I’ll admit it. I was duped.
But then I started to think about why I was duped. It wasn’t so much the information, because obviously the students did an excellent job researching to support their hoax, it was how the information was delivered to me. In the comments section of the edwired.org entry someone articulated what I could not…trust networks. The source of information matters a great deal. I’m a skeptical person by nature but the fact that Dr. LMB assigned this reading and it was on our syllabus I automatically thought this was legitimate.
I think the ethical dilemmas The Last American Pirate project raises are relevant and extremely important to the Public History field, especially when trying to define the practice of public history.