@BurnNewHistoryBooks

When I was in 10th grade, almost 50 years ago, I wrote a research paper about the bizarre relationship between Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun. Because it was such an usual topic, I had to use inter-library loan to get the books I wanted to use. In those days, it was a somewhat drawn out process to get your source materials. At any rate, the books took longer to get than had I just gone with the materials in the high school and/or local libraries. So my paper was late. But unlike many of my cohorts, I, at least, had actually read my sources, not merely paraphrased/summarized encyclopedia entries.

I wrote that paper on a manual typewriter, complete with Turabian citations and carefully executed erasures for my typos. In a word, it was flawless.

My history teacher accepted the late paper as though it were a personal favor in doing so. And of course, I could expect that I would get points off for lateness. Later, he kept me after class to question not the veracity of my claims, but rather, whether I had plagiarized. Apparently, it was so well-written that he was having difficulty believing a sophomore high school student had written it. Being somewhat, but not terribly, insulted, I told him that I'm a good writer, but that he would have no way of knowing that, given that he had not previously assigned any writing. I pointed out that thus far, his assessments had been mere multiple-choice quizzes which required only the memorization of information, such as the year in which Columbus had sailed the ocean blue, as opposed to assigning topics which required critical thinking skills, such as "refute or negate the claim, using textual evidence, as to whether Leif Erikson had actually been the first to discover the New World."

He stood there, mouth agape. And then dismissed me, without even giving me a pass for my next class, for which I was already late. In truth, figuring I was already late, I probably stopped in the bathroom to sneak a few drags of a cigarette prior to going to the next class, kek.

He returned my paper a few days later with no comments or corrections, just a big fat red A+ on the title page. That was it. And he never bothered me again, although he did begin to include short prompts on his quizzes which required written responses, usually adding up to 50% of that quiz grade, which I was easily able to bullshit my way through. For example: "Describe the life of an indentured servant during the American Colonial period." I mean all one has to do to effectively answer a question like that is to know the meaning of the phrase, "indentured servant." Still, he was trying.

But back to the Adolph Hitler/Eva Braun research paper: While I have long since lost or discarded it, and could not even begin to recall the titles of the sources I used, I can attest with certainty, ALL of my sources concurred:

Eva Braun was the niece of Adolph Hitler.

Surely, you, as someone who uses the moniker, "BurnNewHistoryBooks," would understand that.

o7