I listened to an interesting Freakonomics podcast on my drive home today. It was called The Legacy of a Jerk and featured several stories related to people who were, or were made out to be, jerks and how their jerkiness was treated after their deaths.
As historians, it is important to be as truthful and accurate as possible when recounting past events and delving into the lives of people who have passed on. But it’s human nature, and perhaps more of a social more, to not speak ill of the dead. How can we reconcile these two very different approaches to remembering the past? Continue reading
This Public Historian 