O'Reilly isn't someone I would turn to for original information. Everything he does is derivative even when he's quite correct about things he's willing to pontificate about.
I had hoped this WaPo piece would be more informative about the poor scholarship. The acreage of Dr. Mudd's farm? The number of times Our American Cousin had played at Fords before the fateful interrupted performance? I can dismiss those sorts of irrelevancies by concluding O'Reilly's book is like a lot of his work. An arrested adolescent's equivalent to children's literature, as O'Reilly would dismiss them, "for 'the Folks.'"
“The history is well-documented.”
But is it true?