A historic obscenity trial went unremembered even by contemporary witnesses

Evidence

I interviewed four then-young people who spent the summer of ’ in Provincetown. Not one remembered this incident. The entire transcript of the trial was published in the issue that appeared the following summer: “EDITOR JAILED.” Judge Robert A. Welsh, the son and grandson of Massachusetts judges, quickly found Ward guilty. The case was dismissed as quickly on appeal, largely because the minor who purchased the obscene material was not in fact a minor. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1860

Categorization

• QUESTION: The reader’s own method question: how reliable are oral-history interviews for reconstructing scene history? Not one of four witnesses remembered the incident.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s project: oral memory as a source for why-culture-stagnates arguments is fragile, a caveat for any empirical test.