Of course I’m way more bugged by inaccuracies in non-fiction books, and never more so than when it’s by somebody who should really know better. Case in point:
Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, formerly a history professor at Harvard and currently the freaking president of Harvard, recently wrote a book entitled This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. It’s about the impact that the number of dead (roughly 2% of the population of the USA) had on the nation during the war and for a generation after.
I noticed several small errors. For example, there was a memoirist named John Allen Wyeth who I’m very familiar with from genealogical research: he was in the same unit as one of my ancestors and wrote one of the best accounts of their battles. Faust refers to him consistently as “the Confederate surgeon John Wyeth”. When she quotes him on medical conditions she’s quoting him as a Confederate surgeon, thus by implication she’s quoting him on the conditions of Confederate soldiers.
The problem is that John Wyeth (who I’ll admit is hardly a household name, but still- I knew about him and I’m not a Ph.D. in history with emphasis on the Civil War like she is) did not become a surgeon until after the Civil War. During the Civil War he was not a surgeon or a physician or a medical professional or paraprofessional in any way; he was a cavalry private, purely and simply. Also if you know anything about the title of surgeon, during the Civil War it meant something completely different- surgeons then were more like battlefield medics today; they set broken bones, amputated limbs, and stitched you up, but they didn’t perform operations that involved incisions or the like. Wyeth was actually a surgeon in our sense of the word- one of the generation of doctors who actually led surgeon to becoming far more respected. Most glaring is that his medical career was mostly spent in NYC. When he wrote about the differences in northerners and southerners in the operating room he was referring to differences after the war and in* peacetime***.
This may sound like a nitpick, except that she’s quoting his battlefield memoirs as if he were writing as a medical professional- and he wasn’t at the time and in fact little if anything about his account of the war has any medical insight.
She also makes some type of comment to the effect of “only 1 in 9 southerners came from a slave owning family”. Now she’s not the only person I’ve read who made this comment or one very similar, but the problem is that it’s bollocks and a complete misread of the data. Only about 1 in 9 southern individuals owned slaves- that is true- but far more grew up in slave owning families.
Suppose in a hypothetical statistically simple city of 100,000 people there are 1,000 who own a house worth $1 million or more. This means that 1% of that city own million dollar homes. BUT, assuming that the average family size for their households is 3.5 members, then this means that 3%- triple that number- are from households grew up in million dollar homes.
On the slave schedules of the U.S. Census before the Civil War one member of the family, usually the husband/father of course, actually owned the slaves, but the family could be anywhere from just him/her to two dozen members. The number of people who grew up in slave owning families was closer to a third of the white population on average; in Mississippi it was more than half. (We’re not talking Tara and Twelve Oaks families here- families who owned hundreds of slaves and thousands of acres- but about 1/3 came from families that owned at least one slave.)
Now this, like referring to Wyeth’s career and medical studies, may seem nitpickish at first, but I don’t consider it so. She’s using this figure to discuss how most of the south couldn’t relate to slave owners when in fact the number who grew up with a slave in the house or on the farm is actually several times what she’s claiming. (I had many ancestors who didn’t own slaves themselves but grew up in families that owned them, and I would imagine there were many many thousands of southerners like them.) In other words the number of people who had first hand residential experience with slaveowning was a minority but it was a big minority.
There were other errors like this, but these are the two I remember offhand. While they were minor in and of themselves perhaps remember that we’re not talking about a paper by an undergraduate student or even by a grad student or a professor at a small liberal arts school but the PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, somebody who has a very high beam and also an army of graduate students and other underlings who should have checked her research. (I wasn’t even looking for these errors and found them.)
)