I remember how i would hear, from time to time, that some new information about, lets say Jack the Ripper, appeared and the case about him changed on some way. Same thing on John Wilkes Booth, Napoleon and other people from way more than 100 years ago. How can something from so much time in the past still change? Wich kind of evidence is this and how people get it? Investigations are still happening? Can we trust the new information?
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To put it simply, we have better tools to analyze the historical records now and communicate things that seem strange in them. Or records previously undiscovered turn up. Or new general knowledge happens that explains anomalies that people at the time couldn’t (like scientific advances). Also, in the case of criminals specifically, the subject being analyzed is no longer able to fight back and destroy evidence.
We sometimes come up with new ways of examining evidence like DNA and other stuff that wasn’t around at the time, for example if Jack the Ripper sent a letter we can pull DNA from where he licked it which we may not have been able to do even five years ago. That, and occasionally we find new articles of evidence to begin with. For example every now and then people find their great-grandparent’s scrapbook and find letters from historical figures that can be verified by historical experts.
New tools that have opened up new angles.
The Jack the Ripper updates are usually because someone tested the DNA on some old piece of evidence. That said it’s usually overstated how big these breakthroughs are. That case is most likely never going to be solved, too much evidence is just gone now.
There are conspiracy theories that Jack the Ripper was identified. Scotland Yard has fought tooth and nail to keep certain records from the investigation sealed to the public. Leading to questions about why, with the most popular belief being that somebody important was implicated, somebody important enough to be protected even long after dying.
One of the things not being mentioned that is another factor is the digitization of newspapers. Newspapers in the 19th century were way more common than they are now. The general population was literate and there was no other means to spread news. Most cities had dozens of newspapers and bigger cities like New York and London could have in the hundreds. Just like we see now with cable news, in the 19th century, these newspapers would send journalists to major events that were happening. Jack the Ripper is a great example. This was international news, and the killings were very spread out in time, so at any given point in time, there could be thousands of journalists from any corner of the western world sending someone to London to write a story for their paper. With that many different journalists, each doing their own investigations, there were hundreds of interviews or tiny details buried in random papers across Europe and North America, with each journalist hoping to add something to make their story relevant against the competition just from their hometown. At that time, it would have been impossible to cross reference all of those stories.
However there have been major undertakings all over to digitize all of those old newspapers. So now through the internet, someone can search through thousands of old newspaper articles in seconds. And if they find something interesting in a paper from Baltimore for example, and see corroborating details in a paper from Seattle, and another detail added in a paper from Prague, then that investigator can start piecing together things that would have been impossible to do in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The last question you ask is the hardest to answer though… can we trust the veracity of all of these articles? Because just like there is now a competition to be the one to “break” a story in the news, there was then as well. And to keep a paper relevant, there would certainly be journalists willing to bend the truth to draw readers in. So what details can be trusted as accurate versus what is there just to sell their paper? And how can we possibly know now when all first party accounts are long gone? This is where that cross referencing I mentioned really comes in. If you see the same detail mentioned in multiple different papers, then it is more likely to be accurate.
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