A Week in History, August 6-12. Nixon's 1974 Resignation + Paladin App Neglects Fact-Checking

Micro-learning history apps that advertise heavily on social media, such as Paladin, are increasingly popular, with tens of thousands of users, but buyer beware. Paladin is clickbait, full of embellishments and exaggerations by unchecked artificial intelligence and hyped-up marketing copy, not solid historical learning. Take their “today in history” posts for August 6-12.

I am all for learning history in bite-sized chunks, but I won’t pay for Paladin ($100 a year), nor urge students to do so until and unless it cleans up its act. I have to fact-check nearly every Paladin post on Instagram. Few of them score 10 out of 10 for accuracy. More often, their scores are 6 or 7, or at best 9 out of 10. They could do much better.

I do acknowledge that Paladin’s “This Day in History” posts for August 8 and 9 are accurate. Most notably, August 9, 1974, was the day Richard M. Nixon resigned as president due to the Watergate scandal.

Public History

Personal Memories of Richard Nixon's Resignation

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August 10, 2021

I frequently think of President Richard Nixon around August 9, the anniversary of his resignation in 1974, and reflect on how we, and America, have changed since then. It was a big event in my extended family, with everyone having strong and somewhat differing opinions, expressed with enviable civility.

Click on the ad to see it for yourself, and then read this critique to see what the post gets right and wrong. Nearly all the underlying stories are real. Paladin’s weakness isn’t wholesale fabrication; it’s compression and embellishment. It takes a sound historical fact and adds a vivid detail (”dinner still on the table”), collapses chronology (”coins melted down to build it”), or turns a complicated relationship into a dramatic causal statement (”fed straight into 1914”). This one rates about 8 out of 10 for accuracy.

August 11 on Paladin’s Instagram page is even less reliable than August 10. Paladin’s description of August 7, “today in history,” attached two later events to it and exaggerated several details. I’d rate it C+/B−.

For August 6, five of the seven events cited are accurately depicted. Two require corrections. Paladin asserted that it was the Internet's birthday, when the first web page went live. Not true. In 1991, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web project on the public alt.hypertext newsgroup. The first web server and site were already operating internally by the end of 1990. And dial-up newsgroups existed years before that.

Paladin also confused an important detail regarding the horrifying spectacle of a fried human when the first electric chair was introduced in 1891. It was Thomas Edison who promoted DC (direct current) and smeared George Westinghouse’s competing AC (alternating current) as too dangerous, not the other way around. See the War of the Currents, a fierce late 19th-century technological and commercial rivalry.

Paladin often begins with a sound historical fact and then adds a cinematic sentence that is either interpretive, legendary, or subtly inaccurate.

In the “On This Day: August 10, 1941” post, the reference to Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe volunteering to take the place of prisoner Franciszek Gajownickzek at Auschwitz is a significant editorial failure. The famous substitution occurred in late July, and Kolbe died on August 14. There isn’t an obvious reason to assign the event to August 10. That should have been caught before publication.

Kolbe survived starvation for more than two weeks and was killed by lethal injection on August 14, 1941. Gajowniczek survived Auschwitz and did attend Kolbe's canonization in Rome on October 10, 1982; the Vatican explicitly records his presence.

Paladin also neglects truly significant historical events. On August 10, 1792, for example, the French monarchy was overthrown!

I am not a huge fan of “today in history” blurbs that lack enough context to be a true learning experience. For true history buffs who like the reminders, they can be fun.

Below is the full-day history critique for August 10, along with critiques of the mistakes Paladin made for August 6, 7, 10, 11, and 12 for those who truly want to learn something.