Talk:Lynching of Horace Maples

More Potential Sources

http://strangefruitandspanishmoss.blogspot.com/2014/09/september-7-1904-horace-maples.html has more that I wasn't able to chase down fully yet. Ivey (talk) 23:08, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Books on the subject

Looks like these books would be a good source. Haven't read them yet:

• The Sins of Madison County, by Fred B. Simpson with Mary N. Daniel & Gay C. Campbell, 1999, Chapter 6.
  • Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-97386
  • ISBN: 0-09675765-0-4
• Where Spirits Linger: Huntsville's Haunted Past, by Jacquelyn Procter Reeves
  • ISBN: 9781728311197
• The Federal Reporter, Volume 151 by West Publishing Company, 1907 page 648-650 discusses the indictment of Robert Powell for conspiracy to injure/ threaten/oppress Horace Maples.
• Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States 1889-1918, published in 1919, page 15

--WikiDreamMonkey (talk) 15:26, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Feedback from New Page Review process

I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: Thanks for creating.

Celestina007 (talk) 00:26, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Recent edit

I added a citation for an unsourced statement awhile ago . That page goes into detail about which newspapers covered the lynching if the quote itself isn't sufficient. If people think the given source isn't strong enough for the claim, I'd prefer they either remove the claim outright or find better sourcing for it. I was under the impression that published books tend to be decent sources, but I'm open to arguments about why that would not be applicable. It's possible I'm putting too much weight in what people say about me off-wiki, but I tend to care about addressing any criticism that doesn't involve fundamentally changing my values as a person. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:03, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

I've just removed it entirely for now. Anyone can restore it or discuss it here if they'd like. I tend to add citations to books I read that mention subjects where it's relevant, so if this is a problem (or not a problem at all), I'd prefer people be up front and honest about that so I can know that going forward instead of assuming it's a COI thing. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:41, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

As a rule of thumb, the more tangential the focus of the source and authors expertise is to the subject of a claim you want to use it for, the less reliable you should consider the work as a source for the claim. To me, this falls over the line where I would want to get a better, more authoritative source: There do seem to be some scholarly works that discuss the Horace Maples case: . Without having seen page 46 it's hard to judge whether the book actually supports it, but I think what you added was not supported by the sentence you quoted from the book. Hemiauchenia (talk) 17:30, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Well, obviously scholarly works are preferable. Wales does go into several paragraphs talking about the news coverage across Alabama. Tangential is a good rule of thumb, although my personal threshold for that was a bit broader because the book kind've jumps all over the place to support its thesis about how people trust. I didn't really see it as a contentious claim to say that there was a bunch of newspaper coverage in the state, even if Jimmy wasn't an authority on the subject whatsoever. But it was evident (to me) that some research was done (probably because it's an event that happened in his hometown and he cared on a personal level to actually research it for the book). Someone else I know seems to think that I just really messed up here (which if true, means I should go back and clean up some similar edits, because it really is common for me to do use books I happen to be reading as sources... but I've never done it for anything that I think would be contentious or to push fringe beliefs or anything like that). I saw this as similar to something being published in a newspaper. Most journalists aren't nessecarily experts on the subjects they're writing about either, but I'm under the impression it's usually fine to cite them in similar contexts because they're published and reputable. It's possible my whole train of thought here is flawed but if that's the case, as always, I'm willing to be convinced. I'll leave a more detailed comment about my thought process regarding the actual review elsewhere. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:50, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Your addition of

Detailed news reports of the lynching spread quickly across the state

contains several claims not mentioned in the quote you cited:

"On the morning of September 7, 1904, a small story appeared on newspapers throughout Alabama."

The quote mentions nowhere that the reports were "detailed". It's also important to distinguish whether this news coverage was before or after the lynching, because presumably the original accusation against Maples of murder also got news coverage. Is this quote actually about the lynching? If these stories were about the lynching that happened in September 7 1904, then the lynching itself would have to have occurred in the small hours of the morning before the morning newspaper reports came out, assuming the 7 of September date for the lynching is correct. Hemiauchenia (talk) 19:00, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

I didn't add detailed to the text (that was already there when the claim was completely uncited, I agree it should be cut). What I meant in my comment above is that the book itself has several paragraphs about the aforementioned news coverage after the sentence I quote. It lists several different newspapers and briefly quotes them. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:20, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

I think something mundane like "the lynching was subsequently widely reported across Alabama" cited to the book would probably be ok if the book supports that. Hemiauchenia (talk) 19:41, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I was going for in the initial edit. Just missed the word "detailed" at the beginning of the pre-existing text. Anyways, feel free to reinstate it. I'm a bit hesitant about doing it myself at this point. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:00, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

I didn't originally catch that distinction with the one word, sorry. It was reporting of the murder but not the lynching. It all tends to get a bit confusing when there's two different murders being talked about (the murder that prompted the lynching and the lynching itself being an act of murder) in this discussion. It's complicated by the fact that there's newspaper snippets of both before and after the lynching, but the quoted sentence only makes an interpretative claim about the scale of coverage in that one sentence and on Sept 7. If it's too confusing and messy, we can just omit the information and rely only on other, better sources. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't completely misunderstanding a Wikipedia norm about proper sourcing given the concerns my friend had. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:04, 4 December 2025 (UTC)