Talk:Samuel Doak

Organization and Headings
Article would be clearer with added heading before "Doak delivered the following sermon…" Suggest "Battle of Kings Mountain" or some such. OR, move those two paras (closing with "LORD AND GIDEON. AMEN." under CAREER heading. As it stands, it looks like the Kings Mountain material is part of Abolition efforts. --DET (talk) 00:32, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Supposed 1780 Doak prayer at Sycamore Shoals
Bee Cliff River Slob (talk) 18:17, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
 * This lengthy prayer attributed verbatim to Doak simply did not exist before 1895 when Theodore Roosevelt was writing his book (along with historian Henry Cabot Lodge) Hero Tales from American History, nor was this verbatim Doak prayer cited by historian Lyman C. Draper within his 1881 copyright book King's Mountain and It's Heroes, nor was the verbatim Doak prayer (as presented within this Wikipedia article) ever recorded within J. G. M. Ramsey's The Annals of Tennessee. In his book King's Mountain and It's Heroes, Draper only cites a "few stirring remarks" and "closing with the Bible quotation, "The sword of the Lord and Gideon;" within a footnote referencing a June 21, 1880 letter from J. G. M. Ramsey who attributes only this barest citation almost one hundred years after the supposed September 25, 1780 Doak prayer at Sycamore Shoals to "the tradition of this country, and I fully believe it."

I removed the portrait
The above portrait was prominently featured in the article. It is on display at Tusculum College and is apparently assumed to be an accurate portrait. There is no information about its provenance. I raised some concerns about it on its Wikimedia Commons talk page.

First of all, this is a modern copy of an earlier work that is also apparently anonymous. Here's an image of the earlier work, as displayed with the Tennessee Encyclopedia article about Samuel Doak: (Portrait of Samuel Doak). Comparing the two makes it plain that the Tusculum College painting is based on the work shown at Tennessee Encyclopedia.

The modern copyist made serious interpretive errors. The main errors in the copy are:
 * 1) Where the original work shows a man with longish white hair covering his ears and adhering to the top and sides of his head, the copy shows a man with a kind of white hood that completely covers his hair. (In fact, the hood seems to be attached to the garment under his waistcoat, suggesting a modern hoodie).
 * 2) Where the man in the original wears a loosely tied neckband like a cravat, the copy has a vaguely sketched necktie with a four-in-hand knot — an anachronism, to say the least.

Therefore, with apologies to Tusculum College, this portrait is not a reliable portrayal of its subject and should not be treated as a historical image. Therefore it does not belong with the article. — ℜ ob C. alias ALAROB 18:31, 23 June 2022 (UTC)