Usually I would never lead a reader to Wiki as it is chock full of what researchers call "Entertainment Tonight History". This article, however, took some reading and checking of footnotes and it seems to have jumped through a lot of the hoops that make for good historical research.
There is a thing called "primary sources" meaning that the trail back in history comes to an end at the event itself and all the rest of it is just stuff written about it. An event happens but one time. Everything else is just stuff written about it that is written about the writing about the event. So you look, as an historian, for the Incunabulum or ""the earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything"...the first account, the first writing about something, the eyewitness or the speech or document read, performed, whatever - the primary source.
A lot of general definitions simply say anything printed (not written by hand) before 1501 so as to mean that the "first book in type of anything" is an incunabulum.....musicologists of course disagree for any number of reasons not the least of which is music in print is unlike words. Manuscripts were freely copied and disseminated and how it was bound up in a
When I look at our President re-writing history or what he said 10 minutes ago, what he meant to say or what his hyperbole really means; well. Happily we live in an age that produces presidential incunabula that can be recorded and with this god-awful liar and fabricator historians will go nuts finding the original sources.
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