Regular readers of this blog will know that not long ago I taught a class called Lying About the Past in which my students created a fictitious historical figure — Edward Owens, the “last American pirate.” That class generated a fair amount of comment in the blogosphere and has resulted in some very interesting conversations…
Tag: Hoaxes
Really? Really, Really?
How many “reallys” does it take Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to describe how he feels about Edward Owens? Three. In an interview on a recent edition of the podcast Tech Therapy, Wales (who admitted up front he hadn’t heard of the work my students had done), said, “Things like that really, really, really annoy me.”…
Was the Last American Pirate ‘Authentic’?
Readers of this blog know the story of Edward Owens–the “Last American Pirate“–fairly well by now. Owens, a creation of my students in the course Lying About the Past, lives on, but in the way of all things in the academic world, I have managed to morph him from a fun classroom project into a…
Pirates on YouTube
In what I hope will be my last post on my hoax course (because the criticisms from certain quarters have become repetitive), I want to pass along a link to a YouTube video about our course produced by Jerry Griffith, a local videographer and spouse of one of our grad students here at Mason. The…