frequently introduces unnecessary mistakes.  Sooner or later,
generalists have to venture into specifics, if only by way of example to
strengthen an argument.  And it isn't always feasible to vet everything past
the specialists when you're working against an exhibit deadline.  What I see
occurring in many contemporary museum exhibitions is the tendency of
generalists to begin with a grand theme and try to illustrate it with
objects; sometimes the historical significance of the objects--let alone the
specific details about the objects--gets distorted in the process.  But the
exhibition viewer, often more interested in the objects than in the theme or
general narrative, may carry away some misconceptions.  Obviously, I'm making
a plea for generalists and specialists to work together to get both ends of
the spectrum right.

I'm suggesting that corporate history or agenda is not the only culprit in
introducing historical errors.  Other historians have their own agendas, and
true scholarship can suffer if an agenda overrides impartial investigation,
analysis, and conclusion.  Scholarship, it seems to me, is a detail business.
 I have no quarrel with the processes of deduction and induction to form
sweeping and illuminating conclusions--but I think we first have to make sure
we get the details right.  One thing historians of all stripes have in common
is the zeal for revisionism.  That's what historians do: revise.  I'm not too
worried about a distorted Microsoft history of the PC--sooner or later, I'm
confident, someone will come along to revise it.

David Haberstich