Patrick Henry Said What?: Or, How to Fact-Check an Internet "Quote"

An unfortunate side effect of this information superhighway thing is that a lot of the information that gets passed along is wrong. This is as true of historical information as any other kind. The web is crowded with imaginary black confederates, crank constitutional theories, and historical "quotes" that no one ever said.

A former student of mine is always putting up one historical "quote" or another from Brainy Quote or ThinkExist on his Facebook page. These sites are full of made up and real quotes side by side (Mark Twain in particular suffers terribly at their hands, along with the Founders and Yogi Berra). And these websites seem to plagiarize one another with abandon, so once something is out there, it is everywhere. So now I tell students to trace their quotes back to the source: "Find me the document by that person that is the origin of the quote," I tell them.

Case in point, the following "quote" for Patrick Henry, which is so widespread that it gets over 800,000 Google hits: "The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."

Sounds great, patriotic and stirring and making a political point that has considerable modern-day relevance. But Patrick Henry never said it. He never wrote it. It is fake.

How can I be so sure? Google books is often a good source for getting to the facts. Here is the search. We see that the Henry quote appears in ten books from the last 15 years, including the Congressional Record (apparently by Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, and 
Chuck Norris' magisterial Black Belt Patriotism.

Yet the alleged quote appears not at all in any earlier works--not in any of the hundreds of books of Henry's writings, books about the constitutional debates, or biographies of Henry that are in the Google Books database. In fact it first pops up in print in 1994 (dawn of the internet era!) in a political book. If Henry really said something so quotable in his lifetime it is inconceivable that no one thought to quote it until 1994. The quote is a fake.

Further evidence that the quote is spurious is that it does not sound like Henry, who was after all an anti-federalist and opposed to the constitution, which he considered a Federalist plot. Hell, Henry refused an invitation to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, famously explaining "I smell a rat."

I could have performed this exercise with hundreds of other "quotes" from the Founders that you see plastered on bumper stickers and misspelled on Tea Party signs. So where do we look for real, verified historical quotes? My first suggestion is to read the primary sources. If you want to know what any one of the Founders thought about the Constitution read his collected writings. You could begin here. These are men whose thoughts on government were for the most part highly nuanced and sophisticated. No one-sentence take away, even if it is verified, is going to capture the richness and complexity of their thought.

OK, some of you are not going to do that. If you must go to a quotations website, use Wikiquotes. A spin-off  of the Wikipedia project, Wikiquotes tries to raise the bar by organizing the quotes into three categories: "Sourced" for verified quotes, "Attributed" for quotes whose provenance is uncertain, and "Misattributed" for things that are flat out wrong. It is a good idea, but crowd sourcing is only as good as the crowd, and as of this morning their Patrick Henry page included the fake constitution quote as "Sourced!" I fixed it--let's see if it stays fixed.

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars?

Your humble Northwest History blogger is sometimes accused of being a Google fanboy. A fair cop. But you know who is not a Google fanboy? Geoffrey Nunberg, that is who. Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education Nunberg has a witty jerimiad, Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars.

Nunberg's beef is with Google's sloppy and commercially driven metadata schemes. He demonstrates that even with such a basic item as date of publication, Google Books very frequently gets it wrong. This in turn often corrupts search results: "A search on 'Internet' in books published before 1950 produces 527 results; 'Medicare' for the same period gets almost 1,600." By comparing Google's data to that found in the catalogues of the contributing libraries Nunberg shows that these errors do in fact belong to Google, not to their partners.


Nunberg also whacks Google for the classification errors where books are placed in the wrong categories: " H.L. Mencken's The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles . . . An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering."

Worst of all to Nunberg is Google's adoption of the Book Industry Standards and Communications categories for Google Books, which he describes as a modern commercial invention used to sell books, rather than a scholarly system of classification like the Library of Congress subject headings: "For example the BISAC Juvenile Nonfiction subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, like New Baby, Skateboarding, and Deer, Moose, and Caribou. By contrast the Poetry subject heading has just 20 subheadings. That means that Bambi and Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Leopardi, Schiller, and Verlaine have to scrunch together in the single subheading reserved for Poetry/Continental European. In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore."

I think that Nunberg has a number of good points--point he gathers together to form a molehill, from which he conjures up a mountain. Google's metadata may be everything he says (and I think he is probably right) but how great a problem is that really? This scholar at least uses Google Books either 1) to locate a digital copy of a book I already know about, or 2) via a string of search terms. In the first case, it is not relevant to me that Google has classified Adventures of Huckleberry Finn under "wild plants" or whatever. I know perfectly well what it is, and just wanted to find a quote I remember.

In the second case, I might search for mentions of the Columbia River in books published before 1860. And suppose a faulty date in Google's database brings me to something written after 1860. So what? Surely when I click on the link and find myself reading Sherman Alexie instead of Lewis and Clark, I will notice the fact. (Actually I just did the search and on the first 10 pages of results I don't see any errors at all. Take that, Nunberg.)

So for which scholars exactly is Google Book Search a "disaster?" Nunberg cites "linguists and assorted wordinistas" who are "adrenalized" at the thought of data mining to "track the way happiness replaced felicity in the 17th century, quantify the rise and fall of propaganda or industrial democracy over the course of the 20th century, or pluck out all the Victorian novels that contain the phrase "gentle reader." But who does this? OK, I know that people do it, but most data mining of this type has always struck me as more of a parlour trick than actual scholarship.

The other thing Nunberg ignores is that metadata is not that hard to fix. Google already provides a "feedback" button on every virtual page so readers can report unreadable or missing pages. If we howl loud enough we could easily see similar feedback mechanisms on the "More book information" page so we could correct names and dates and categories.

Nunberg is absolutely correct to recognize the monumental importance to scholars of the Google Book Search project. It is vital that scholars take a critical stance that will push Google to improve the project and make it even more useful. His article is a valuable push in that direction.

UPDATE 9/3/09: Reader Ed points out that Geoff Nunberg also posted a nicely illustrated version of his article on the blog Language Log, and got a brief response in the comments from John Orwant, who manages the metadata at Google Books.

Alexander Ross Describes an Indian Breakfast

I just wanted to share this wonderful passage from Alexander Ross' account of the failed Astoria adventure (the attempt by John Jacob Astor to establish a string of fur trading posts across North America). This passage is from Ross' wonderfully entertaining account, Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River:

On the 17th, we were paddling along at daylight. On putting on shore to breakfast, four Indians on horseback joined us. The moment they alighted, one set about hobbling their horses, another to gather small sticks, a third to make a fire, and the fourth to catch fish. For this purpose, the fisherman cut off a bit of his leathern shirt, about the size of a small bean; then pulling out two or three hairs from his horse's tail for a line, tied the bit of leather to one end of it, in place of a hook or fly. Thus prepared, he entered the river a little way, sat down on a stone, and began throwing the small fish, three or four inches long, on shore, just as fast as he pleased; and while he was thus employed, another picked them up and threw them towards the fire, while the third stuck them up round it in a circle, on small sticks; and they were no sooner up than roasted. The fellows then sitting down, swallowed them—heads, tails, bones, guts, fins, and all, in no time, just as one would swallow the yolk of an egg. Now all this was but the work of a few minutes; and before our man had his kettle ready for the fire, the Indians were already eating their breakfast.

When the fish had hold of the bit of wet leather, or bait, their teeth got entangled in it, so as to give time to jerk them on shore, which was to us a new mode of angling; fire produced by the friction of two bits of wood was also a novelty; but what surprised us most of all, was the regularity with which they proceeded, and the quickness of the whole process, which actually took them less time to perform, than it has taken me to note it down.

Keep in mind that Ross was writing with quill and ink! Ross later married an Indian woman and his accounts of native people are often far more sympathetic than those of his white contemporaries. His Fur Hunters of the Far West is another great primary source for the early northwest.

[Picture of Alexander Ross take from this Manitoba Historical Society page, which has links to more of his writings.]

New Features on Google Books

Good news for users of Google Books--a passel of new features on Google Books have been released. The improvement range from better overview pages to browsable thumbnail to improved search within books (my favorite feature). There is even a nifty "page turn" animation.

For historian of 18th and 19th century America, Google Book Search is the most radical expansion of available research resources since--I don't know, since JSTOR. (Because of copyright it is much less useful to 20th century historians). Suddenly the number of period books at my disposal has gone from the few thousand at my library to a few hundred thousand--all of them downloadable and subject to keyword searches.

(If you use Google Books as much as I do, it pays to keep Inside Google Book Search, the official blog, in your RSS feed.)

Bring Me the Head of Stephen Burroughs!

[An exploration in Google Book Search]

Illustration from The American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany.

Some years back I published a little piece in The Historian about the life of Stephen Burroughs, infamous early national counterfeiter and con man and author of one of the great picaresque accounts of American Letters, Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs. As I described Burroughs in the article:

Outraged Pelhamite

Burroughs Memoirs lead the reader in a delightful romp through early America. Burroughs is expelled from Dartmouth for pranks, enlists as a sailor on a privateer in the Revolution, dabbles in counterfeiting, is imprisoned at and escapes from Castle Island prison in Boston Harbor, impersonates a minister, seduces school girls, and gets involved in an early censorship dispute on Long Island, and takes part in the Yazoo land fraud in Georgia. HisMemoirs were an early national best-seller, going through something like 30 editions before the Civil War.

The article was great fun to write and I have maintained an interest in the charming rogue ever since. So tonight Burroughs popped into my head and I suddenly thought--"Google Book Search!" When I wrote my article in 2002 Google Book Search did not exist. What could I find about Burroughs in Google Book Search?

As it turns out, a wealth of information that I had not uncovered for my article. There were of course multiple versions of the memoir. I also found mentions of Burroughs by other 19th century writers, most of them using Burrough's infamy to make a larger point. "I doubt if the best informed of those who have devoted their lives to Public Libraries have ever heard of Stephen Burroughs as being one of their founders,"wrote Charles Francis Adams in 1879, introducing a story about how Burroughs helped to start a library on Long Island. To Frederic Palmer Wells, author of a 1902 history of Newbury, Vermont, Burroughs' story "is the history of a woefully ill-spent life. But he was a man of talents, and his narrative possesses considerable historical value."

"We do not regard Stephen Burroughs as very high authority, in ethics; nevertheless, it is true that even Satan himself may be compelled to testify to the truth," writes a reforming busybody in The Moral Reformer and Teacher on the Human Constitution. The truth that Burroughs testifies, according to the unsigned author, is the deleterious effects of "novel reading" on the character of the young. He quotes Burroughs: "Reading and dwelling so much on those romantic scenes, at that early period of life when judgment was weak, was attended with very pernicious consequences, in the operations of my after conduct."

And there is so much more! Burroughs was often written up in the obscure 19th century histories of the little New England villages where he played his pranks and committed his thefts. He was regularly denounced by moral reformers as an example ofwhatever bad habit they are railing against. and by 1873 Burroughs merits a biographical entry in The American Cyclopaedia, which politely describes him as "an American adventurer." In all, a Google Book Search for "Stephen Burroughs" limited to books in full view produces 458 results, more than half of which are our Burroughs.

My favorite and least-expected discovery is this article from the 1841 volume of The American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany: "PHRENOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS AND CHARACTER OF STEPHEN BURROUGHS." Capitalizing on renewed public interest in Burroughs (who had died a year earlier), thePhrenological Journal works from a recent bust of Burroughs (pictured at the top of this post) to take measurements of his skull and analyze the man:

"The middle lobes of the brain, giving width between and above the ears, are very full, indicating great strength of the selfish propensities, which must have a marked influence . . . The crown of his head is very high, giving independence and determination of mind, joined with smaller Approbativeness and Conscientiousness, almost a total disregard for public opinion . . . His moral sentiments are mostly weak . . . "

Ya think? Below is Burrough's phrenological chart:













The topic of Stephen Burroughs reveals some of the power of Google Book Search. The bust of Burroughs used as in illustration in thePhrenological Journal to my knowledge no longer exists and the illustration here has not been seen by modern Burroughs scholars. The obscure town histories mostly draw their Burroughs information from the Memoirs, but many contain additional details about the man, and towns he moved through. And the frequent references to Burroughs in 19th century proscriptive literature merit an essay of their own. Google Book Search enables new kinds of scholarship.