“Journalism is the first rough draft of history.” That comes from the Washington Post.
A recent New York Times story tells us that journalism can be something entirely different. It can tell us when history is revised. The recent story was about lynching. It was new to me and, I expect, new to almost all its readers.
According to the story “From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.”
Mind bending. The history of violence in the United States is worse than we thought. We learn about new victims. We learn about new perpetrators.