Valentine's Day Challenge Commentary

The legends and the ambiguity of the origins of Valentine’s Day and the man behind it makes writing a history of the day more difficult. The history of valentine’s greetings also has some ambiguity. There are many sites, both professional (CNN and History Channel) and amateur sites that have information about the history of Valentine’s Day.

The reliability of some of the websites seemed questionable. I used information from the historychannel.com, infoplease.com by Pearson Education (an article which had an author), and Wikipedia thinking that, like it said in the articles assigned for this week, the page would be checked because it is a high traffic site-especially this month. Other sites that I found through Google had interesting and relevant information, but it was not clear who was behind them and the overdone graphics and the ads made them look amateur and unreliable. Some of the sites had conflicting information about the history of valentine’s greetings, including dates and the materials used for the cards, and other aspects of Valentine’s Day.

Many of the sites that I searched lacked citations. The Wikipedia page on Valentine’s Day had the most citations and it said that it needed more. Especially concerning the origin of Valentine’s Day and who Valentine was, much of the information was “according to legend” and there are many versions which makes writing an essay more difficult especially without the use of scholarly sources to use as a reference.

This was a good exercise to see the range of material, reliability, and scholarship (or lack there of) that can be found on one popular topic for free on the internet. This exercise revealed the gap between what historians use as reliable sources and what is in the public domain on the internet. For this topic at least there seems to be a lack of identifiably scholarly work available for free on the internet. I found it difficult to get started because of the conflicting origin stories and the questions of reliability.