What is the Basis of Ozian History?
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In any effort, it is wise to start at the beginning. At the time when the HACC project began, we had a number of Oz books, written by many different
authors over a period of about ninety years. How were we to cull a coherent and standardized history from all this? We needed a place to start:
something that we point to and say "This, by definition, is accurate Ozzy history". Once that was achieved we could build from there. We
began with the very first Oz book of all, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
This book was assumed to be accurate history, occuring in the year that it
was written, 1898.
The Oz books that most Oz readers are familiar with are the Famous Forty, or the forty books published by Reilly & Britton and its successors from
1900 to 1963. Each title in the Famous Forty was verified against the earlier books of the Famous Forty and found also to be historically accurate. That
is, they did not textually contradict events in the previous volumes of the Famous Forty.
When all 40 books were analyzed, the resulting historical thread was called the Standard Ozian Baseline. All other books are verified against this
baseline as well as other non-FF books that have been written previously.
While books outside of the FF expand the historical thread begun in the FF by mentioning new people and events, and giving insight into earlier
historical happenings, it is in the FF that most of what we know as Oz has been defined. The basic structure of the land was described pretty
thoroughly and most of the major players in and around Oz have their beginnings in the FF. While we feel that it is important for new stories to
honor the other stories by taking into account history that they have brought to light, the FF still retains the core of Ozian history.
As each new book comes out, it is checked against the FF and, to a lesser extent, non-FF books. In other words, it is checked against what we
know (or think we know) of Ozzy history. If it does not contain any major deviations form established Ozzy history, it is deemed Historically Accurate,
assigned a year of occurence, and placed in the HACC.