The Italian Hall Tragedy

I apologize: I have not been updating this site all that much lately. There were several reasons (“excuses!”) for this, among them: My Douglass Houghton book has just come out. Also, for a week or two I could not access this site. I though the entire site was down. Not sure what was happening there.

However, I feel the need to address a couple of things. Some people have pointed out to me that there is a movement among some (a very small number, clearly) writers of history to make the argument that there either was no cry of Fire at the Italian Hall, or that if there was, we could never prove it.

It’s an odd argument to make. There was overwhelming evidence that there WAS a cry of Fire. What we don’t know is WHO cried Fire or WHY.  Kind of like the Kennedy Assassination: Argue all you want about who shot the man; don’t deny that he was shot. Or the Titanic: How many of the survivors actually saw the iceberg the boat hit? Does anyone want to argue there was no iceberg?

I think these revisionist historians (and that’s what they are — the cry of Fire was one of the things that has been consistently correct all these years) simply want to make the issue of what we don’t know (who cried Fire) to encompass the whole story. Why? I don’t know. That’s not history. Trying to figure out why “historians” ignore facts and solid research is a question for psychologists.

Steve