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O.T. Interesting History Lesson
On 28 Feb 2004 17:47:21 GMT, (RGrew176) wrote:
VERY INTERESTING HISTORY LESSON
At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution. In
1787, Alexander Tyler - a Scottish history professor at the University of
Edinborough - had this to say about "The Fall of the Athenian Republic" some
2,000 years prior:
*yawn*
This is the same urband legend that has been circulating since 2000 and has been
soundly debunked.
From snopes.com, in part:
Tyler's book, Universal history, from the creation of the world to the
beginning of the eighteenth century, is available for viewing and
searching on-line. The complete text was searched for each of the
following phrases:
Athenian Republic
democracy
generous gifts
public treasury
loose fiscal
fiscal
bondage
200 years
two hundred years
spiritual faith
In no case was text identified that was remotely similar in words or
intent to the alleged Tytler quote.
4. Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University is not the source of any
of the statistics or the text attributed to him. Professor Olson was
contacted (by me) via e-mail, and he confirmed that he had no authorship
or involvement in this matter. And, as Fayette Citizen editor Dave
Hamrick wrote back in January 2001:
I really enjoyed one recent message that was circulated extremely
widely, at least among conservatives. It gave several interesting
"facts" supposedly compiled by statisticians and political scientists
about the counties across the nation that voted for George Bush and the
ones that voted for Al Gore in the recent election.
Supposedly, the people in the counties for Bush had more education, more
income, ad infinitum, than the counties for Gore.
I didn't have time to check them all out, but I was curious about one
item in particular... the contention that the murder rate in the Gore
counties was about a billion times higher than in the Bush counties.
This was attributed to a Professor Joseph Olson at the Hamline
University School of Law. I never heard of such a university, but went
online and found it. And Prof. Olson does exist.
"Now I'm getting somewhere," I thought.
But in response to my e-mail, Olson said the "research" was attributed
to him erroneously. He said it came from a Sheriff Jay Printz in
Montana. I e-mailed Sheriff Printz, and guess what? He didn't do the
research either, and didn't remember who had e-mailed it to him.
In other words, he got the same legend e-mailed to him and passed it on
to Olson without checking it out, and when Olson passed it on, someone
thought it sounded better if a law professor had done the research, and
so it grew.
Who knows where it originally came from, but it's just not true.
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