What This Course Could Not Source: The Disclosure Entry (W-2)

The idea

A course built on a named anchor and named witnesses owes the learner a list of what it could not find in any of them, and this entry is that list. The following names appear in the course only here or as marked disclosures, never taught as facts, because neither the anchor, nor the four witness texts, nor a located primary document carries them: the Dutch regents and the De Witts, whose republic the course teaches through William III instead; the Reform Act of eighteen sixty-seven, the second British franchise, taught by its neighbors of eighteen thirty-two and eighteen eighty-four's absence alike; Magenta and Solferino, the battles of eighteen fifty-nine, taught by their year; Königgrätz, or Sadowa, the battle of eighteen sixty-six, taught by its year; Boulanger, the general of the Third Republic's crisis, taught as a general unnamed; Nietzsche and Einstein, absent from every source, so that the century's turn is taught through Freud; Planck, Röntgen and Bergson, likewise; Livingstone, the missionary explorer; Brusilov, whose offensive of nineteen sixteen the anchor describes without his name; Erzberger, who signed the armistice, taught as the delegation's leader; Kronstadt, the sailors' rising of nineteen twenty-one; Matteotti, the deputy Mussolini's men murdered, taught as a deputy unnamed; the Lateran Accords of nineteen twenty-nine; Watson and Crick, whose double helix is taught as DNA in fifty-three; Beethoven; the asiento; and Mesmer. Beside them stand the items the course teaches from the standard record and says so: Britain's entry to the Community in nineteen seventy-three and the enlargement of two thousand four, the Constituent Assembly's dispersal, the expulsions' scale, Britain's franchise of nineteen twenty-eight, and the recognition of the Soviet Union in nineteen twenty-four. Every one of these is exam-plausible, and a learner who meets one on the exam should treat it as a name the course chose not to invent a source for. The reason is the course's rule: a fact is voiced only when a source on disk carries it, and the source is named. The rule cost these names; it bought every other claim in five hundred eighty-four entries its citation.