It's called Historiography - applying ruthless logic in the authenticating of so-called history, and evaluating the methods by which it has been reported and assembled.
Two of our critics on this page give conflicting verdicts about the well-known story of Lincoln's haunting dream, shortly before his death: that he heard the sound of weeping and saw a coffin guarded by a soldier who told him the president had been assassinated. One of them declares that no mention was made of any of this until twenty years afterwards, while the other repeats the standard version, apparently well-confirmed, that he spoke about it to colleagues in the few days' interval before the fatal theatre-visit.
Certain variations have somewhat blurred the Yes/No validity of the tale. It needs to be separated-out from the other (recurring) dream he had about travelling in a boat towards 'a vague, indefinite shore', which always left him feeling disturbed and distracted. Then we hear that his wife Mary appeared to have had a dream of foreboding at the same time, and was keen to stay at home on that evening, though we know that she was liable to nag him regularly throughout their marriage. As for the other psychic phenomena linked to the murder, reported from all over America, it is reasonable to treat these with scepticism, knowing the urge to fabricate legends in the wake of a catastrophe.
This makes for a somewhat untypical episode of OSB, not strictly in series (and the last minutes are affected by poor audio recording); also my YouTube upload at 20 minutes is ten minutes shorter than the running-time quoted by IMDb, so I may have missed some important clues. But it remains an interesting sidelight on America's supreme national tragedy.
Two of our critics on this page give conflicting verdicts about the well-known story of Lincoln's haunting dream, shortly before his death: that he heard the sound of weeping and saw a coffin guarded by a soldier who told him the president had been assassinated. One of them declares that no mention was made of any of this until twenty years afterwards, while the other repeats the standard version, apparently well-confirmed, that he spoke about it to colleagues in the few days' interval before the fatal theatre-visit.
Certain variations have somewhat blurred the Yes/No validity of the tale. It needs to be separated-out from the other (recurring) dream he had about travelling in a boat towards 'a vague, indefinite shore', which always left him feeling disturbed and distracted. Then we hear that his wife Mary appeared to have had a dream of foreboding at the same time, and was keen to stay at home on that evening, though we know that she was liable to nag him regularly throughout their marriage. As for the other psychic phenomena linked to the murder, reported from all over America, it is reasonable to treat these with scepticism, knowing the urge to fabricate legends in the wake of a catastrophe.
This makes for a somewhat untypical episode of OSB, not strictly in series (and the last minutes are affected by poor audio recording); also my YouTube upload at 20 minutes is ten minutes shorter than the running-time quoted by IMDb, so I may have missed some important clues. But it remains an interesting sidelight on America's supreme national tragedy.