Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly

[JJamiekinder]

I agree totally with the earlier opinions concerning O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln. I actually do a two-day lesson with my American History class of juniors using the piece as an example of improper citations and references or as I term it...bad history. I use the second part of his book, "The Ides of Death" which as earlier stated, uses a vague narrative of cited sources such as Wink's April 1865, Anthony Pitch's They Have Killed Papa Dead and Kaufman's American Brutus. As you all know, these are great sources but the way the authors use them, the reader simply cannot decipher how they are referenced as there is no specific pages or direct quotations in the notes. I then put the students in groups actually going through referenced sources (Wink, Pitch and Kaufman) to see if they can figure out how they were used. The students then compare a well-written and cited piece of history, in this case I use Roy Z. Chamlee's Lincoln's Assassins (one of my favorites) to compare and contrast "good history" verse "bad". Nonetheless, my students come away with the same verdict that most of you do. That O'Reilly produced a stinker. Then I show them the NY Times best seller list, which he sat atop of for weeks and we then take the conversation of "sources", "what sells" and "why" even further to today's "fake news" and the importance of properly vetted information. And just for the record, I don't even go down the path of opinion concerning the premise of the piece. But if i did, I would put it along side of Eisenschiml, the original scoundrel of the bunch, Vaughn Shelton, who followed in the chemist shoes, Ray Neff's Civil War Times debacle and of course Balsiger and Sellier's book which unfortunately was turned into a bad motion picture. Politics aside, there is a reason the bookstore at Ford's refuses to carry O'Reilly's piece. It's simply bad history.