A Historical Accuracy Checklist
Most period errors fall into six drawers. Open them one at a time, with the right reference book beside each, and the check stops being a vague worry and becomes a list you can finish.
Why a checklist beats a reread
Rereading for accuracy fails for a simple reason: the same memory that wrote the error reads it back and approves it. A checklist breaks that loop. It tells you what kind of claim to look for, and it sends each kind to a source that can settle it. The research itself, before and during drafting, is a different job; our guide to researching historical fiction covers that. This checklist is for the draft you already have.
Run it late, once scenes have stopped moving. Checking a chapter you later cut is the most thorough way to waste a week.
1. Objects and technology
List every manufactured thing a character touches, wears, eats out of, or drives. For each, ask two questions: did it exist, and would this person have one?
The second question catches more errors than the first. A patent date tells you the earliest a thing could exist. Gideon Sundback patented his "separable fastener" in 1917, but the word "zipper" came from B.F. Goodrich's rubber boots in the 1920s, and zips on trousers came later still. A heroine who zips her dress in 1919 is possible on paper and wrong in practice.
- Settles it: patent records for the earliest date; trade catalogs, advertisements, and period photographs for when ordinary people owned the thing.
2. Language
Read dialogue and close narration for words and idioms that arrived after your year. Watch the comfortable ones: they feel old because you have heard them all your life. Our guide to anachronistic words and phrases walks through dating a word yourself.
- Settles it: a historical dictionary with dated citations (the Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest example it has found, and Merriam-Webster lists a "first known use" on many entries). Google Books Ngram Viewer shows how common a word was, but its dates rest on scanned metadata, so open the actual books before trusting an early hit.
3. Prices and money
Every price in your manuscript is a factual claim, and so is every coin. Check the amount, and check the money system itself. Britain counted in pounds, shillings, and pence (twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound) until decimalisation on 15 February 1971. A Londoner in 1965 who pays "fifty pence" for anything is speaking a currency that does not exist yet.
Be wary of inflation calculators run backwards. They report an average price level, which tells you very little about what bread, rent, or a train ticket cost in a given town.
- Settles it: advertisements and market reports in newspapers from the place and year, mail-order catalogs, and official price series where they exist.
4. Law and institutions
Courts, police, schools, banks, and the post all changed shape over time, and fiction leans on them constantly. Familiar procedure is the trap. A detective who reads a suspect his rights in 1955 is borrowing from Miranda v. Arizona, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1966. A speakeasy needs Prohibition behind it, which began nationwide in January 1920 and ended in December 1933.
- Settles it: the statute or court decision itself, an institution's own published history, and newspaper reporting from the period, which shows how a rule worked in practice and not only on paper.
5. Events on your timeline
If your story runs alongside real history, every scene has a date whether or not you wrote one down. Build a table of scene dates, then check what the world was doing on each: the news, the weather, the day of the week, the phase of the moon if anyone looks up at it.
Calendars themselves can trip you. Britain and its colonies switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and Wednesday, 2 September was followed by Thursday, 14 September. Eleven days of that month never happened there.
- Settles it: digitised newspaper archives for what people knew and when, weather records from national meteorological services, a perpetual calendar for the weekday, and an astronomical almanac or moon-phase calculator for the night sky.
6. Travel times
Distance is easy to check and speed is easy to forget. Characters in period fiction often cross a country at modern pace, because the writer pictured the journey with a car in mind. Check the route that existed, the vehicle your character could afford, and the season.
- Settles it: railway and shipping timetables (Britain's Bradshaw's guides are the classic example), period road maps, and for the ancient world, Stanford's ORBIS model, which estimates travel time and cost across the Roman Empire by road, river, and sea.
Log every fix
A check without a record has to be repeated. Keep a short log, one line per claim:
- where it is (chapter and scene, or script page);
- the claim, quoted;
- the verdict: confirmed, changed, or kept on purpose;
- the source, specific enough to find again.
The third column matters more than it looks. Sometimes you will keep a wrong detail because the right one would confuse a modern reader. That is a legitimate choice, and our guide to avoiding anachronisms discusses when to make it. Writing "kept on purpose" in the log means an editor's query takes you thirty seconds to answer, not an afternoon.
Where an anachronism checker fits
An automated checker is good at one part of this list: finding datable details on the page and testing them. Use it as a sweep across scenes, ideally before your category passes, so the passes start from a shorter list. Know its limits. It can only check what you wrote, so it will not notice the gas lamp a scene should have had. It cannot judge a liberty you took on purpose. And it knows nothing about your story's own calendar unless that calendar is on the page.
Storskarvia's free anachronism checker takes up to 1,500 words and the setting you give it, such as "Chicago, winter 1936". It checks each datable claim against Wikipedia and independent web sources, then hands every finding to a second pass whose only job is to argue it down. What survives reaches you as a card with the quote, the problem, the evidence, and a link to the source, which is most of a log entry already. If nothing survives, you get one line saying so.
With a free account the same fact-checker reads whole chapters and manuscripts and remembers the year you set in chapter one, and a continuity editor catches the errors that are internal to your book. Storskarvia never writes a word for you. It tells you what is wrong and where, and every fix stays yours.
Working on a period scene now? Check a passage for anachronisms free: paste up to 1,500 words of prose or screenplay, no signup, and get cited findings back.