My Journey on Lincoln's Assassination

[Christine]

No footnotes? Yikes! And yet here we are still discussing his theories? Even though I am not a historian, my research about Aiken made me a bit of a "source snob." With a host of contemporary and primary sources to study, why do authors believe they can simply quote other authors (who quoted other authors who quote other authors. . .) withthout referring their readers to the actual source material? No matter how much research someone has done when they publish without the actual source notations they are in essence telling the reader to trust them and their conclusions without acknowledging that the reader may actually have a brain and wish to consult those same sources to come to their own conclusion. Sorry, but with so many rich historical books with hundreds of historical sources, and so little time, I choose the mantra "no sources? No reading."