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- Did Custer really make a last stand? Who was the real
William Shakespeare? Was there a Pope Joan? How did the stones get to Stonehenge?
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- Davy Crockett and Amelia Earhart are not alive and well
on Atlantis. Or are they?
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- Television has transformed the historical mystery into
a low-budget documentary full of hokey re-enactments and spooky music.
Fat paperback bestsellers promise the secrets of the ancientsaliens, Atlanteans
(as in Atlantis residents), or the Freemasons, depending on the book.
For those who get their unsolved history from popular culture, every scientific
answer is followed by a portentous ". . . or is it?" and the
answer of choice is whatever's weirdest.
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- The mysteries that occupy historians, both professional
and amateur, are rarely so cinematic. Real historical detectives are
more concerned with the gritty, hairsplitting details of history. Even
searching for Atlantis, as grand and quixotic as that may be, comes down
to pragmatic concerns like raising funds and chartering submarines. There's
paperwork to be handled, red tape to slog through, and hate mail to answer.
Sometimes the results will have echoing ramifications, as in the case of
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but more often than not, the mysteries
people care most about don't really matter all that much. "I don't
think this has any redeeming social significance," says Tom King,
an archaeologist searching for Amelia Earhart. "It's an intellectually
engaging form of recreation." In other words, it's a mystery that
can't be put down.
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- If Earhart hadn't disappeared, she'd be far less interesting.
She wouldn't have been captured by the Japanese or frolicked on an idyllic
tropical island. Conventional wisdom says she ran out of fuel and crashed
into the Pacific Ocean.
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- Finding her earthly remains is the full-time job of Ric
Gillespie and Pat Thrasher of the International Group for Historic Aircraft
Recovery (TIGHAR), the nonprofit organization the couple founded 15 years
ago to search for historic plane wrecks. Their theory is hardly romantic:
Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landed on the Pacific island of Nikumaroro
(it would have been in the right place when they ran low on fuel), then
died of disease or starvation. Thrasher and Gillespie, a former aviation
insurance accident investigator, work out of a home office in Wilmington,
Del., packed with Ameliana.
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- The results of four journeys to Nikumaroro and constant
archive mining by TIGHAR members are tantalizing but inconclusive. There
are the crumbling fragments of an Amelia-size woman's shoe, a sheet of
aluminum that could be from her Lockheed Electra if only the rivet pattern
were different, and a paper trail documenting bones found on the island
in 1940. Gillespie is now an expert in bizarre esoterica: What he can
tell you about 1930s Cat's Paw women's replacement heels could fill
a book. The expeditions are gruelingGillespie lost his corneas to equatorial
sunlightbut Earhart is the sexy poster girl that keeps TIGHAR's 800-odd
dues-paying members happy. And it has become a matter of pride. "There's
just a chance we can come up with hard evidence," he says. The dream
find is an "any-idiot artifact"something any idiot could tell
is hers, like a plane part with a serial number or a tooth packed with
nice, DNA-rich pulp.
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- Lincoln's prose? If TIGHAR's work seems tedious, well,
it often is. Most historians endure their share of tedium. Michael Burlingame,
a professor of history at Connecticut College and an Abraham Lincoln biographer,
spent months unraveling the authorship of the elusive "Bixby letter"literally
word by word. On learning that Boston widow Lydia Bixby had lost all five
of her sons in the war, Lincoln ostensibly sent her a brief but exquisite
letter of consolation. It extolled, among other virtues, "the solemn
pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the
altar of Freedom." The 1864 letter, considered by Lincoln scholars
to be a masterpiece on par with the Gettysburg Address, attained even greater
fame when it was read at the start of the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.
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- But Lincoln probably didn't write the letterhis secretary,
John Hay, did, says Burlingame. And Bixby was a liar (only two of her
five sons died in the war), a Southern sympathizer, and the mistress of
a whorehouse. Tradition says she loathed Lincoln and tore up the letter.
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- The historian compared each word in the letter with
the words in a database of Lincoln's writings. Then he did the same for
Hay, but without a computer: He "read everything John Hay ever wrote."
Words used often in Hay's writings, like "beguile" (at least
30 times), but nowhere in Lincoln's, were clues. And he found a copy
of the letter pasted in a scrapbook Hay kept of his media mentions.
"I've been like a dog with a bone on this one. I knew controversy
existed, but I never thought it was something I'd spend much time on,"
he says.
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- Burlingame continues to pursue Lincoln arcana. He's
now using similar stylistic analysis to find anonymous satirical newspaper
articles that Lincoln wrote when he was a journalist in his youth. "It's
kind of a minor footnote," he says. "But I love detective work
like this."
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- Burlingame's theory didn't cause an outcry or damage
Lincoln's literary reputationafter all, he still wrote the Gettysburg
Address. But historians can and do strike nerves when they challenge cherished
myths. Since its translation into English in 1975, an account of Mexico's
1836 campaign in Texas has caused outrage and anxiety among worshipers
of Davy Crockett. The account, by Mexican Army officer José Enrique
de la Peña, says that Crockett did not die fighting on the ramparts
of the Alamo but was executed on the order of Mexican Gen. Antonio López
de Santa Anna. "How dare you degrade Davy Crockett? . . . This is
one of the Communists' plans to degrade our heroes. He's still king of
the wild frontier," wrote a fan to Dan Kilgore, whose 1978 book,
How Did Davy Die?, gave credence to the theory.
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- Before the 1950s Disney tv show seared Crockett's macho
death into millions of baby boomer brains, there was no debate, says Don
Carleton, director of the Center for American History at the University
of Texas-Austin, which owns the de la Peña document. Scholars are
more interested in the evolution of Alamo history than in the specifics
of Crockett's death. Even the mystery of why people care about the mystery
is subject to studyBrian Huberman, a professor of art and art history at
Rice University in Houston, just wrapped a documentary on the topic.
"What this whole controversy has done is show the way in which history
works, in the sense that it has to be revitalized regularly for each
generation," he says.
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- The debate was revitalized in 1994, when New York City
firefighter Bill Groneman wrote Defense of a Legend. The book asserted,
based on stylistic, factual, and other inconsistencies, that the de la
Peña account was fake. Scholars fussed and fumed, and Groneman
was accused of being an obsessive fan unable to accept his hero's ignoble
death. "Don't write that I'm obsessed!" he says. (And his heroes
are his father and John Steinbecknot Crockett.) Despite the flak, Groneman
enjoys his role in the controversy. "I don't really feel like sitting
back and letting someone else get the last word."
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- Guesswork. The University of Texas-Austin is now testing
the manuscript for authenticity anyway. But even if the paper and ink
are the right age, de la Peña might have liedit would have behooved
him to make Santa Anna, who lost the war in Texas, look incompetent. "People
want clear-cut answers," says Carleton. "But history's really
messy."
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- The story of Atlantis makes de la Peña's account
look neat and tidy. The destruction of the island is based solely on a
Platonic account of a utopia gone bad. Most scholars think it's a fable.
Yet the search for Atlantis is the historical mystery cottage industry.
There are hundreds of books on the subject, and it's been "found"
in dozens of locations.
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- Scientists allow that Plato could have been inspired
by the Minoan civilization of Crete, which declined rapidly after a nearby
volcanic eruption. The rest, most say, is hooey. Ken Feder, professor
of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University and author of
Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, surveys college students every few years,
and the results are always the same: About 1 in 3 believes in Atlantis.
The grand unification theories that cluster around Atlantis beliefsthat
superhuman or extraterrestrial Atlanteans seeded civilization and built
the Great Pyramids and everything elseannoy him. "Was there nothing
interesting in the past?" asks Feder. "You look at a place
like Stonehenge or Gizathe beauty and awe and majesty of those placesthere,
but it's entirely human."
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- So is the urge to keep looking for something that can
never be found. Most determined are the Bimini searchers, spending copious
amounts of their own money and vacation time on their quest. (Psychic
Edgar Cayce once predicted that Atlantis would be found in the Bahamas,
off the coast of Bimini.) "People say, 'No, you'll never find anything,'
but that feels like a really dogmatic approach," says Douglas Richards,
a veteran of several Bimini expeditions. Joan Hanley, a retired elementary
school principal who has led seven Bimini missions since 1989, cites
evidence such as shark- and cat-shaped mounds and place names using the
letters "ATL." But there's nothing conclusive. There probably
never will be. But even if not, it's fun, says Richards. "It's much
more interesting than diving to look for fish."
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