User Talk: Balin42632003

Request for assistance

Hello, I saw you are a member of the American Civil War task force and identify as an American Civil War historian and reenactor. Hopefully you could help with this? For the past few months, an user called "DiplomaticHistoryBuff" has been adding rather outlandish content to the article Diplomacy of the American Civil War ↗. He's quoted several times now a claimed 1941 article in the site "U.S. Naval Institute" about a supposed Confederate bombardment of Morocco during the ACW ("The only foreign war of the Confederacy"), and is now using the same article to claim an affair between the Confederate and French navies in the Mediterranean, calling it "La Patrie Affair". The supposed 1941 article has no sources and I can't find anything that is mentioned there anywhere - not in Google Books, not in Google Scholar. I'm not a professional historian or even American but my bullshit-meter is off the scale about this. In the past, this same user tried to add a section on the Tangier Difficulty ↗, which was a real affair, but he told it in a extremely questionable way (e.g. referring the Raphael Semmes ↗ as "chief Confederate diplomat in the area", claiming that the two Southerners were arrested "for insulting the American flag"). Even worse, when asked for sources he cited a book and a paper that don't talk about the Tangier Difficulty at all, which prompts the question of where he actually gets his information from (and why bother picking up fake sources instead of real ones). In short, can you confirm if this "US Naval Institute" is legit, or as I suspect, a sham, and nothing in this article is real? And hopefully you may be also able to help improve the subarticle France and the American Civil War ↗, with is severely lacking in comparison to its British and Spanish counterparts. Thank you. Menah the Great (talk) 17:17, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

:Sorry, not interested. Balin42632003 (talk) 08:14, 2 July 2026 (UTC)