Reading Forwarded Emails

Among many interests, I love history. This first blog contains my personal lesson for the day. Don't blithely read and forward what you receive, no matter who the sender might be. I was confused when I received an email of "History Unfolding," a blog purportedly by David Kaiser, a historian from Jamestown, RI, and after looking up his name to see if he was legitimate, forwarded it to some family and friends to ask their opinion. The response from one astute reader was the following link where Kaiser has posted a disclaimer about the piece on Saturday April 18, 2009 on his real Blogspot: http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/. Read his well-formulated ideas; as a professor of critical reading, I should have known better, but now know to go to sites such as Snopes.com to check the source--something I always caution my students to do. Kaiser reported on April 11th that:

"During the past seven days this blog has had about 1100 hits, which may be a record. I do hope some of my new patrons will return, but the reason for the outburst of interest is quite ironic: the fraudulent attribution to myself of a piece of right-wing hysteria which continues to circulate around the net. Snopes.com, a site which specializes in exposing fraud, published this almost immediately when I called it to their attention, and during the past ten days 168 hits on historyunfolding.com have come from there. They have traced it to an anonymous comment on a right wing blog last November. It has been misattributed to a couple of other people since then. "

Live and learn . . .