Shared reality incongruity
Lore verses history
I happened upon a comment thread in a Facebook group devoted to the history of Burlington the other day that's got me irritated and cranky about the poor state of our understanding of history.
The Battle of Valcour occurred in 1776: it was a naval engagement between US and British Forces who were attempting to invade the colonies by way of Lake Champlain from Canada. Both sides took heavy losses, but the US forces were able to delay the British enough that they decided to postpone their invasion until the following year, which was more successful.
Andrew Liptak
Carleton's Prize is a small rocky island that juts out of the lake just off of South Hero, and was reportedly bombarded by the British fleet who mistaking the rocks for one of the fleeing US ships. This is where the caption comes from: "the reddish stains are from the cannon balls that the British fired into it."
The post quickly attracted some commenters who pointed out that the stains aren't from the battle: they're the product of iron deposits in the rock that's oxidized. One member of the group left a couple of comments that I've been thinking about for the last couple of days:
"OR, it's iron shot that penetrated the rocks and is leeching out! Could be...and why not just allow for the lore of the great revolution.
And:
But why can't there be a little historical lore allowed to exist in the world. Nobody is foisting their lies upon anyone here and demanding agreement ... it is simply fun to consider what it MIGHT be, in addition to allowing the scientific fact of what it is likely to be.
This is Facebook, so we're talking about an argument with exceedingly low stakes, but I think it's illustrative of much greater arguments that are taking place around how we as a society remember the past and undertake the practice of history as a discipline. In 2026, the United States will enter its 250th year (starting with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776), and as the nation gears up to celebrate, we're going to see a lot more of these discussions and arguments crop up as we look back over that last quarter millennium.
I've been mulling over the phrase "historical lore" and the rush to defend the idea in this post even if it's defending something that is quantifiably wrong: that the British bombarded the island by mistake and local legend claims that the stains are what remains. I can see the appeal: it's a story that attempts to explain the situation, and to remember on a cultural level something important occurred in this place.
Folklore and stories passed down in oral traditions are important and historians shouldn't disregard them. In 1846, a pair of British ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror vanished in Canada's far north. The ships were rediscovered just off of King William Island in 2014, thanks to centuries of stories passed down by members of the Inuit community, which conveyed that two ships arrived and were crushed by the ice off the island before sinking. In Australia, study of Aboriginal folklore has led to a better understanding of the Henbury meteorite field, in which stories told of fire that came from the sky and that if people drank from the water in the area, they might be poisoned.
But it's important to treat folklore carefully as historical evidence and to account for errors and perspective. Human memory is fallible and as stories are transmitted across generations, they can change. Aboriginal Australians wouldn't have had the cosmological vision that we now have, and interpreted the events through their perspective.
In this instance, we do have a good understanding of what occurred in October 1776: we have firsthand accounts from the people who were involved in the battle, wreckage from the ships, and contemporary documents, as well as decades and decades of scholarship from historians working to understand how this battle fit into the larger picture of the American Revolution. We also have more than a decades of research into the region's geologic makeup that explains why there might be reddish stains in the rocks in the area.
There are a couple of things to pick apart with this particular story: that the British fired upon a rocky island, thinking that it was a ship, and that the cannon balls left the stains behind. There's dubious evidence for either. Firsthand accounts of the battle, such as ones from Doctor Robert Knox (a British physician) and US militiaman Jahiel Stewart talk about the battle in detail, and make no mention of the bombardment, while books about the battle likewise don't include it. The only references that I can find are a Wikipedia page dedicated to the incident with some extreme dodgy sourcing.
Something that I think about a lot is the "Andy Letter" that was featured on the NPR show Car Talk, in which the author wrote to the show in a delightful way to say that they had unwittingly answered a question: "Do two people who don't know what they are talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what he's talking about?" After listening to the pair talk about electric brakes on a cattle trailer, he found an answer: "you proved that even in a case where one person might know nothing about a subject, it is possible for two people to know even less!"
Per Andy:
One person will only go so far out on a limb in his construction of deeply hypothetical structures, and will often end with a shrug or a raising of hands to indicate the dismissability of his particular take on a subject. With two people, the intricacies, the gives and takes, the wherefores and why-nots, can become a veritable pas-de-deux of breathtaking speculation, interwoven in such a way that apologies or gestures of doubt are rendered unnecessary.
That's what's happened here. Looking at the historical record, there's enough out there to say that the incident likely didn't happen and that connecting the oxidization on the island to the battle is conjecture that arose after the incident.
I think about this letter a lot when it comes to information on the internet: in the last decade of social media discourse, misinformation campaigns, and general dumbfuckery that takes place online, we've seen shows just how easy it is for people who don't know what they're talking about to sound authoritative on any number of subjects, whether it's the sudden rise of armchair generals talking about Ukraine's military strategies to the aerodynamics experts who came out of the woodwork when Elon Musk unveiled the Cybertruck. I also think a lot about some of the panels that I've attended at science fiction conventions, where authors are invited before a crowd as subject-matter experts simply because they wrote a book that includes a topic – but who're often operating at a surface-level understanding of said topic. These are constant reminders that we need to be careful about who we look to for expert advice, and instead look to methodology over personality.
But the letter and its realization is only the first half of the equation: Dis- and Misinformation are real threats to civil discourse online, and what it doesn't account for is how defensive people can be when incorrect information or lore is called out online. I keep going back to this guy's first comment: "why not just allow for the lore of the great revolution?" and "it is simply fun to consider what it MIGHT be, in addition to allowing the scientific fact of what it is likely to be."
History is complicated, and unless you're studying it, what you were taught barely scratched the surface. It's a subject that's easy to deflate down to simple cause-and-effect, without delving into the enormous complexities and motivations and decisions that built up the causes and effects. One of my college professors imparted an important lesson: the individuals who led the American Revolution were political radicals who were out of step with the general public, and proceeded to explore the pamphlets through which they explained their ideology and the work they undertook to change the minds of their neighbors that ultimately led to the founding of the country. It was a far cry from the simpler version of the founding that's often taught.
Why not "allow" the lore of the great revolution? To start, it's incorrect and it doesn't bring the listener any understanding of what transpired
Why not "allow" the lore of the great revolution? To start, it's incorrect and it doesn't bring the listener any understanding of what transpired during that battle. At worst, it's a story that posits that the British were incompetent and that the Americans transpired in part because of that blunder, and at best, it's just conjecture at the end of a long game of telephone that tries to simply highlight that a great battle took place here.
If you take the former motivation – that the British were incompetent – you come away with the thought of American exceptionalism: that the US forces were somehow inherently better at their jobs than their enemies, and that our victory in the American Revolution was inevitable. This isn't the case: the British military was a highly competent, well-trained fighting force. Arguments like this flatten and simplify our understanding of history, reducing its complexity and giving us a poor understanding of the complications, challenges, and sheer luck that brought about an American victory. In the latter, if all you're trying to do is convey that there was a battle that took place in the area, there are plenty of historic markers and scholarship that showcases the battle.
If you're looking to simply have some fun and "consider what it MIGHT be," head to your local bookstore and look up the works of Harry Turtledove.
History has been used as a cudgel for one-sided truth for eons. The axiom "history is written by the victors" showcases its fallibility as truth. We Americans have a poor understanding of our own past: schools in the south systemically misrepresent the nature of the American Civil War, while we collectively have a poorer idea of the nature and direction and motivations of the people who instigated the American Revolution. The online environment doesn't help: the UN found that social media misinformation has fueled a rise in holocaust denial and antisemitism.
History as a discipline is the examination of the nature of our past reality. The coming semisesquicentennial is a ripe opportunity for educators, historians, and institutions to counter these narratives by showing history grounded in facts: highlighting the process of using artifacts, documents, eyewitness accounts, and other primary sources to properly ground a story in reality and to impart readers and viewers with the tools to understand the past. These skills are vitally important: we are long past the point where we have first-hand knowledge of the events of the American Revolution (the last survivors died after the end of the American Civil War!) and the American Civil War, and we're quickly coming to the point where the last survivors of the Second World War, the Korean War, and (in a couple of decades) the Vietnam War will also be gone, along with their first-hand knowledge of what they underwent.
A story like Carlton's Prize is relatively unimportant in the greater scheme of things: a small, inaccurate folktale that falls apart when you poke at it. But the same can't be said for the stories that will arise around other conflicts and events: look at the state of looking back at the Second World War. There are plenty of people who question the existence of the holocaust, despite mountains of physical evidence, stories from survivors, and documents from the perpetrators themselves. These are two very different situations, but they're linked by a similar mindset: that we're willing to accept that our history doesn't have to be grounded in fact.
That approach leads to a diminished and poor understanding of the past, preventing us from learning from our mistakes and tragedies. That is the danger of allowing lore and storytelling to flourish in place of what really happened.