Authenticity

William Aspray is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He formerly taught at Colorado (Boulder), Harvard, Indiana (Bloomington), Penn, Rutgers (New Brunswick), Texas (Austin), Virginia Tech, and Williams. He has also served in senior management positions at the Charles Babbage Institute, Computing Research Association, and the IEEE History Center. He served as the editor of Information & Culture: A Journal of History and is the author or editor of more than 30 books on the history and use of information in modern societies. Most recently, he co-edited Deciding Where to Live (R&L 2021), edited Information Issues for Older Americans (R&L, 2022), and co-authored with James W. Cortada both Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America (R&L, 2019) and From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking (Springer, 2019).James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He formerly worked at IBM Corporation in a variety of sales, consulting, research, management, and executive positions. His research and writing have focused on the business history of information technology and in the role of information in modern societies. He is the author or editor of more than three dozen books and serves on the editorial board of key journals devoted to the history of information and its technologies. Most recently he co-authored with William Aspray, Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America (R&L, 2019) and From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking (Springer, 2019); and authored Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L, 2021).

“The most thoughtful work on authenticity since Miles Orvell’s classic, The Real Thing. Orvell’s domain was objects, while Cortada and Aspray’s is time, place, people, and acts as they creatively and expertly analyze inauthenticity and misinformation in heritage tourism—offering rich intellectual journeys through Colonial Williamsburg, Gettysburg, and Lindsborg, Kansas.”

• ContentsPreface1.Authenticity and Misinformation in the American Historical Experience 2.Academic Research by Tourism and Information Scholars 3.Authenticity in Small Heritage Tourism Sites: The Case of Lindsborg, KS4.Authenticity in Large Private Heritage Tourism Sites: The Case of Colonial Williamsburg 5.Authenticity in Large Public Heritage Tourism Sites: The Case of Gettysburg6.Lessons About Authenticity and MisinformationNotesIndexAbout the Authors