The timeline doesn't match up here. We're told that historian Stefan Lorant was doing his research in the 1950s. Then we're told that he checked with Teddy Roosevelt's wife and got her confirmation that one of the children in the window was Teddy Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was married twice, and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, died in 1884, so it's not her. But his second wife, Edith Carow, died in 1948, at age 87. So unless Lorant interviewed her posthumously, via seance, it can't be her, either.
Our best hope of rescuing this anecdote is to assume that Lorant's research happened earlier (1940s?) while Edith Carow Roosevelt was still alive. But she would have been just three years old at the time of Lincoln's funeral, and while her family and the Roosevelt's family socialized together, even her quoted reminiscence is less than definitive about whether that's actually TR.
Possible? Sure. Probable? Maybe. 100% verified? No way.
From what's presented to us, this sounds like a cool legend
Mordisquitos 20 hours ago [-]
The blog article links Stefan Lorant's own recollection of the event, but the link is broken (fair enough, the blog entry is from 2010). Fortunately though, the link is archived on the Wayback Machine [0], where we can see it is an article from American Heritage, June 1955.
In the linked article Lorent does not specify when exactly he interviewed Edith Carrow Roosevelt, but I think it is fair to assume that the reference to "in the 1950s" is an assumption made by the author of the blog based on when the article was published, and does not cast any doubt on the timeline.
> But she would have been just three years old at the time of Lincoln's funeral, and while her family and the Roosevelt's family socialized together, even her quoted reminiscence is less than definitive about whether that's actually TR.
While she might not have direct memory of the event, it would not be unheard of for older relatives to explain the picture to her when she was older. Just because she doesn't remember it directly does not automatically make the story of the picture untrue.
saalweachter 16 hours ago [-]
So her recollection is that she was in the house to view Lincoln's funeral procession. She didn't, because she was three and got scared, but it was still an event she was a part of.
Even if she didn't remember whether Teddy was standing at that window at that time, she probably knew that she at Teddy and his brother were at the mansion for the event.
So we have the Roosevelt mansion, knowledge that not many boys would have been allowed to be in that window, and confirmation that Teddy Roosevelt was there watching at that time.
rayiner 8 hours ago [-]
> While she might not have direct memory of the event, it would not be unheard of for older relatives to explain the picture to her when she was older. Just because she doesn't remember it directly does not automatically make the story of the picture untrue.
I have a memory of having a tantrum at the Taj Mahal which can't be a real memory because I would have been 3 at the time. But it definitely h appened. It's a reconstructed memory from having seen a photo my dad took from the trip and my dad telling me about it.
WalterBright 15 hours ago [-]
I have a few vague memories of being 3. I expect if something dramatic had happened, I'd remember that.
lostlogin 7 hours ago [-]
I can guarantee that something dramatic happened, based on observing a few 3 year olds.
rootusrootus 20 hours ago [-]
This came up in a Reddit discussion a while back. Snopes has an article about it, in which they quote a source which says that the actual interview happened in 1948.
The past is so much closer than you think. We are only three human lifetimes away from the American Revolution. The last living children of American slaves were around into the 2010s. Back to Teddy, the last living person who could have met him was still around in the 2000s as well, meaning in your lifetime you could have talked to someone who knew someone who saw Abe Lincoln alive.
rootusrootus 19 hours ago [-]
Indeed this is one of the things I most enjoyed when I first visited DC, the realization of just how recent these historical events really were. Standing on a battlefield in Gettysburg and thinking "This all happened in the 1860s, barely more than 100 years before I was born. I have relatives who lived in this area at that time, and only a few generations back."
When I talk to young people today, and realize how little they know about people and events that were major news when I was young, I understand how it happens. Even for me WW2 is just something from the history books, and yet it concluded just ~30 years before I was born. 30 years before today was 1996.
Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. Just imagine what it would be like today if we could see videos of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, etc. Might knock the mythology down a peg or two, though.
lukan 16 hours ago [-]
"Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. "
The question will be at some point, will they be able to tell it apart from AI generated fake ones? (and will they care?)
Already now youtube recommends me some obvious AI generated garbage as WW2 documentations.
And that was just garbage generated for attention (ad money).
Once big actors with money want to rewrite history and flood the web with fake images to spread certain narratives, then new challenges will arise.
I hope enough people still care about facts and guard them.
rootusrootus 15 hours ago [-]
That's a good point. When I wrote my comment only my optimistic side was engaged ;-). The pessimistic side shares your concerns. I hope that we develop some technologically diffult-to-overcome solutions for preserving the integrity of media. Like methods for cryptographically signing raw content from a digital camera that guarantees it was produced by that hardware. Not a panacea, but a step in the right direction I think.
cucumber3732842 15 hours ago [-]
It's the "if you think the news is all lies, bullshit and agendas you should see the history books" meme.
Lord knows what falsehoods of today will become the official record of tomorrow never mind what lies of the past we just repeat because they're what got written down.
There is an anecdote a regarding Napoleon and Bertrand Russell. One lifespan can be relatively close to two events that an are seemingly far apart.
Bertrand Russell was raised by his grandparents. His grandfather met Napoleon when Napoleon was imprisoned in Elba, and talked about this with Bertrand.
Bertrand was alive to watch the moon landing on TV.
That's a pretty extreme case that shifts the data by 70 years.
Xcelerate 17 hours ago [-]
Weird thought: someone born in the 1800s was (most likely) alive when the first transformer model ran.
Emma Morano died April 15, 2017, the NIPS submission deadline for "Attention Is All You Need" was May 19, and a Wired article indicates they were testing models for quite a few weeks before then.
WalterBright 15 hours ago [-]
The last Civil War soldier died in 1956.
jzl 7 hours ago [-]
Yep, my mom (still alive) remembers seeing many interviews with Civil War vets when she was a kid in the 40's.
I've had conversations with people born in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries!
alanbernstein 18 hours ago [-]
And yet, anything beyond one lifetime is entirely out of reach...
bena 19 hours ago [-]
Lincoln died in 1865. If you were born in the 50s, there’s a chance. But most people don’t live to 90.
For me, that person would be 115 when I was born for our lives to overlap.
Yes, history is closer than we think, but it still moves on
totalmarkdown 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
xrd 21 hours ago [-]
When I hear the name Lincoln now, I can't help but think of the fake Letterboxd review of Melania: "the worst experience I've had at a theatre." By Abraham Lincoln.
WalterBright 15 hours ago [-]
too soon?
20 hours ago [-]
MORPHOICES 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
triceratops 21 hours ago [-]
Tl;dr a picture in which a historian spotted 7-year old Teddy Roosevelt watching Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession from the window of his grandfather's house in New York. Very cool story!
jej_FundAlign 18 hours ago [-]
OK, thats enough proof for me that we are in a simulation. LOL
anigbrowl 17 hours ago [-]
This image shows a close-up of the second story window (Courtesy the New York Times)
A 'close up' that is smaller and lower resolution than the main photo on the article, which is courtesy of the NY public library. NY Times isn't mentioned in the text at all. Is this entire article an LLM hallucination?
rootusrootus 17 hours ago [-]
> Is this entire article an LLM hallucination?
An article at the National Archives written in 2010? That would be remarkable.
landl0rd 17 hours ago [-]
It dates to 2010. It's not any part LLM hallucination.
Rendered at 12:04:33 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
Roosevelt was married twice, and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, died in 1884, so it's not her. But his second wife, Edith Carow, died in 1948, at age 87. So unless Lorant interviewed her posthumously, via seance, it can't be her, either.
Our best hope of rescuing this anecdote is to assume that Lorant's research happened earlier (1940s?) while Edith Carow Roosevelt was still alive. But she would have been just three years old at the time of Lincoln's funeral, and while her family and the Roosevelt's family socialized together, even her quoted reminiscence is less than definitive about whether that's actually TR.
Possible? Sure. Probable? Maybe. 100% verified? No way.
From what's presented to us, this sounds like a cool legend
In the linked article Lorent does not specify when exactly he interviewed Edith Carrow Roosevelt, but I think it is fair to assume that the reference to "in the 1950s" is an assumption made by the author of the blog based on when the article was published, and does not cast any doubt on the timeline.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060507100625/http://www.americ...
https://transfer.it/t/wCLoeh9XEZrZ
While she might not have direct memory of the event, it would not be unheard of for older relatives to explain the picture to her when she was older. Just because she doesn't remember it directly does not automatically make the story of the picture untrue.
Even if she didn't remember whether Teddy was standing at that window at that time, she probably knew that she at Teddy and his brother were at the mansion for the event.
So we have the Roosevelt mansion, knowledge that not many boys would have been allowed to be in that window, and confirmation that Teddy Roosevelt was there watching at that time.
I have a memory of having a tantrum at the Taj Mahal which can't be a real memory because I would have been 3 at the time. But it definitely h appened. It's a reconstructed memory from having seen a photo my dad took from the trip and my dad telling me about it.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/roosevelt-lincoln-funeral/
https://web.archive.org/web/20090107061334/http://www.americ...
Apparently she was 4 at the time and lived next door:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Roosevelt#Childhood
Also, a young Bill Clinton shaking JFK's hand. These sort of baton-passing moments are interesting to see from all sides.
It came with a card full of abe lincoln vs john f kennedy coincidences.
(I wonder if I still have it somewhere?)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lincoln+kennedy+penny+card&iar=ima...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coinci...
When I talk to young people today, and realize how little they know about people and events that were major news when I was young, I understand how it happens. Even for me WW2 is just something from the history books, and yet it concluded just ~30 years before I was born. 30 years before today was 1996.
Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. Just imagine what it would be like today if we could see videos of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, etc. Might knock the mythology down a peg or two, though.
The question will be at some point, will they be able to tell it apart from AI generated fake ones? (and will they care?)
Already now youtube recommends me some obvious AI generated garbage as WW2 documentations. And that was just garbage generated for attention (ad money). Once big actors with money want to rewrite history and flood the web with fake images to spread certain narratives, then new challenges will arise.
I hope enough people still care about facts and guard them.
Lord knows what falsehoods of today will become the official record of tomorrow never mind what lies of the past we just repeat because they're what got written down.
Bertrand Russell was raised by his grandparents. His grandfather met Napoleon when Napoleon was imprisoned in Elba, and talked about this with Bertrand.
Bertrand was alive to watch the moon landing on TV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4OXtO92x5KA
I think his post that really got me was the 2021 headline, The Last Documented Widow of a Civil War Veteran Has Died: https://kottke.org/21/01/the-last-documented-widow-of-a-civi...
Emma Morano died April 15, 2017, the NIPS submission deadline for "Attention Is All You Need" was May 19, and a Wired article indicates they were testing models for quite a few weeks before then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4
For me, that person would be 115 when I was born for our lives to overlap.
Yes, history is closer than we think, but it still moves on
A 'close up' that is smaller and lower resolution than the main photo on the article, which is courtesy of the NY public library. NY Times isn't mentioned in the text at all. Is this entire article an LLM hallucination?
An article at the National Archives written in 2010? That would be remarkable.