User talk:Bully84

Hi Bully84, and Please excuse this intrusion as you have been around a bit already but if no one has said it before: Welcome to Wikipedia!

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Fourth of July in Vicksburg

Regarding the note about the bottom of the article about Vicksburg's celebration of the Fourth of July, Ken Burns cited in his documentary, that the Fourth was not celebrated until 1944. See Link : http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/war/facts.html Bully84 (talk) 17:59, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Burns is not considered a very scholarly source, but what point are you trying to make? The article says that it was not celebrated until World War II and that a historian of the Vicksburg campaign indicates that this is more a matter of trying to compare public with private celebrations. Hal Jespersen (talk) 18:36, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Vicksburg and the Fourth of July

The point I am trying to make is that it appears to me that the text on the page along with the annotation, makes it look like the story that Vicksburg did not celebrate the Fourth of July is merely the stuff of legend, and my opinion is that it is factual. As for your comment regarding Ken Burns, I did not realize that Burns was not considered a scholarly source. However, there are sources other than Burns on the Internet, that also cite this as a fact. Aside from all of that, my late father was born and raised in Vicksburg. My mother, who is still living, visited his family there early one July shortly after they were married in 1943. Many times in my early adulthood, she relayed a rather humorous story how she found out that the Fourth was not to be celebrated there....and this was long before I had ever heard of Ken Burns. Bully84 (talk) 23:57, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The way the article is worded is a balance (what Wikipedia calls neutral point of view) between those sources that claim it is a "fact" versus another reliable source that expresses doubt in a reasoned way. In creating articles about the American Civil War, there are literally thousands of reliable, secondary sources that are published through academic presses and are fully cited, so we tend to bypass websites and popular media that do not make their citations (and in some cases, their authors) visible. Hal Jespersen (talk) 00:11, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]