History of the United States I / Unit 13 USH1 1861 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Two Versions of One Speech
The idea
The speech survives in two published versions and they are not the same. Reverend Marius Robinson published a transcription in the Anti-Slavery Bugle in eighteen fifty-one, the year it was delivered. Frances Dana Gage published a different version in the Anti-Slavery Standard in eighteen sixty-three, twelve years later, during the Civil War. The famous refrain by which the speech is now known belongs to the later of the two versions.
In practice
The best-known sentence in nineteenth-century American women's history appearing first in a text published twelve years after the event.
Where people slip
This is the payoff of Unit 02 entry 0155, where the course first taught reading a document against its author's motive. Apply the same method here and ask what each version was for. Robinson was reporting a convention for readers who might have attended it. Gage was writing during a war over slavery, for readers who needed a symbol. Neither is necessarily dishonest and they cannot both be verbatim. The honest position is the anchor's, which is to record both and attribute each.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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