The Missouri in the Civil War Message Board

Re: Confederate Partisan Rangers

No offense intended to the authors/historians you mention but I don't think secondary sources or the number of secondary sources is part of the equation. The number of authors that see it one way or another is sufficient for the casual student of history but those in this thread on Bloody Bill are far beyond that. The critical information is from primary sources and apparently there are many of them as well as confusing fragments and clues. Pulling together as many of these as possible, making a discretionary judgment on each as to reliability, and developing some opinion is a far superior method than comparison of how many authors think one way or another.

On this topic in general, I see different persons with their sub-sets of information bickering about who has the better sub-set instead of an unbiased survey of all available information.

I live in Oklahoma so I know from experience that authors and historians should be viewed with a healthly amount of skepticism.

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Re: Confederate Partisan Rangers