I don’t know quite how to feel about it, seems that the book did exaggerate a lot of facts in order to tell a story and perhaps should be categorised as a historical fiction, but that does not quite make the book worthless, as even a good story can be a launching point for many talented young women to get into science.
Makes me wonder how many other things I’ve watched and read were edited for the purpose of telling a better story.
Certainly not a reason to cite 1984 though.
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
In this case, yes, there's a lot of "wanting it to be true" involved because the tale of a black woman mathematician working in the 1960s makes for a heroic story of triumph over adversity.
Per the "How Did It All Get Started?" section of the PDF it seems like the misconstrual of what happened began not as some kind of woke project in the last 10 years, but in the 1960s with the mathematician in question, proud of her accomplishments, inflating them beyond their real significance. And then the tale grew in the telling as the events receded in her memory.
I don't want my street named after a slave owner, period. No, it doesn't destroy history to change it. History recorded safely, in many other places, is exactly why street names and books are being updated - to include more accurate, less sugar-coated retellings of history.
If you have a problem with the increased scrutiny and exposure of how deeply our systematic failures run, you're the problem.
I think it is naive to suggest 1984 is suddenly upon us. Orwell I'm sure knew that history has been re-written for at least 2500 years.
