I've got a formula I'm looking for-
Weird news stories from after 9/11 but before 2015 that were obsessed over by the media and broadcast far and wide.
Especially stories which have obviously false details at their heart, and extraneous numbers that get repeated ad nauseum from source to source.
Ideas I've had so far-
- The disappearance of Gov. Mark Sandford- the SC governor disappeared for 6 days before being found in Argentina. I remember a lot of public speculation at the time that he was connected to sex rings:
https://gawker.com/5301923/the-mark-sanford-disappearance-gets-even-weirder
- The Tuam babies- a crazy story from 2014 where an orphanage in Ireland supposed buried 800 babies in a septic tank over the course of a few decades. This was the first "fake news" I was ever aware of- before Trump popularized the term- because it is literally impossible. How big is a septic tank? How did they get the body parts to flush? Were the nuns renting backhoes and digging it up all the time?
It was proven false almost immediately, but in Googling I found a NYT article from Jan. 21st of this year still referencing it as factual. Whatever this is communicating is still relevant in the U.S. at least.
There have to be a million suggestions- let 'em rip! I'm ready to research!
You know, I pulled something similar about Sandy Hook back then at a party. I got upset that other people were taking about crisis actors.
I know basically nothing about that incident to this day. Why did I react that way? I still consumed mass market media and I was conditioned to.
Don't bypass personal testimony about these events. Had a teacher who was first in at one of the death camps. Have listen to hours of recorded testimony of survivors and talked to perhaps 40 to 50 actual survivors and to many of survivor's children.
My husband is a life long Civil War buff. He reads journals and letter collections and we've visited battlefields and prison camps from PA to Georgia.
This I am sure is right...after years of singular devotion to the subject, my husband insists that the CW wasn't about slavery in the South and his most admired commanders for skill and character are Stonewall and Lee.
I am not discouraging you at all. History is fascinating.
I grew up in Utah and was taught the history according to the church even in history classes. Then I relearned it via personal journals and rabbit holes I found on the internet. The history i was taught was a fantasy.
It's pretty commonly taught in colleges that Civil War was fought because of competing economic systems and the industrial revolution. Slavery was an aspect of that that became more and more central as the war went on, but it did not cause the war.