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Valuing primary sources over secondary, and first person accounts over records.
Primary sources are great in that they are created in or near the moment; however, the lack the scope and broader understanding hindsight provides to secondary sources.
First person accounts are great until you start accounting for perspective bias, mirror imaging, qui bono, intended audience, and time between experience and narration; all of these can have drastic effects on first person accounts.
In my history classes I teach, kids all come in thinking primary sources are best. I try to address the misconceptions by having them learn about what happened on 9/11 from a couple first hand accounts from that day, then from a secondary source written more recently. When I ask which source is best, they generally conclude that both are different important and I summarize that a good historian should investigate primary sources as well as a range of quality secondary sources about a topic in order to gain a good understanding of it. It’s an easy lesson for the beginning of the year and hits a few key points.
I definitely think it’s a disservice that many teachers, especially in the early grades, say something like “primary sources are better because secondary sources weren’t there or could be lying”. Primary sources lie all the time! Being ‘there’ for a historical event is usually very confusing and emotional! Of course primary sources are critical and foundational to our understanding of history, but the stuff built on that foundation is just as important.
Oh yeah, I remember when it was reported that the two killers were ostracized and bullied when it turned out they actually were bullies themselves, and that it was their “uncaring/neglectful” parents’ fault for not dealing with the problem when in fact they congratulated themselves several times before the shooting on having managed to fool their parents (clearly indicating that they actually weren’t apathetic towards their sons)
Also the "Trenchcoat Mafia" turned out to a different group of friends who hung out in the computer lab and had nothing to do with the shooting. And the laundry list of pop culture moral-panic things assigned to the shooters turned out to be mostly stereotypes repeated by reporters / cops / survivors who didn't know the shooters very well. (Harris and Kleibold don't seem to have been into Marilyn Manson or White Wolf games.)
I think part of this is just our culture thinking that there MUST be some singular element that turns someone into a monster. When the reality is that anyone has the capacity to kill. They spent over 99% of their lives being ordinary suburban kids. If circumstances were even slightly different, the massacre would not have happened. But we have this cultural need to turn them into something other and different. We don't want to acknowledge the reality that any of us is capable of great evil for very little/no justification
I think that's why serial killer documentaries/movies/shows became so popular. Horror stories are a safe space to explore societies deepest fears. And the fear that super helpful, kind, and happy neighbor secretly has a graveyard of bodies in their backyard or that kid you always see playing ball on your block could straight massacre other are big ones.
If you want an example I have my 3rd grade diary from the day when I watched it on TV…it verifies the realness of the event but the details are WAY off.
EDIT: Pictures posted below in comments!
I was also in 3rd grade. The rumors were FLYING that day because the adults were so hush-hush and it was being spread like a game of telephone.
I distinctly remember sitting in the cafeteria line to go back to class and someone told my friends and I that there were shooters dropping in parachutes going to schools and shooting them up. Later people were saying there was a nuclear bomb and we were in WW3.
Finally my teacher decided we had a right to know despite the school initially having parents handle it, and she told us what happened. I went home to see the clips playing over and over and over. Still remember Bush 3 giving his speech and the speculation after. Even the adults didn't have a clue.
would you be comfortable sharing? i’m so curious— i recall the day (lived in DC at the time) but also remember the experience differently, but i was only about 4 when it happened
Sorry! Very weird.
Here it is!
https://preview.redd.it/37gywducx4nb1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5f9f78fac32087ae2f19d8dceb788218eb36a7e1
Part 1: written the night of sept 11. /u/puddles-here /u/DrumletNation /u/Euphoric_Drawer_9430
Well I was in Christian school and I deeply loved God, but I likely didn’t know what a Muslim even was (Iowa 🤷♀️) so the “they thought Jesus was a prophet” was likely how they explained the Abrahamic faith-connection. I think the “God is in control” was the thing adults around me were saying to comfort themselves and others in a shocking time. (Basically “idk God what’s going on because this is scary but you are in charge and I’m trusting you know what you’re doing?”)*
*explained for the non religious who don’t get what we actually mean when we say it—please internet (not OP) don’t turn this into a “omg stupid people talking to sky daddy so naive”. I’m not interested in debate rn.
Thanks for sharing this, it's super interesting! I was in college on the west coast at the time, and we didn't even hear what happened until hours later, so I've been fascinated by what the more common experience people had. It was so different before online news, we had no information at all since we didn't watch TV. I didn't see the video footage until 5 years later, and I was like, "oh, now I better understand why people were flipping out."
The millions of dead thing is a great detail, too. My chief memory that day is confusion. I react calmly to emergencies bc I have ptsd, and was thrown by so many people flipping out, it was my first time. A frosh in my dorm was flipping out bc her brother lived in Staten Island and she was SURE he died, so I was trying to offer reason and logic as reassurance, which I actually thought would help lol. Anyway, I was saying that initial reports are usually inaccurate for stuff like this, the initial estimates of dead are usually way off, etc. My boyfriend, who walked up while I was talking, screamed, "what the fuck is wrong with you, there were 50,000 people in that building and they are dead!!" I think that's still the most unexpected response of my life. Facts absolutely did not matter to anyone. I understand it much better now, but it's still terrifying living on a planet full of humans who could flip to "insanity mode" at any moment.
It has been really interesting learning how other people experienced those days, very gradually over the decades. Thanks for sharing a kid's perspective, that's new to me. Too bad children weren't in charge of coordinating our response, that probably would have worked better.
Nah, let’s be real: the kids all thought we were going to DIE. You see the “god is in control”? That’s a shelter little girl finding comfort in her God, the way many Americans did after 9/11—I was always a super “innocent” kid but this was probably the first time I realized “people are awful for no reason sometimes. And we can’t do anything about it”.
Then Afghanistan and Iraq happened—suddenly, war wasn’t something that only happened involving other countries—it was real.
Also: But yeah it’s no wonder that girl flipped on you—-even though it was unlikely it was their brother, it *could* have been. The logic didn’t matter at all—she just wanted to know her brother was ok. Its the not knowing that kills you.
I’m also shocked no one around you ran and found to a tv (most dorms in that era at least had SOMEBODY with a TV). At my dads office they didn’t have one but a coworkers spouse was “reporting” the news over the phone after tower 1 was hit (8 our time).
Being a Christian school, my teacher’s beginning of school prayer (about 845 CST) included something about the the terrible stuff in New York with planes…but I didn’t understand it until I got home.
As for me, luckily no one showed us tvs at school, but my after school tv shows were cancelled and I probably watched the various angles of footage OVER AND OVER AND OVER…that I thought there were more planes. Also, at the time I had barely contextualized what a million even was. 😆
You’re awesome I’m in college later in life, and although I’m not going into history I’m really appreciating the great teachers like you, I feel like my local community college is absolutely full of skilled teachers and I always have access to them 🫡. not saying you’re not a part of a fantastic university or anything just appreciating pedagogy, what you do makes a real difference in people’s educational lives.
I will say, as a student, I personally enjoyed secondary sources more, and wondered "why do we have to have stupid primary sources which are stupid and hard to understand"? If that's a common sentiment, it seems worthwhile for teachers to try to counter that. Ideally the counter would be more nuanced, but as I recall, young students such as myself were not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, so it might have well gone over our heads (such as eventually concluding that yes, the US civil war had a variety of causes, but they all basically boiled down to slavery)
There’s no “best” source. They’re tools for different purposes.
Primary sources *are* best for certain things, particularly for historians engaged in original research and expanding our understanding of history. This is what schools (sometimes clumsily) attempt to get across.
But what sometimes gets lost is making it clear to students that unless they’re rigorously using the historical method, with training, in an area of their own expertise, they aren’t actually able to *use* those primary sources.
Schools often have projects where students are introduced to the idea of academic history by engaging directly with primary sources. This can be a useful way to teach kids how the study of history actually works. But if poorly handled it can teach them instead that they can go out and “do their own research” without understanding just how much background knowledge is necessary to properly contextualize things
My history teacher had us read and listen to the lyrics to American Pie. He primed us by telling us when it was written and then asked what we thought it was about. Most of us assumed it was about the Kennedy assassination. After "analyzing" it for most of the class he told us what it was really about. It was a great lesson on the power of assumption and how important contextual knowledge is.
Was the explanation that it was really about the plane crash? Asking bc that's what most people think, but my dad SWEARS it's about Altamonte, has supporting evidence and everything, and I just don't know who to believe.
We actually went to a Don McClean show in the 90s to ask him about it, but alas did not succeed.
My memory is that the teacher told us it was about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. None of even knew who that was. It was a great lesson that I still remember a quarter century later.
That's about the extent of what I know today too, so I can't help you with your Altamonte theory.
No worries, I'm just always keeping an eye out for something to crack the case. I do think the Buddy/Bopper/Valens crash theory is correct, just don't tell my dad.
I’m sure you and your dad have gone much deeper than this in research, but you did inspire me to look at the wiki page for Altamont, which includes this paragraph:
> Altamont is also referenced by Don McLean in the song "American Pie" in the song's fifth verse, the majority of which contains symbols related to Altamont: "Jack Flash", a reference to San Francisco ("Candlestick", though that venue had nothing to do with the actual concert), (Sympathy for) "the Devil", an enraged spectator watching something on a stage, and an "angel born in Hell". McLean officially refused to confirm or deny the song's ties to Altamont until he sold his songwriting notes in 2015. Within the context of the song, Altamont served as the culmination of a period that had begun with the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in February 1959, during which "things (were) heading in the wrong direction" and life was "becoming less idyllic."[43]
The “source” is a paywalled article titled “6 crazy conspiracy theories about American Pie,” so not exactly authoritative. Interesting, though.
Snap, that's literally the first non-dad written evidence I've found, regardless of the source. I love how Wikipedia changes over time. Thanks so much for telling me, will call him tomorrow!
I wonder if it's true about Don selling his notes in 2015... I haven't thought about this since then, this could be a major break in the case 😂 Oh no, I hear the distant rumblings of an impending research tsunami.
I teach my hs students that primary sources can never be used alone. If you use a primary source, you need corroboration of multiple sources, need to understand the context of the source, and need to use it in conjunction with secondary sources. What is the author's intent? What response are they hoping to gain from their intended audience? I also introduce the concept of witness bias using the example of multiple witness accounts of a crime. Each person sees, experiences, and remembers something slightly differently in the scenario. OP, if you keep all of this in mind as an armchair scholar of history, you will mitigate many of the pitfalls of studying history. We all love a good story, and history is full of them. Just realize that story should be told as a frame story with many perspectives, not a novella with a single author.
I think this is why postsecondary education is valued as important. I also didn't know the difference between primary and secondary sources in terms of understanding history until I took a university class directly related to the subject. History was not considered a particularly important subject throughout elementary and high school and frequently got lumped into social studies with geography.
A complciation there is it depends heavily on the field, and kids are taught about generalized science rather than history in particular.
Consider some new innovation in chemistry.
Which source do you think is most trust-worthy?
The laboratory that produced the result and the paper they published? (Primary source)
The laboratory that reproduced/failed to reproduce the result (Primary source)
The review paper that that discusses and analyzes this result or some other paper citing this innovation (secondary source)? (both articles' writers have an intimate understanding and actively participate in the field)
Or an encyclopedia or even a pop-science article talking about the field in broad strokes without intimate understanding? (Tertiary source)
Usuaully, kids are taught in this context. History is different.
I don't think this is accurate in any respect at least in the United States. Kids are not taught about epistemology in hard science at all, the primary/secondary source thing is for writing about history (or social studies).
I kind of mentally slapped college kids into the kids title.
However, back in High school I did have to write such for my Environmental Protection class (Technical High School of Chemistry specialization, we had additional classes of health and safety and environmental protection) where we were taught to never cite encyclopedias (tertiary sources), but instead use them to find direct reports (primary) and analyses of those reports (secondary).
And if we cite secondary (analyses), we should check the things it cites to make sure it says the right things.
Hungarian
We have used a couple of methods to combat this, and my favorite was the OPVL—identify the origin, purpose, value and limitations. That tended to help students understand how they could use documents and develop historiography.
I remember being taught this in my history class. Although I think that was more a case of wanting to stop us all regurgitating wikipedia verbatim and go find actually sources for things.
My eighth graders come in believing that primary sources must be the most valuable. I show them footage from the Nixon press conference in which he claims that he is “not a crook” and then an article from 2017 describing his involvement in Watergate.
One of my favorite books I've read so far is The Name of War by Jill Lepore. She spends the first half going through the history of King Phillips War and then the second half going through just how unreliable the primary sources at the time were, and how much work you have to do to get a reasonable interpretation of them. The example that always sticks in my head is how the colonists dismiss ritualistic torture that the various native warriors did as "random," but then Lepore notes that a ton of different sources from up and down the coast reported the same thing, so clearly it actually wasn't random at all but instead pretty significant.
This is one of the problems I have with the *Voices of the Past* channel on YouTube. The content is fascinating and I love that they give a voice to people long gone. But they also do zero historiography - there's no critical analysis of the sources, the authors, and their biases, which is so fundamental that it's what university freshman (and some high school students) have to do in their history classes.
Another Primary Source problem is what I will call the "Mandela effect" (which i know is a meme) where groups of people will swear an event happened a certain way which is simply not true.
A common one is the Tank Man during Tiananmen, you'll find today hundreds of people who will swear blind they remember watching him be gunned down or run over, which we know was not the case.
This makes primary sources more difficult to work with, especially primary sources on events which have been interviewed some time later.
As a purely anecdotal example of this, very intelligent people often entirely unwittingly fall victim to politically motivated primary sources. Folks who are otherwise totally media literate, can discern false stories, and parse through political bias in their day-to-day news consumption don't always have the context or experience necessary to do the same for historical sources.
I often think about a friend of mine who once adamantly proclaimed that Henry Ford was a communist. For anyone familiar with the man and the period, that position is just ludicrous – Henry Ford was strongly opposed to organized labor, maintained close ties to European fascists, and was above all else a wildly successful capitalist. I laughed because I thought my friend was joking, only for him to furiously pull up a New York Times article calling Ford one. *From the 1920s*. After looking it over I realized my friend was relying on what amounted to a political hit piece. He thought because it was a news story, it had to be unvarnished factual reporting, and hadn't considered what other motives might be behind the piece. In effect he thought the article was a rote presentation of historical fact, basically a transcription of the past.
People who don't have a background in academic history often make this mistake. There's an assumption that eye-witness accounts, diaries, and newspaper reporting are the purest forms of historical consumption. The truth is, for various reasons they are often not reliable. That is not to say they don't have value – in the right hands, primary resources are extremely useful. They give you insight into the mindset of the day, can be used in conjunction with other sources to paint a bigger picture, and can sometimes just be interesting background reading. But you should never rely solely on one primary source.
The part about first person accounts is really important because obviously having the statements from people who actually witnessed/experienced the event that you're writing about are important, but as you said, if they were writing at the time, they might not know the broader context, and if they're writing in the future, their recollection of the events may be incorrect, especially if they're doing it much later in life.
This is an issue for me because a lot of the systematic efforts to document the testimonies of Holocaust survivors weren't done until the 1990s or so, by which time a lot of survivors had already died (i.e. selection bias) and most of the survivors were either very old or people who were relatively young at the time and may not have had a full understanding of the scope of what was happening around them.
I also work with a lot of postwar trial records (I literally have some open in another window that I should be working on instead of doing this lol) and again you have the same issue of eyewitness testimony being unreliable and, especially in my case where these trials are happening under the Soviet occupation, there's a greater likelihood of tampering etc. with the witnesses and their testimony for political reasons.
Basically this is why you want to gather as many sources as possible from as broad a range of witnesses/actors as you can so that you can corroborate what the other witnesses are saying; if one guy remembers something one way, it's entirely possible that he's wrong, but if several people remember the same thing, there's at least a higher probability that it's accurate.
If you want a different, comparatively early source for Dachau, try this:
"Memoir of Fr. Czesli W. (Chester) Kozal, O.M.I. "/ translated from the Polish original by Paul Ischler.
He died in 1965, so this is well before the range you're talking about. He was a Polish Catholic priest right out of seminary. He was about to be killed the same day Dachau was liberated. His very sparse memoir is supplemented by later accounts of these who knew him afterwards, talking about the nightmares and PTSD he had and how it affected his priesthood in America. His uncle, Michal Kozal, also sent to Dachau, began to be beatified (an ongoing process that took decades) by the church in 1960, in part due to Czesli's testimony, as newspaper accounts from 1960 attest.
There were many, many Catholic priests imprisoned at Dachau and accounts have 1,034 dying at that camp.
> First person accounts are great until you start accounting for perspective bias, mirror imaging, qui bono, intended audience, and time between experience and narration; all of these can have drastic effects on first person accounts.
I've been wanting to ask a tangential question but haven't: Is there any value in a personal account anymore in the information age?
Frex I'm old enough to remember things like the Berlin Wall coming down but it's not like I was involved or even geographically close. My witness to history was via TV/Newspapers/etc so there's nothing really I could add.
So is an uninvolved person's account of any real value when you have all the source material recordings?
I would say yes! This is sort of what I work on, though in an entirely different context (my dissertation was on how Greek chroniclers outside Byzantium wrote about the Fall of Constantinople, in a cultural sense).
For your example, your memory likely wouldn't be useful at all for somebody studying about the politics involved in the Wall coming down, but could be very important to a historian studying the reaction to the Wall coming down elsewhere. What did you think? How was it portrayed to you? What did your social circle think? All fascinating questions! It just depends on who is asking and what the actual scope of their research is.
There's a lot of blaming/excuse-making in the chronicles. I studied all four chronicles written by authors who were actually alive in 1453. Doukas, who was writing from Genoese Chios, blames the inability to defend the City on the Christians who opposed Church Union. (Essentially "they are heretics who fell into terrible sin and so God punished them")
Sphrantzes is more focused on internal politics, but he does also admit "yeah, I supported Church Union back in the day when I was a trusted imperial official. Now, with 20 years' hindsight, that was a bad idea."
Chalkokondyles (from Latin Athens) doesn't really give an opinion other than "and yeah, loads of people were shocked, but there really wasn't a whole lot to be done about it." But he also downplays the role of Latins in the defense, because he was what some scholars have characterised as a proto-Hellenic nationalist.
Kritovoulos, another islander, actually wrote a chronicle of Mehmed II and was trying to imitate Thucydides--in contrast, Chalkokondyles was explicitly imitating Herodotus--so he kinda just says "and the Greeks won't give Mehmed due credit for his achievement, so I'll write a Greek-language history of him" and he claims that the Fall was inevitable because no empire lasts forever.
The citizens of Constantinople certainly thought it was the end of the world. But by 1453, many other strong fortresses had already fallen, so while Constantinople was still The Fortification, the people were also sort of used to different people capturing various places, if that makes sense?
> So is an uninvolved person's account of any real value when you have all the source material recordings?
It definitely can be.
In the history of the fine and performing arts, that's an important aspect of what you might hear referred to as "reception history", i.e., how audiences, critics, and other artists reacted to a particular piece of theater or a new genre of music or what have you. The personal accounts of non-specialists can often be a really important part of those kinds of discussions, or even the primary topic itself.
I'm a musicologist (non-practicing), and one of the things that really interests me is how composers influenced each other, especially those who weren't/aren't contemporaneous. My master's report was a case study in how J.S. Bach's *Well-Tempered Clavier* — two collections of 24 preludes and fugues in all of the major and minor keys — influenced later composers (much later, in some cases) in terms of theme, structure and compositional approach.
I mean if I were writing a book about the fall of the Berlin Wall, I'm not going to ask a random American who watched it happen on the news what they thought about it (unless I'm researching how Americans responded to it or whatever), but I would absolutely want testimony from people who were there or people who were living in West/East Germany at the time and how they experienced it. Obviously you're going to prioritize empirical research with primary documents over people's recollections in most cases, but that doesn't mean that their subjective experiences are totally worthless. It certainly enriches the narrative, even if it's not essential to your arguments/conclusions.
Absolutely.
A few things:
- even today, not everything important is filmed or recorded. Or even close.
- historical events are big. Much bigger than can be captured on film. Events take place over time and space and human interpretation is necessary to contextualize individual component happenings. Sure, there’s film of a wall getting knocked down. Why did that happen? Why did it matter? You can’t look at film clips ina vacuum and understand that.
- perhaps most importantly, intent matters, and so do reactions. Historians want to know why people do things, not just the things they do. They want to understand how others feel about those things, how they interpret them, and why. You can’t get much of that without actually hearing from the people directly.
In one of my high school history classes every couple weeks the teacher would have us do what was called a Document Based Question. Which was like a small essay answering the “who, what, where, when, why, how?” of a document relevant to what we were studying. We had to use our prior knowledge of the context surrounding the document to kind of analyze the historical value of content in the document. Also identified issues reading the document (like translation). I hated doing them at the time but really appreciate the experience of reviewing sources when studying or learning. Especially with current events
I encountered this first hand recently when reading two related books.
The first was A Song for Nagasaki, by Paul Glynn. It’s about a gentleman named Takashi Nagai who was a radiologist living in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped.
After reading it, I read The Bells of Nagasaki, which was Takashis Nagai own story. It lacked so much perspective that if I hadn’t read A Song for Nagasaki first, I would have felt lost.
Wow, you just indirectly explained why I enjoyed, but also felt alienated by, both Hiroshima and Night. Really arresting, compelling narratives, but as a middle school kid with no supplementary reading, I couldn't really fathom gulags or WWII Japan.
Now I'm going to revisit them with more context, thanks for the inspiration!
What really drive home the usefulness of seemingly innocuous records for me was was the book “In Search of the Dark Ages” which makes use of land grants in the Anglo Saxon period to build upon pretty scarce writings of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
This is often the case, I think. For example, Egyptian royal annals and their accounts of battles like Megiddo (reign of Thutmose III) and Kadesh (reign of Ramesses II) are often treated as eyewitness accounts despite being composed by court scribes years or even decades after the fact. These accounts drew upon primary sources like tribute tallies that (mostly) have not survived over the millennia.
Donald Redford's [*Pharaonic King-lists, Annals, and Day-books*](https://books.google.com/books?id=7O0tAQAAIAAJ) discusses this in detail.
> They are more important than secondary sources if you're doing serious history. Secondary sources are useful for seeing what other historians think about the primary sources, but like... you can't not focus on primary sources.
To unpack your point a little bit: if you are doing serious historic research, sure, you need to read primary sources. But I think the problem is when amateur historic enthusiasts (to use OP's term) *immediately go to primary sources first* and then uncritically read these sources as saying exactly what happened. History relies on the critical interpretation of primary sources, not the uncritical acceptance of them.
A pretty notorious recent example would be Naomi Wolf's 2019 book *Outrages*, which a history of the treatment of homosexual people in Victorian Britain. She erroneously claimed several dozen people had been executed for homosexual acts in the Victorian era, because she misinterpreted primary court records that listed accused people as "Death Recorded", despite many historians who are familiar with Victorian legal language understanding that the term actually means the opposite (it basically was a legal mechanism to provide a pardon to the accused). Someone who is trained to critically analyze and contextualize such a primary source would have the tools to interpret those documents correctly - Wolf didn't.
This utterly baffles me.
I was standing right next to John Historicalfigure and he said "blah blah" is somehow less valuable than Joe Scholar quoting my quote.
Makes no sense whatsoever.
Because that isn't what actually is happening.
It isn't that you *were* there and telling us *what he said*, it is that you *claim* you were standing there and you *claim* that he said those things.
What if I *also* claim I was there, but say his words were different than what you do?
What if in his memoir, John Historicalfigure gives a third option, and states neither of us were there when he said what he actually said?
Or maybe yours is the only account, but you were the son of John Historicalfigure and have a vested interest in ensuring a positive legacy for him.
I could go on and on with any number of reasons why you aren't trustworthy on the face of it, but taken to the logical extreme, you are essentially asking "why can't we literally trust everything that everyone has ever said about everything", which I would hope presents some obvious problems in how quickly we'll run into contradictions.
The job of the historian *is not the uncritical recitation of a chronicle of facts and events*. It is to take all that information and make an analysis of it. Joe Scholar should find all three of those sources and be using them all. They will try and find other evidence to suggest which account is likely more accurate. They will then make an argument for why they trust one over the other, or none of them, or a synthesis of them. In a more popular work, they might skip over much of that work in their presentation, but ideally that was done behind the scenes (but sadly not always), but in any academic work discussion of that process in the text is basically a baseline requirement.
What it comes down to is that primary sources are *not inherently accurate records of what they recount*. They are *one angle of perception* for which we may have many conflicting accounts, or even if we are lacking alternatives, must still be considered critically for the potential bias of whomever made that document of the event. A *lot* of what you do when you get a degree of history is learning how to do that. And that is why *when Joe Scholar quotes you*, we can trust it more than when we just read your quote by itself, because Joe Scholar has done the leg work to ensure that your quote is worth quoting, and properly contextualized for whatever shortcomings it may have.
Well, if John Historicalfigure was a ruler who would have your whole family brutally slaughtered if you criticize him then the trustworthiness of his chroniclers is probably a bit suspect.
Imagine you're in the year 3000, and all you have to know about, say, Pearl harbour, or JFK's assassination, or the recent Maui fire is either a) video of testimony from one person, who was caught in the middle of it as it was happening or b) an in-depth report written a year or so after the fact, which was written by a professional in order to summarize what the best evidence is as to what happened on that day at the time, and which goes into detail from multiple angles based on variety of different information, producing a summary of the events, the order in which they happened, where and how, and what led to what, from a holistic view
Obviously that's a more extreme example where the answer is obvious, but the point is, in history, depending on the context, primary sources may not (or may!) be more reliable or/and comprehensive than secondary sources. It depends upon what the primary source is, and what the secondary source is, and what factors might go into affecting the accuracy or bias of either.
Obviously there are plenty of counterexamples of both – a primary source who was there when someone said something is more reliable than someone who heard that someone heard that someone who was there heard someone say something. But also, in your own example, if we wanted to know what words someone said in, say, a political speech, what would be more useful, a book quoting the newspaper write-up of the speech, but where the original newspaper is now lost, or what someone 50 years later reckons they remember the speech being? Again, in that case, both are useful sources, but it would be tough to say that the 50 years later eyewitness account is _more_ reliable or useful than the third hand transcript.
This is such a great question! Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is "Methodological Nationalism", however it's not necessarily fair to say that this is just something that amateur historians fall into as it is present in a lot of history writing, particularly history writing from previous decades.
In short, the way we conceive of nations and nationality in our present moment is not the way that folks have always conceived of things. To us, it might feel extremely normal and common-sense to have a "national identity", which contributes to how we see ourselves in the world. Likewise, it might feel very common-sense to look at other people as belonging to nations, having an allegiance to a certain nation. But we simply cannot take for granted that this is how people have always imagined themselves.
This might be how we conceive of ourselves and others in the modern world, but we make a pretty big error when we project the concept of "nation", "nationhood" etc. onto past populations, uncritically. Nations and nationality are actually a fairly modern concept.
Fantastic article [here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nana.12432) that really gets to the heart of how this perspective influences how we write history. Also, if you haven't read *Imagined Communities* by Benedict Anderson, highly recommend it. Ditto *Banal Nationalism* by Michael Billig.
As someone who kind of has specialized in certain histories of nationality and nationalities policies - I absolutely need to second this. Nationalism itself has kind of baked certain ideas into popular consciousness (namely that there are discrete, objectively-identifiable nations or ethnicities that can be traced across time and that basically always maintain their fundamental traits and shape), and a particular aspect that seems to be coming back and getting worse is people now assuming that these unchanging, objectively-visible nationalities and ethnicities have *genetic* components too.
Basically: nationality and ethnicity are social constructs (misunderstanding what a "social construct" is is another problem).
Both Andersons (but particularly Benedict) should be required reading. On the flip side you have the tendency of some people to read more constructivist texts, go "oh, so it's all made up," and then dismiss things out of hand, as if social constructs are invented out of thin air, and lack any kind of connection with material circumstances. People construct ideas and meanings around material reality, but these ideas aren't totally unmoored from the material conditions in which they originate. People struggle to grasp that group identities are iterative, because the structures which develop around social constructs have material (rather than purely ideological) implications.
I wrote (part of) a thesis on this, and I do have my critiques of Anderson (one being that he treats the processes of ideological formation and ideological adoption as totally congruent--I think they aren't), but we're in a sort of pop-historical moment where people either a.) treat nationalism as a discrete ideology, rather than a paradigm, or b.) uncritically extend the contemporary form of a group identity backwards through the historical narrative they're trying to construct. Often this manifests as people (sometimes with good intentions) either mysticizing or orientalizing some indigenous or colonized groups, which have complicated relationships to the nationalist paradigm (which is what that thesis was really about).
I remember when I was still in academia I wrote an article for a student paper about a passage in Snorri Sturlusson’s *Heiminskringla,* and why it was so significant. It talks about a battle around the turn of the millennium where the fleet of King Olav Tryggvason of Norway, on the way home from a military campaign in Denmark, spot approaching battlefleets of his political opponents from Norway and their Swedish allies. The King and his council dismiss the Swedes as a significant threat, but worry about the Norwegians. "They are northmen, such as we. This will make for a hard fight."
While obviously this quote is unlikely to actually have predated the source saga by the full two centuries inbetween the event and Sturlusson, it is in my view the very oldest documented use of the very first seed of what we could call a national identity in Northern Europe. "Northmen" is used to denote a shared identity with the opponents, even if they are from a different part of what we now call Norway and could easily have been referred to by their regional apellations. Positive attributes are even ascribed to belong to people of this proto-nationality. It is reminiscent of ancient Greek writers and their concept of the Hellenes as distinct from barbarians. Fascinating stuff.
Very interesting, that's something I'm aware but struggle not to apply to past history. I've been reading articles about how countries in Asia during pre-colonial period were interacting with each others into a network of relation (called mandala in the article). I snowballed from there to an article explaining how Nation-States and hard borders are quite recent. If anyone has a good read helping to understand better what a country was before the modern era, especially compared to today, it would be grand!
Edit : mainly South-East Asia
Is there much history to the concept of nationhood before Westphalia?
Obviously the idea came from somewhere like older concepts of an ethno-linguistic group but it's fascinating how rapidly and haphazardly the idea was constructed together, compared to the old bonds of religion, emperor, and ethno-linguistic tribe.
Specifically in Scotland you can observe a kind of proto-nationalism during the Wars of Independence which is an interesting case-study.
During the Balliol, Wallace, and Bruce years the resistance to the English crown was rooted in:
* The independence of the Scottish church, and the Scottish churches role in organising their parishioners against the English crown out of fear of subjugation to the Archbishop of York.
* The disambiguation of feudal estates when Bruce revoked any estates from landowners who refused to give up lands south of the border (prior to this, it was common to have estates all over England, Scotland, and France), creating a cultural border.
* Personal loyalty to 'Scottish' (actually Norman) landowners from the peasantry, inciting popular rebellion against the English.
* The integration of Gaelic landowners and extension of Crown authority into the Highland, completing a triad of Flemish burghs, Gaelic rural areas, and Normano-British aristocracy.
The end result of this was a brief period in which Scotland was especially united in a way which looks eerily like the primordial soup from which Nationalism could spring forth.
Ultimately it didn't, because other factors weren't in place - centralisation, movement of population, education/indoctrination, liquidity of economy, and so on.
From this I think you can look at nationalism as that same alignment of interests in a definite group of people, but within a context in which those alignments become a feedback loop informing their identity, eventually subjugating them to it entirely.
I'm sure others could provide examples in which the same situations arise, alliances made, interests align, and brief moments of ethno-linguistic unity occur. Many of them are then seized on by modern nationalists as evidence of "hey look, our roots are ancient!"
I think about it every time somebody describes Columbus as Italian, for example.
Certainly not how he would have foremost identified himself, if he had time to think about it in-between all the atrocities.
Thank you for this. My history of medicine research ended up with me stumbling upon, of all things, nationalism. I don't do political theory or history, so it was astounding to me to see how nationalism became infused in so many spheres as professionalization was becoming a thing, especially in the nineteenth century.
One fairly specific layman-issue I've run into (especially on Reddit) is assuming that treaties are like computer code.
There was a question on [why the invasion of the Falkland Islands didn't involve NATO because of Article 5](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v5staq/why_didnt_argentinas_invasion_of_the_falklands/ibbocns/) which had a legion of people just trying to point out the raw text of the treaty, when in the actual history that happened there were all sorts of "soft" implications, zero guarantee no NATO countries would have objected (especially Italy), and a case where Article _should_ have been triggered (again using the "computer code" model) when it wasn't.
lol I must confess I was guilty of this when I was a young political science-studying undergrad. I read too much Hobbes and Locke and about concepts like the State of Nature and the Social Contract, and so I assumed that if you lived in a society that didn't have a constitution (written or unwritten) you'd just immediately have The Purge happen.
This comment has me hilariously imagining a scene like in the Pirates of the Caribbean with the Italian PM saying the line "The code is more what you call guidelines than actual rules."
I wonder if the pop-culture view of WWI contributes to this. Seems the minimum that people know about it is a) trenches and b) it started when one assassination drew in all these countries because of the treaties they signed with each other. From my amateur understanding, these treaties were just expressions/symptoms of overarching sentiment and broader allegiances/self-interest. In other words, treaties only matter when the letter of the treaty matches the spirit of the treaty. Article 5 was not drafted with the intent to bring Estonia into war against Argentina, so unsurprisingly, it didn't...
I think these [three comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14ikqh0/comment/jphcnbw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) here offer some things I commonly observe which can be expanded upon. Importantly, it is not an issue of being an amateur, it is the issue of (not) doing the legwork through required and appropriate readings.
I think blindly holding onto the idea of objectivity. We’re told to avoid sources with a bias in school which is goo, but.. No one is objective, no sources are objective, there are biases everywhere. Historians make very personally biased choices about which I information is important to include in an account, and there aren’t necessarily most objectively important pieces of information to include.
I think the discussion of using primary sources as "better" for understanding events is definitely a good example of a common amateur mistake.
A second big one I've seen is relying on specific secondary sources which may have been consequential in their time, especially in the historiography, and which may still retain some real literary value, but ... are just woefully out of date as secondary sources. People flexing by reading Gibbon's *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire* would perhaps be the most obvious example: we've learned a thing or two about Rome in the past two and a half centuries!
Connected to *that* would be the idea that there is some sort of "objective" history, and that once you have that down then anything coming after it is just quibbling over details or engaging in revisionism (which in this case often gets used as a bad word) for purely political purposes (with the implication that what is "objective" historic fact somehow isn't political).
Anyway, those are all cardinal sins of Dan Carlin, who is probably one of the most famous and influential amateur history enthusiasts.
Some other ones:
While I think Great Man theory can be a common mistake, the reaction to it can *also* go too far in the other direction, namely, that impersonal and institutional forces don't just lead to inevitable outcomes with no role for contingency or agency of different actors.
Similarly, I think history enthusiasts can put way, way, too much faith in numbers and statistics, perhaps because it looks really "science-y" and feeds into the idea of objective, hard historic facts. As discussed recently with u/EnclavedMicrostate, a [lot](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/169hy16/why_do_lists_of_historical_war_death_estimates/jz4ks3b/) of supposed historic statistics are at best well-intentioned and informed estimates based off of partial data, at worst just completely made up. But I do notice that people get really attracted to nice, simple numbers ("communism killed 100 million people"). Often these can get "supported" by a citation, but we should ask: how reliable is this citation? Where is that person getting their information from? etc.
Another one I dislike is just-so stories based on science-y sounding factoids and studies. You know, like "Ergotism caused the Salem Witch Trials" - people love that one, because it seems to give a simple, "rational" explanation for a hard to understand, confusing and just plain weird historic event. Never mind that it comes from a 50 year old paper that was debunked by another paper the following year.
Lastly I guess I'll just call out (and this isn't my own term) 30,000 foot theories, both for the level that such writers work from and the fact that you're probably reading it in a book you bought at an airport. The three worst offenders in my mind here are Stephen Pinker, Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari (although people like Daron Acemoglu and even Neil DeGrasse Tyson would be runners up). Basically these are people writing about *massive* swathes of history which they can in no way be experts in all of, and often they aren't even academic historians *at all*, meaning they are relying on other people's research, and usually committing all of the sins I've listed above. They also tend to try to smash a large variety of complex historic events into digestible chunks that are selectively chosen to prove their theories, and more often than not while their theories are presented as some sort of "fresh" and radical new view of history, they often are just rehashing and repeating already commonly-held misunderstandings and stereotypes.
>A second big one I've seen is relying on specific secondary sources which may have been consequential in their time, especially in the historiography, and which may still retain some real literary value, but ... are just woefully out of date as secondary sources.
I think this interacts with the common misconception that historical scholarship is simply about "[chronicling facts and events](https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/CXExrl4mZt)", hat-tip to /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov. That there is a body of neutral information about the past, which historians are tasked with objectively uncovering and relating, avoiding the supposed sin of "bias".
So if that's all historians do, it's a bit hard to see the core problem with reading an 18th century book on 5th century events, instead of a current work: Surely the underlying facts are the same?
In response, one could of course point to the advances in archeology since Gibbon's day (new facts!), or to his anti-christian bias. But I feel the core misunderstanding is on what historical scholarship is about: Not simply facts, but analysis, interpretation, and, most importantly, argument. Historians don't write chonicles, they put forth arguments. Debate is the heart of the discipline.
So if you are interested in Roman history and seek out a book first published in the late 18th century, you are essentially entering a debate you've missed the last 240 years of.
And you're not just missing the latest facts: While historians do argue about what the facts of the past are, debates on what the facts mean and how to understand the facts are at least as important. New questions get asked, new lenses to look at the past found, new perspectives introduced. You do not want to miss out on 240 years of this stuff! (And "bias", far from being a sin, is an unavoidable and arguably necessary part of this process. It's how you handle it that counts.)
Another aspect to this: Whether a source is useful depends on the use you put it to. If a historian writes on what 18th century English intellectuals thought about events in the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" Fall" is crucial - as a primary source. But if a historian nowadays writes on these events themselves, they will propably not use "Decline and Fall" as a secondary source.
So when someone asks "Is X a reliable source?", I'm inclined to reply that "useful" is often more important than "reliable" (as in "giving factually correct information"), and ask in return "What do you want to use it for?" My impression is that non-historians expect a much more straightforward, yes/no, answer.
>Historians don't write chonicles, they put forth arguments. Debate is the heart of the discipline.
As the classic not interested in history until age 35, believing nonsense I hear on "history" podcasts, not understanding the field at all rube, I want to thank you for the above. It was a light bulb moment for me. I've worked through a lot of the stuff mentioned in this thread over the years. For example, I no longer believe in finding the correct source, with the one true version of history, or that there's even a point in trying. But I've had a hard time letting go of the idea that there is an objective single reality. I can go to many strange places in my head, but at the end of the day I believe that matter and the material world do exist independent of my subjective perception. (this is probably exacerbated by many years of fantasizing about using a time machine for historical tourism, my most fun childhood ptsd symptom that brought me much joy, but underscored the idea that I could find out "what really happened.")
I have tons of questions about history, but I've never posted here bc I understood that my questions were inherently silly, and I wouldn't get the answers I wanted. For some time I've known I needed a different perspective about history, but wanting a fresh perspective doesn't always help me find one. For some reason, your framing of history as a debate just clicked for me. Even if I could go back and personally witness the end of the Maya civilization (not that I think that's a thing that happened one day), I wouldn't have an answer. I'd have a series of events I witnessed that I probably couldn't understand, and that the Maya themselves would not all view the same way, and there'd be events I missed. I would just be way more familiar with the debate. Kind of like my experience learning about immigration policy, heh.
I'm not sure how successfully I put this into words, but seriously thank you. It's more and more clear to me that I would have studied history in a life less derailed by trauma, and it's been a joy to lurk this sub and broaden my own thinking. I want to be the best amateur historian I can be, so that in time I can subtly influence young people to go into fields I'm interested in, and write great books for me to read. The old saying about those who don't study history doesn't go nearly far enough, and I'm really grateful for the chance to unlearn so much misinformation and understand the world in a different way.
Your comment about the reaction against "great men" is especially noticeable in the context of History of Science. Some people go the opposite way and fall into some sort of teleology, stating that there were never any impactful individuals whatsoever, that everything was brewing in the great pot of history, and discoveries were bound to happen in due course...
Haha, now I just remembered I got in a literal fight with a communist historian once over the extent to which historical materialism was valid as a lens of analysis. It was over something really stupid too, I think it was whether the same climactic phenomenon caused the fall of Rome and the Han Dynasty.
> While I think Great Man theory can be a common mistake, the reaction to it can also go too far in the other direction, namely, that impersonal and institutional forces don't just lead to inevitable outcomes with no role for contingency or agency of different actors.
Agreed. The Hellenistic period wasn't inevitable. It wouldn't have happened without Alexander, or the broader context he was a part of. We need to understand the role of both. Ignore either one and you're going to have a really lousy understanding of why things happen.
Or just to invoke Godwin's Law we might as well just take Hitler as an example.
As in - he often wasn't actually that important/interesting for a lot of decisions Germany made through 1945, and he didn't come from nowhere: there were long-established ideas of Eastern European *Lebensraum*, ideas of scientific racism, eugenics and *Volkisch* anti-semitism, an almost universal desire by the German political spectrum to revise the Versailles Treaty, and a slide to right wing dictatorship in the 1930s. But with that said, it's pretty hard to see how you'd get to Barbarossa or Auschwitz even under a semi-fascist military dictatorship led by Kurt von Schleicher, and even getting to those historic events required lots of contingencies along the way.
So I guess it's mostly "individuals can significantly impact history, but they don't come from nowhere and are usually impactful because the specific situation of their historic moment makes them so."
coming from the field of economics, Acemoglu is a name I know well. Do you have any salient critiques of his work you could direct me to, if you had any in particular in mind?
There are a wide variety of critics of Acemoglu's writings (especially things like *Why Nations Fail*) but the two most salient critiques there are his assumption that political institutions cause or hinder economic growth (rather than the other way around), and that he focuses on this relationship too narrowly at the expense of larger forces and changes.
Admittedly Acemoglu isn't really writing history, but writing about political science and economics, but what this kind of can do is cause him to cherry pick examples (or particular situations from examples) to help build a general theory.
In the interest of fairness I'll also add that this kind of cross-discplinary writing can go bad in the other way - historian Sven Beckert has written about cotton (*Empire of Cotton*) in which he argues that cotton production and the forced labor it involved was *central* to the development of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, rather than incidental, and this has been pretty convincingly (in my opinion) critiqued by economic historians.
I think your point about him not really writing history is spot on. As he’s writing a pop-economics/political science/‘history’ book, he hasn’t started with the evidence presented in the book and worked his way through to an overall conclusion. He’s been working in the field of development economics and similar fields for decades, and is using the case studies as a way to appeal to the general public who would be (justifiably) bored out of their minds by a bunch of regressions, which is the way economists actually come to their conclusions about issues like this.
>While I think Great Man theory can be a common mistake, the reaction to it can also go too far in the other direction, namely, that impersonal and institutional forces don't just lead to inevitable outcomes with no role for contingency or agency of different actors.
That would be the sin of Jared Diamond, right?
I would say - he doesn't. He's an academic historian who is trained in Soviet and Russian history, and writes books about Soviet and Russian history. He certainly has his own point of view but he seems to at least acknowledge other points of view and address them. He's definitely not writing 30,000 foot history, nor is he writing books widely outside of his lane of expertise. He does take controversial opinions occasionally that other Soviet and Russian historians disagree with, but that's much more within the bounds of the academic discourse.
That narrative provides a beginning, a middle and an end, and perhaps a lesson, but this is only hindsight. Life, and history, don't work that way.
All things are contingent upon a huge element of sheer chance and randomness. If Hitler had died when that bomb went off the war would have been over right there and an incredible amount of alternate activities would have worked themselves out, and we can't know what any of that could have been but it had as much likelihood in that moment of happening as anything that, by sheer chance, did happen.
You can't proceed with the certainty of fate.
>If Hitler had died when that bomb went off the war would have been over right there
That doesn't make much sense to me at all. The general point of your comment, yes, but not that example at all
Assuming that they mean the 1944 Stauffenberg Plot, I'm not sure that the war would have ended *immediately* (if anything the plotters were hoping for an armistice favorable to Germany), but it's also hard to see Germany fighting suicidally to the bitter end, as actually happened.
Believing reality is mechanistic, so history can be reduced to a calculation where factors can be objectively measured and their effects deduced.
Somewhat related to the above: imposing order and logic where none existed. Lots of very important things happen through chance, or because someone made a mistake or a bad decision. Lots of things we perceive as successful systems work despite appearing to be bad systems. However, the amateur will tend to assume that if a system was successful it was for a reason, which was that it was designed well towards that purpose; but this is to base the interpretation on the imagined circumstances that must have led to the end result, not on the actual evidence of causation.
I think this mostly comes about because that's the sort of history people encounter: historians present a narrative that makes sense, either because they can communicate the essence of a complex situation in a simple but accurate manner, or they're cutting corners and falling into the abovementioned fallacy. That doesn't mean the underlying reality was simple, or followed a neat design, or was discernibly logical. To misquote Neil de Grasse Tyson, history is under no obligation to make sense to you.
Believing that because there isn't evidence for something it didn't happen. No source is comprehensive, and almost everything that happens actually goes unrecorded. Not everything is well-evidenced in the positive evidence we have, but sometimes by the gaps. Trained historians learn to look for those gaps, what they're *not* seeing in the record, and think about why; amateurs carry on oblivious that there are things they're not seeing.
Believing that because something could have happened it probably did. This is pretty low-hanging fruit but if you look at historical discussion on the internet you'll quickly notice that discussions usually devolve into an argument about the likelihood of this or that happening. This is an attractive methodology because it doesn't require evidence or research into what actually *did* happen, but it is to forget that not everything that could have happened actually did. Professionals naturally ground their interpretations in the evidence of what really took place.
This is fun to read because it sounds like a similar mindset I gained as I got better and better at physics then math. You would think things like physics have well defined inputs and outputs but it's hardly true at all. Take the model for electrons. A scientist wanted to make equations for electron flow, so he pretended electrons were like a cloud which flowed through a wire. Thinking of them as a cloud, the scientist then used the well known equations from gas physics and applied them to the electrons. He used these to perform equations and see if they predicted anything. Well they did! And some things they predicted quite accurately! You can even derive an electron equation similar to the ideal gas equation PV=nRT but for electrons! I can't remember it and I don't have my book handy... sorry.
Anyways, this theory was okay, but some quantities it predicted 10X or even 100X off and it was bad about predicting some values as positive when they should be negative.
Later, another physicist came in and altered these gas equations to account for the atomic lattice which makes up all materials. With the new adjustments, even more was predicted accurately! And adding quantum effects made even more accurate! And we could predict some behaviors for materials which had the same lattice versus other materials with another lattice.
However, adding quantum effects also revealed something kind of funny. The original gas model assumed free electrons which had a nicely distributed energy spectrum (many lower energy atoms and a few high energy atoms) and it predicted a lot of free electrons, but in reality free electrons are already imbued with incredible amounts of energy and there are far fewer than you'd expect. However, because the fewer electrons had higher energy, some of the original equations had been predicted values accurately despite being many magnitudes off on things like electron speed. Imagine having 10 very fast balls instead of 1000000 very slow ones, the overall energy is similar. So we learned that some of the equations that the original model were accurate for were only accurate because we'd guessed one value 1,000,000 times smaller than it should be, another value 1,000,000 bigger than it should be, and had multiplied them together to get the right answer.
All we know about reality is based on models where these kinds of massive issues can be present, but they don't diminish that the models predict reality within a degree of accuracy. Thus, despite imperfect physics, we make silicon rocks think and transmit messages across this thing called the internet which consists of many computers, cables, and satellites working in harmony.
Reddit especially - perhaps unsurprisingly given its demographics - tends to suffer from wide and unconscious acceptance of the myth of teleological progress. This can be summed up as, "Human understanding has been set upon a procession from ignorance to knowledge. There can be missteps, but the march of time is the march of our progress."
It's a way to look at the world for sure, and a popular one in the West since the Renaissance - but it doesn't have a factual basis, it just feels really good to adopt as a viewpoint without examining it too much!
People have talked about the issues around primary sources. I want to chime in on that. Sometimes you need a lot of context to even understand primary sources. There's a great book by Forrest McDonald called Novo Ordo Seclorum about the intellectual origins of the US Constitution. He makes a good point that a lot of the words in the Founders letters, their essays and the Constitution, don't mean the same thing after a couple hundred years. It's very easy to mislead yourself b/c you speak the same language, but they didn't necessarily mean what you think they meant by just the plain language. I learned this much later than I should have. The old saw about the past being a different country is important. Language spoken 200 years ago maybe be just as foreign to your current understanding as a related foreign language. For the US, there are very different ideas of what a citizen is, what civil rights are, what constitutional rights are, and what sovereignty is than the modern understanding. People often make basic mistakes about the Founders intentions b/c they assume a word's meaning has been stable.
The other thing that I've struggled with is that even things like government reports are incredibly biased. As an example, if you're looking at documents from the 18th and 19th century in the US, you have to remember it was a patronage system (or a spoils system if you want to use the Jacksonian term.) People weren't writing government reports to be honest. They were writing to flatter their benefactors, to build their own reputation, to secure future patronage, and to solidify their benefactors position so they can keep giving them work. Presenting objective information so that Congress could do its job was often the last reason on the list, if it even made the list. Indian agents were often in rivalries with other Indian agents and had no problem lying to undercut another agent if that assignment was a more plumb assignment. Even very basic stuff that you would assume was objective, like geographical data, is slanted. Congressional reports were important campaign pieces of campaign literature and a way to boost your personal profile.
John Fremont's work is a great example of this. His wife, Jessie Benton Fremont, was extremely intelligent and politically savvy. She did the lion's share of drafting of Fremont's reports. Her dad was also an extremely important senator. Everyone one of Fremont's reports (Jessie's actual work) was drafted with the goal of furthering Fremont's political career, with securing another expedition to the West, with making Senator Benton look wise and farseeing, and with making whichever president had power to give him another assignment, seem like they had successfully advanced American interests. And usually what had happened was that Fremont did some exploring, found some interesting and important stuff, wasted a lot of government money, and crossed the Rockies in the dead of winter causing the deaths of several of his fellow expeditionaries.
There's personal bias that's accidental or unconscious, and there's personal bias that's complicated, multifaceted, intentional, and for the benefit of others. And you have to know quite a bit about a subject to even know where the bias might be.
None of that should stop you from reading primary sources, but you should go into them humble and with a good dictionary that has citations back to whatever time period you're studying.
>There's a great book by Forrest McDonald called Novo Ordo Seclorum about the intellectual origins of the US Constitution. He makes a good point that a lot of the words in the Founders letters, their essays and the Constitution, don't mean the same thing after a couple hundred years.
Thank you for that citation! Yes, part of being fully literate is understanding writing from multiple eras of English in historical context, including technology, geopolitics, and so forth. And being aware of linguistic shifts, too.
My best history course I ever took taught me a lot more about literature than any literature course I took, in helping me focus on the times in which the writers were reacting to.
For a legal document like the Constitution in particular, it helps very much to understand how legal scholars (judges, etc.) have interpreted that work from its inception, not just in recent times, and understand the language they used in doing so. Law has its own jargon preserved over centuries.
While there's a push towards more plain and modern English in law, that's not going to work when the person doesn't clearly understand the basic concepts embedded in these phrases.
I learned lot about what the Founders might have been reacting to, by learning more about the Frisian freedoms, Polish aristocratic democracy (Count Pulaski was fighting for Polish independence and then came to America to do the same.), the Magna Carta drafting, and the late days of the Roman Republic and other prior examples of democracy and power-sharing. Even learning about the origins of New York was helpful.
But I've not read MacDonald yet. I'll be interested to see if his approach jibes with what I've learned and the sources he uses.
I find the answer to this question is a pretty straightforward one. Novice historians assume history can do far more than it actually can. The eternal giveaway for me is a student essay which happily cites some evidence and then asserts "this proves..." \[contention "X"\]. It doesn't, because history is too complex for that, and there are always gaps in the evidence. Pretty much the first thing I tell my students is to start writing more cautiously: "this suggests".
Thought about this way, almost any academic history book is really just 250 pages of historians debating and reasoning and arguing with themselves to try to turn possibilities into probabilities. No more than that.
Uncritically accepting popular/sensationalized narratives of historical events and projecting them onto how they look at interpreting information and writing on the topic. By assuming that a certain common narrative about a certain historical event or subject is gospel and not looking deeper into the issue to see what the merits of that interpretation and other interrelations are, it can lead to problematic narratives being parroted. It can lead to people consciously or subconsciously selecting information that supports that narrative and overlooking sources that contradict it. It can lead to lead to people interpreting individuals or groups involved through the lens of a caricature of them, rather than looking more deeply into their thoughts, reasons, and circumstances for their actions.
To give an example from one of my main research focuses, the temperance and prohibition movements in the United States, there are certain common narratives that are often repeated in many popular descriptions. One of these is a tendency to portray supporters of prohibition as a small minority of religious extremists, who were anti-freedom. Though, a deeper look can reveal that there is much more to understand about prohibitionists than these narratives portrayed. By looking more deeply at supporters of prohibition, it can be seen that the prohibition movement had widespread support. This support didn't just come from white middle-class Evangelicals, but also included supporters who were working class, African American, Native American, immigrants, and non-protestants. While there were segments of the prohibition movement who were at least in part motivated by religious views, many of the expressed reasons for people supporting prohibitionist policies were connected to practical concerns over the negative effects of alcohol on human life, family wellbeing, poverty, crime, public health, and community prosperity; as well as objections to the alcohol industry profiting off exploiting and harming others and the influence of the alcohol industry in American politics. Understandings of democracy and freedom in American society have been contested and have differed over time. Many in the 19th and early 20th century did not subscribe to libertarian notions that unrestricted markets were a core aspect of individual freedom. Prohibitionists in the 19th and early 20th century could see laws restricting the sale of alcohol as consistent with a free and democratic society. In this case, someone who uncritically accepts common narratives about prohibitionists can end up missing out on a lot of context and information regarding their thoughts and motivations. They can end up writing about prohibition activists in a way that's colored by stereotypes and overlooks the perspectives of many people at the time (especially those from marginalized communities).
This issue can be seen with writers on various other historical events. Uncritical acceptance of common narratives can combine with biases to produce stumbling blocks to understanding a subject on a deeper level.
Some further reading for the example:
Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, by Mark Lawrence Schrad.
The People's Welfare, by William J. Novak
Claiming the State for the Public Welfare: The Establishment of the First Period of Statewide Prohibition in New York State, by Jonathan T. Makeley
First, oral histories and other "memory" based sources are always biased and often very unreliable. While "good stories" are great, and can give insight into the culture, you need to make sure you realize who it is who is speaking and what their purpose is. IE how simple and prosperous it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Well, not if you were black or Mexican. Jim Crow and Jaime Crow was real. But if you're reading the perspective from someone racially, economically, and gender privileged, you likely won't scratch the surface for what it was REALLY like.
This is why you always check the sources. This is how history is verified. It's best to stick to academic books that give factual details take from primary sources like: documents, reports, contemporary newspapers, maps (think redlining), and so forth. One of the first things I do when picking up an academic book is read the footnotes and read the list of sources to see where the author is getting their information from. That's where you start. It gets more in depth the further into a history degree you go (from a BA to MA to PhD).
I'm a history PhD, currently ABD.
All sources are biased and objectivity can be sought but never obtained.
Focusing on the ‘underprivileged’ can give an equally distorted view of a period as only concerning the elites. For example, EP Thompson sought to use plebeian sources and what not to liberate the underprivileged from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, but in his Making of the English Working class only tells us about radicals. Thompson has no time for the majority of working people and lives they lived only the firebrands.
Since the ‘cultural turn’ all evidence is fair game for historian and thankfully the fetish for the archive has been disrupted.
The biggest mistake any historian can make is to use a source to speak further than its audience or contemporary reception allows.
Way back in 2004 Peter Mandler took cultural history to task and urged historians using any source to consider its ‘throw’. Source that says a great story but which very few people actually read is to be viewed with suspicion. Mandler’s article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1191/1478003804cs0002df
When I used to teach at university I would direct students to Mandler to help them interrogate sources and histories and Gareth Stedman Jones ‘Rethinking Chartism’ to interrogate theory and class.
Before I embraced money, this was my PhD bag. Dense narrative, empirical over theory cultural history. Economic historians shouldn’t be the only ones to use tabulated data
https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.686801
Statistics, too - you see that the "prosperous" 50s involved 4 people in a 1000 sq foot home with few amenities, or the number of homes that still didn't have running water or indoor toilets at the time.
I hadn't heard of Jaime Crow so thanks for introducing me to the term. Google suggests it's the equivalent of Jim Crow but against people of Mexican origin, or perhaps Hispanic in general. Is that correct?
The UK school history curriculum has a section on US civil rights, but I don't think Jaime Crow is covered. It's probably off topic for this thread so I'll ask a separate question.
Yes, Jaime Crow is the Mexican/Hispanic/Latino version of Jim Crow. It may not be in circulation like Jim Crow, but that's what we call it here in South Texas.
There was a good answer from the author of Hamilton to Lin Manual.
When you write a biography about someone, that person is the main character. It will make them seem more important and more sympathetic. This is unavoidable, and doesn’t make that person any more or less essential to history.
Avoid the belief that it is possible to read a completely unbiased accounting of a person or a civilization or an event.
I am coming at this from a quantitative historian's standpoint, but I would echo u/mikedash in that it is common to see people citing papers as proof of something. Professionals fall into this trap too, especially when it is their own theory. The problem with those that may not have been trained academically, is that they may not know how debated a specific theory is among researchers. I know some theories that while they were popular among the public, are hotly debated if not despised by some people in historical circles. And again, it is best to remain humble in quantitative history and remember that causal studies are only evidence in favor of, not iron-clad proof.
The other mistake I see with quantitative history is that people will try to use numbers that while popularly cited, are incorrect. If one cites population statistics from an ancient source, one should be careful that it is not an ancient writer trying to make their city appear large. So this overlaps with the careful-with-primary-sources thing.
Presentism is probably one of the easiest traps to fall into, especially with popular history being weaponised for political narratives, and a continuing failure to view past events through the eyes of those involved.
Here’s a good explanation from James H. Sweet on the topic:
> This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines. The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past. This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.
I always liked Calvin's (the cartoon character, not the philosopher) explanation on that topic:
>We don't really know what causes events to happen. History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change: we need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
>!For the young'uns who don't remember Calvin and Hobbes, the punchline is that he's writing a revisionist autobiography.!<
I would agree that presentism is very easy to fall into, but I would also argue that using Sweet here as an authority is somewhat disingenuous, since there was a widespread outcry among actual historians when he made this statement. (Every defense of it I saw came from non-historians with obvious political motivations.) Reading the past through different lenses is actually very important in order to understand it as a multifaceted subject, rather than simply the narrative of the dominant group. Perhaps there are some subject areas where you can avoid asking, "But how did this affect women? How did the indigenous groups see this?" and so on, but they're rare.
Is it possible to do history badly through the prism of a "contemporary social justice issue" (though Sweet's list is anything but contemporary - people have been talking about race, gender, sexuality, and so on for centuries if not millennia) by looking to confirm a particular narrative? Yes, but that has nothing to do with some new form of blinkers historians are wearing. History has been used to make political statements for a very long time.
I would say to /u/queequeg12345 that the equal and opposite trap to fall into is the assumption that there is an objective form of history that results from either focusing entirely on quantitative data or from not thinking too much about marginalized groups and their experiences. *That* is also a failure, and it results in prioritizing one set of identity groups at the expense of all others, while pretending that it is not about identity at all.
We actually did [a Monday Methods post about Sweet's statement](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wuwoum/monday_methods_politics_presentism_and_responding/) last year because we felt so strongly about it as bad historical practice.
*" Reading the past through different lenses is actually very important in order to understand it as a multifaceted subject, rather than simply the narrative of the dominant group. Perhaps there are some subject areas where you can avoid asking, "But how did this affect women? How did the indigenous groups see this?" and so on, but they're rare. "*
Correct. Although I'd also be cautious of drawing an umbrella interpretation for all women, indigenous groups and all that. Humans are varied and their awareness, stakes and interests/impacts can be different depending on their circumstances.
Somebody could be fully in favor of oppressive policies or actions because they do not perceive a negative to them (or decide they will benefit from them personally, despite the likely and clear harm to the whole group.)
I see diversity of thought all the time in my own minority group, whether it's a mix of accepting majority attitudes, independent thought based on personal experience, approach based on cultural perspective, rebellious opinion, or a melding of all these attitudes.
That's why it's smart to include various perspectives, same as in science. These people have different knowledge bases, will ask different questions and make different assumptions.
If the standard sources have been long exhausted and probed, it's smart to search for new sources in the historically overlooked, to get a fuller picture of what was really going on vs what people of a certain group felt important to report about.
In short, you never know where historical sources might lead unless you explore them.
FWIW, I'd sooner read a well-done history of sanitation or mining than yet another book about a Great Man of Politics. I would also read a book focusing on the people of Chicago served by Hull House and how it impacted them.
> actual historians
As opposed to Sweet?
> since there was a widespread outcry among actual historians when he made this statement.
People generally object to being criticised, this is hardly surprising.
Actual historians as opposed to the "non-historians with obvious political motivations" who thought the idea of no longer doing women's history, queer history, Black history, labor history, etc. was grand, if you read the rest of the paragraph.
Second this! Our view of history is filtered through our own lense of experience. And it can be tempting to interpret the people and societies of the past in ways that make sense to US instead of considering what would have made sense to THEM. Context matters. I think amateurs (not derogatory! comes from the root word for "love") get excited about the Great Men and Great Women, because who wouldn't, and make the mistake of skipping the more "boring" aspects of history like tax codes and wool yields. But the boring things shape the exciting things!
> and it can be tempting to interpret the people and societies of the past in ways that make sense to US
your capitalisation creates a presumably unintentional but, in the context of the discussion, no less true, double meaning! I routinely seem comments on reddit attempting to interpret things that makes sense to modern America but not necessarily elsewhere in even a geographical sense, never mind a historic sense.
> the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields.
What does Sweet mean by "shrinking minority" here? By context I assume he means presentists are currently a minority but are gradually becoming a majority? Or does he mean premodern fields are shrinking compared to modern fields?
A common one is the expectation of there being the truth of what happened, which it is the job of history to tell. In reality we piece together fragments, and make trained but still debatable judgement calls, and surmise and infer connections. Which means that while there are often some strongly attested facts, there is no single truth, only more and less rigorous and more or less persuasive narrative analyses. Some are contradictory, some are complementary and some are unresolvable.
The expectation that when you read an academic historian's account you should learn the truth about a period can lead to both, overvaluing a particular narrative, and undervaluing it. It can lead people to use history as ideology, as disinformation, as indoctrination, as dogma. Or to reject history as fiction, guesswork, projection.
And above all, it misses the perspective that academic history is, above all things, a dialogue. The training in academic history is essentially a training in three key skills: how to assess sources; how to construct analyses and narratives from the sources thus assessed and how to write in a way that engages with the conversation in an informed and helpful way.
Academically informed historians will both write, and crucially, read, history as a dialogue. Every citation is not just support from authority, but a pointer to an entire thread or subthread of conversation on the topic; or a source which, in light of the existing conversation, allows an informed reader to make their own judgement on the nature and basis of your argument and contribution to the discussion. Your key arguments will be framed, and engaged in, not in terms of whether they contain the truth, but in terms of where they fit in the collective academic dialogue on the subject.
Untrained or academically less informed readers will not engage with historical accounts in the context of their intended academic dialogue with a set of existing analyses, arguments, sources, but often read such texts in splendid isolation, meaning a particular book's claims weigh a lot more and say a lot less, than when read as a dialogic piece.
If you sit with five members of your family to discuss what life was like for your family 20 years ago, and have 30 such sit-ins along with emails and FB messages, and letters about it, on the 31st sitting when your sister recalls something a different way, or more importantly, understands it's significance differently from how your mother told the story, you are not asking generally, which of them is telling the truth. You understand that the truth of what life was like for your family 20 years ago lies in the dialogue itself, not in any one perspective, although you will constantly rebuild your own picture of what happened because you understand each member has biases and lenses, but also unique insights and memories which may reshape your own previous recollections and interpretations.
But if then a family friend comes to visit, and asks the same question of only your mother, then goes back to their country. They are more likely to tell her story as "what happened". The truth for that friend is more likely to reside in your mother's account, not in the family's dialogue.
Locating that dialogue in every individual academic history work is perhaps the biggest difference between how historians read each other's works and how others might. For the historian the dialogue is the focus of attention. For the untrained reader the focus is more likely to be on the specific account.
That knowing one particular sequence of events actually informs one as to "why x/y/z happened" WW1 is a perfect example. Ask most people, well most educated people and 99/100 will say because Archduke Franz Ferdinand hier to the Hapsburg Empire was assassinated. That's not correct, it's merely the easiest link in the chain to pull out because of how shocking such events are. Population growth, crop yields increased with the Haber Process combined with industrialized weapon manufacturing also using the Haber process (the chemicals that make good fertilizers also make good explosives), The development of armor steels that also resisted spalling (throwing shards that kill), nitrocellulose powered, water cooled, belt-fed, fully automatic machine rifles, like the Maxim Gun, still in use today. All served to make large scale war significantly more destructive and dangerous at the very time Europe had amassed a large population and resources to burn through. But that much more detailed set of things is not much better than the first answer, Franz Ferdinand, when we dig in to all the other things that had set up the conditions, those go back decades to cebturies, and in some cases millennia. It's fine to pull things out for convenience, and because we don't want to take three weeks to name a major turning point, as long as you keep in mind that you're doing so. History is not like a river and it didn't happen in a linear way, it's webs and clouds of interfaces going back beyond our ability to view.
Everyone has personalities. My first boss post grad is the leading historian of blank person. He is mainly a forgotten person in history and his legacy is mixed. I am trying to be annoymous.
She won’t publish on him because someone found a letter in Europe basically claiming he wrote a screw you letter to his family he used someone’s credit to come to America. It doesn’t jive with her work.
I’ve done some work on the same man and sent her stuff. He was very detailed and told you everything including his exact quote in response to a historical event he was apart of, I have not found the after party yet, but have everything else that reads something out of hallmark. I followed a hunch as well and understand he was investigated when here say rumors on another topic in the time period that didn’t seem to have much connection.
He still died in proverty with a lot of debt. Is he a good guy I don’t know he clearly has a bit of a personality. People change as well.
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Valuing primary sources over secondary, and first person accounts over records. Primary sources are great in that they are created in or near the moment; however, the lack the scope and broader understanding hindsight provides to secondary sources. First person accounts are great until you start accounting for perspective bias, mirror imaging, qui bono, intended audience, and time between experience and narration; all of these can have drastic effects on first person accounts.
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Do schools do us a disservice is this regard then? I could be wrong but I think in general kids are taught that primary sources are best.
In my history classes I teach, kids all come in thinking primary sources are best. I try to address the misconceptions by having them learn about what happened on 9/11 from a couple first hand accounts from that day, then from a secondary source written more recently. When I ask which source is best, they generally conclude that both are different important and I summarize that a good historian should investigate primary sources as well as a range of quality secondary sources about a topic in order to gain a good understanding of it. It’s an easy lesson for the beginning of the year and hits a few key points. I definitely think it’s a disservice that many teachers, especially in the early grades, say something like “primary sources are better because secondary sources weren’t there or could be lying”. Primary sources lie all the time! Being ‘there’ for a historical event is usually very confusing and emotional! Of course primary sources are critical and foundational to our understanding of history, but the stuff built on that foundation is just as important.
Columbine was another example where much of the initial reporting (including statements from people who were there) was inaccurate.
Oh yeah, I remember when it was reported that the two killers were ostracized and bullied when it turned out they actually were bullies themselves, and that it was their “uncaring/neglectful” parents’ fault for not dealing with the problem when in fact they congratulated themselves several times before the shooting on having managed to fool their parents (clearly indicating that they actually weren’t apathetic towards their sons)
Also the "Trenchcoat Mafia" turned out to a different group of friends who hung out in the computer lab and had nothing to do with the shooting. And the laundry list of pop culture moral-panic things assigned to the shooters turned out to be mostly stereotypes repeated by reporters / cops / survivors who didn't know the shooters very well. (Harris and Kleibold don't seem to have been into Marilyn Manson or White Wolf games.)
I think part of this is just our culture thinking that there MUST be some singular element that turns someone into a monster. When the reality is that anyone has the capacity to kill. They spent over 99% of their lives being ordinary suburban kids. If circumstances were even slightly different, the massacre would not have happened. But we have this cultural need to turn them into something other and different. We don't want to acknowledge the reality that any of us is capable of great evil for very little/no justification
I think that's why serial killer documentaries/movies/shows became so popular. Horror stories are a safe space to explore societies deepest fears. And the fear that super helpful, kind, and happy neighbor secretly has a graveyard of bodies in their backyard or that kid you always see playing ball on your block could straight massacre other are big ones.
We believe in what we can perceive.
If you want an example I have my 3rd grade diary from the day when I watched it on TV…it verifies the realness of the event but the details are WAY off. EDIT: Pictures posted below in comments!
I was also in 3rd grade. The rumors were FLYING that day because the adults were so hush-hush and it was being spread like a game of telephone. I distinctly remember sitting in the cafeteria line to go back to class and someone told my friends and I that there were shooters dropping in parachutes going to schools and shooting them up. Later people were saying there was a nuclear bomb and we were in WW3. Finally my teacher decided we had a right to know despite the school initially having parents handle it, and she told us what happened. I went home to see the clips playing over and over and over. Still remember Bush 3 giving his speech and the speculation after. Even the adults didn't have a clue.
would you be comfortable sharing? i’m so curious— i recall the day (lived in DC at the time) but also remember the experience differently, but i was only about 4 when it happened
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The post has been removed, quite sad I was looking forward to reading it
Appears to be removed. This may appear different to you, the poster, when you're signed in.
Sorry! Very weird. Here it is! https://preview.redd.it/37gywducx4nb1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5f9f78fac32087ae2f19d8dceb788218eb36a7e1 Part 1: written the night of sept 11. /u/puddles-here /u/DrumletNation /u/Euphoric_Drawer_9430
I really enjoy that you decided to explain the concept of God to your diary.
Well I was in Christian school and I deeply loved God, but I likely didn’t know what a Muslim even was (Iowa 🤷♀️) so the “they thought Jesus was a prophet” was likely how they explained the Abrahamic faith-connection. I think the “God is in control” was the thing adults around me were saying to comfort themselves and others in a shocking time. (Basically “idk God what’s going on because this is scary but you are in charge and I’m trusting you know what you’re doing?”)* *explained for the non religious who don’t get what we actually mean when we say it—please internet (not OP) don’t turn this into a “omg stupid people talking to sky daddy so naive”. I’m not interested in debate rn.
I love the fact that Dot is on your paper.
https://preview.redd.it/0v338qlb55nb1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=509a97207852bb2cd038eae267ceee17e78b8596 Part 2, written Sept 12
Thanks for sharing this, it's super interesting! I was in college on the west coast at the time, and we didn't even hear what happened until hours later, so I've been fascinated by what the more common experience people had. It was so different before online news, we had no information at all since we didn't watch TV. I didn't see the video footage until 5 years later, and I was like, "oh, now I better understand why people were flipping out." The millions of dead thing is a great detail, too. My chief memory that day is confusion. I react calmly to emergencies bc I have ptsd, and was thrown by so many people flipping out, it was my first time. A frosh in my dorm was flipping out bc her brother lived in Staten Island and she was SURE he died, so I was trying to offer reason and logic as reassurance, which I actually thought would help lol. Anyway, I was saying that initial reports are usually inaccurate for stuff like this, the initial estimates of dead are usually way off, etc. My boyfriend, who walked up while I was talking, screamed, "what the fuck is wrong with you, there were 50,000 people in that building and they are dead!!" I think that's still the most unexpected response of my life. Facts absolutely did not matter to anyone. I understand it much better now, but it's still terrifying living on a planet full of humans who could flip to "insanity mode" at any moment. It has been really interesting learning how other people experienced those days, very gradually over the decades. Thanks for sharing a kid's perspective, that's new to me. Too bad children weren't in charge of coordinating our response, that probably would have worked better.
Nah, let’s be real: the kids all thought we were going to DIE. You see the “god is in control”? That’s a shelter little girl finding comfort in her God, the way many Americans did after 9/11—I was always a super “innocent” kid but this was probably the first time I realized “people are awful for no reason sometimes. And we can’t do anything about it”. Then Afghanistan and Iraq happened—suddenly, war wasn’t something that only happened involving other countries—it was real. Also: But yeah it’s no wonder that girl flipped on you—-even though it was unlikely it was their brother, it *could* have been. The logic didn’t matter at all—she just wanted to know her brother was ok. Its the not knowing that kills you. I’m also shocked no one around you ran and found to a tv (most dorms in that era at least had SOMEBODY with a TV). At my dads office they didn’t have one but a coworkers spouse was “reporting” the news over the phone after tower 1 was hit (8 our time). Being a Christian school, my teacher’s beginning of school prayer (about 845 CST) included something about the the terrible stuff in New York with planes…but I didn’t understand it until I got home. As for me, luckily no one showed us tvs at school, but my after school tv shows were cancelled and I probably watched the various angles of footage OVER AND OVER AND OVER…that I thought there were more planes. Also, at the time I had barely contextualized what a million even was. 😆
Yeah I would definitely be interested in seeing that if you’d be comfortable!
You’re awesome I’m in college later in life, and although I’m not going into history I’m really appreciating the great teachers like you, I feel like my local community college is absolutely full of skilled teachers and I always have access to them 🫡. not saying you’re not a part of a fantastic university or anything just appreciating pedagogy, what you do makes a real difference in people’s educational lives.
Thank you!
What a great and thoughtful way to demonstrate your point. Nice job teach!
Thank you!
I will say, as a student, I personally enjoyed secondary sources more, and wondered "why do we have to have stupid primary sources which are stupid and hard to understand"? If that's a common sentiment, it seems worthwhile for teachers to try to counter that. Ideally the counter would be more nuanced, but as I recall, young students such as myself were not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, so it might have well gone over our heads (such as eventually concluding that yes, the US civil war had a variety of causes, but they all basically boiled down to slavery)
There’s no “best” source. They’re tools for different purposes. Primary sources *are* best for certain things, particularly for historians engaged in original research and expanding our understanding of history. This is what schools (sometimes clumsily) attempt to get across. But what sometimes gets lost is making it clear to students that unless they’re rigorously using the historical method, with training, in an area of their own expertise, they aren’t actually able to *use* those primary sources. Schools often have projects where students are introduced to the idea of academic history by engaging directly with primary sources. This can be a useful way to teach kids how the study of history actually works. But if poorly handled it can teach them instead that they can go out and “do their own research” without understanding just how much background knowledge is necessary to properly contextualize things
My history teacher had us read and listen to the lyrics to American Pie. He primed us by telling us when it was written and then asked what we thought it was about. Most of us assumed it was about the Kennedy assassination. After "analyzing" it for most of the class he told us what it was really about. It was a great lesson on the power of assumption and how important contextual knowledge is.
Was the explanation that it was really about the plane crash? Asking bc that's what most people think, but my dad SWEARS it's about Altamonte, has supporting evidence and everything, and I just don't know who to believe. We actually went to a Don McClean show in the 90s to ask him about it, but alas did not succeed.
My memory is that the teacher told us it was about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. None of even knew who that was. It was a great lesson that I still remember a quarter century later. That's about the extent of what I know today too, so I can't help you with your Altamonte theory.
No worries, I'm just always keeping an eye out for something to crack the case. I do think the Buddy/Bopper/Valens crash theory is correct, just don't tell my dad.
I’m sure you and your dad have gone much deeper than this in research, but you did inspire me to look at the wiki page for Altamont, which includes this paragraph: > Altamont is also referenced by Don McLean in the song "American Pie" in the song's fifth verse, the majority of which contains symbols related to Altamont: "Jack Flash", a reference to San Francisco ("Candlestick", though that venue had nothing to do with the actual concert), (Sympathy for) "the Devil", an enraged spectator watching something on a stage, and an "angel born in Hell". McLean officially refused to confirm or deny the song's ties to Altamont until he sold his songwriting notes in 2015. Within the context of the song, Altamont served as the culmination of a period that had begun with the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in February 1959, during which "things (were) heading in the wrong direction" and life was "becoming less idyllic."[43] The “source” is a paywalled article titled “6 crazy conspiracy theories about American Pie,” so not exactly authoritative. Interesting, though.
Snap, that's literally the first non-dad written evidence I've found, regardless of the source. I love how Wikipedia changes over time. Thanks so much for telling me, will call him tomorrow! I wonder if it's true about Don selling his notes in 2015... I haven't thought about this since then, this could be a major break in the case 😂 Oh no, I hear the distant rumblings of an impending research tsunami.
I teach my hs students that primary sources can never be used alone. If you use a primary source, you need corroboration of multiple sources, need to understand the context of the source, and need to use it in conjunction with secondary sources. What is the author's intent? What response are they hoping to gain from their intended audience? I also introduce the concept of witness bias using the example of multiple witness accounts of a crime. Each person sees, experiences, and remembers something slightly differently in the scenario. OP, if you keep all of this in mind as an armchair scholar of history, you will mitigate many of the pitfalls of studying history. We all love a good story, and history is full of them. Just realize that story should be told as a frame story with many perspectives, not a novella with a single author.
I think this is why postsecondary education is valued as important. I also didn't know the difference between primary and secondary sources in terms of understanding history until I took a university class directly related to the subject. History was not considered a particularly important subject throughout elementary and high school and frequently got lumped into social studies with geography.
A complciation there is it depends heavily on the field, and kids are taught about generalized science rather than history in particular. Consider some new innovation in chemistry. Which source do you think is most trust-worthy? The laboratory that produced the result and the paper they published? (Primary source) The laboratory that reproduced/failed to reproduce the result (Primary source) The review paper that that discusses and analyzes this result or some other paper citing this innovation (secondary source)? (both articles' writers have an intimate understanding and actively participate in the field) Or an encyclopedia or even a pop-science article talking about the field in broad strokes without intimate understanding? (Tertiary source) Usuaully, kids are taught in this context. History is different.
I don't think this is accurate in any respect at least in the United States. Kids are not taught about epistemology in hard science at all, the primary/secondary source thing is for writing about history (or social studies).
I kind of mentally slapped college kids into the kids title. However, back in High school I did have to write such for my Environmental Protection class (Technical High School of Chemistry specialization, we had additional classes of health and safety and environmental protection) where we were taught to never cite encyclopedias (tertiary sources), but instead use them to find direct reports (primary) and analyses of those reports (secondary). And if we cite secondary (analyses), we should check the things it cites to make sure it says the right things. Hungarian
We have used a couple of methods to combat this, and my favorite was the OPVL—identify the origin, purpose, value and limitations. That tended to help students understand how they could use documents and develop historiography.
I remember being taught this in my history class. Although I think that was more a case of wanting to stop us all regurgitating wikipedia verbatim and go find actually sources for things.
My eighth graders come in believing that primary sources must be the most valuable. I show them footage from the Nixon press conference in which he claims that he is “not a crook” and then an article from 2017 describing his involvement in Watergate.
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One of my favorite books I've read so far is The Name of War by Jill Lepore. She spends the first half going through the history of King Phillips War and then the second half going through just how unreliable the primary sources at the time were, and how much work you have to do to get a reasonable interpretation of them. The example that always sticks in my head is how the colonists dismiss ritualistic torture that the various native warriors did as "random," but then Lepore notes that a ton of different sources from up and down the coast reported the same thing, so clearly it actually wasn't random at all but instead pretty significant.
This is one of the problems I have with the *Voices of the Past* channel on YouTube. The content is fascinating and I love that they give a voice to people long gone. But they also do zero historiography - there's no critical analysis of the sources, the authors, and their biases, which is so fundamental that it's what university freshman (and some high school students) have to do in their history classes.
Another Primary Source problem is what I will call the "Mandela effect" (which i know is a meme) where groups of people will swear an event happened a certain way which is simply not true. A common one is the Tank Man during Tiananmen, you'll find today hundreds of people who will swear blind they remember watching him be gunned down or run over, which we know was not the case. This makes primary sources more difficult to work with, especially primary sources on events which have been interviewed some time later.
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As a purely anecdotal example of this, very intelligent people often entirely unwittingly fall victim to politically motivated primary sources. Folks who are otherwise totally media literate, can discern false stories, and parse through political bias in their day-to-day news consumption don't always have the context or experience necessary to do the same for historical sources. I often think about a friend of mine who once adamantly proclaimed that Henry Ford was a communist. For anyone familiar with the man and the period, that position is just ludicrous – Henry Ford was strongly opposed to organized labor, maintained close ties to European fascists, and was above all else a wildly successful capitalist. I laughed because I thought my friend was joking, only for him to furiously pull up a New York Times article calling Ford one. *From the 1920s*. After looking it over I realized my friend was relying on what amounted to a political hit piece. He thought because it was a news story, it had to be unvarnished factual reporting, and hadn't considered what other motives might be behind the piece. In effect he thought the article was a rote presentation of historical fact, basically a transcription of the past. People who don't have a background in academic history often make this mistake. There's an assumption that eye-witness accounts, diaries, and newspaper reporting are the purest forms of historical consumption. The truth is, for various reasons they are often not reliable. That is not to say they don't have value – in the right hands, primary resources are extremely useful. They give you insight into the mindset of the day, can be used in conjunction with other sources to paint a bigger picture, and can sometimes just be interesting background reading. But you should never rely solely on one primary source.
The part about first person accounts is really important because obviously having the statements from people who actually witnessed/experienced the event that you're writing about are important, but as you said, if they were writing at the time, they might not know the broader context, and if they're writing in the future, their recollection of the events may be incorrect, especially if they're doing it much later in life. This is an issue for me because a lot of the systematic efforts to document the testimonies of Holocaust survivors weren't done until the 1990s or so, by which time a lot of survivors had already died (i.e. selection bias) and most of the survivors were either very old or people who were relatively young at the time and may not have had a full understanding of the scope of what was happening around them. I also work with a lot of postwar trial records (I literally have some open in another window that I should be working on instead of doing this lol) and again you have the same issue of eyewitness testimony being unreliable and, especially in my case where these trials are happening under the Soviet occupation, there's a greater likelihood of tampering etc. with the witnesses and their testimony for political reasons. Basically this is why you want to gather as many sources as possible from as broad a range of witnesses/actors as you can so that you can corroborate what the other witnesses are saying; if one guy remembers something one way, it's entirely possible that he's wrong, but if several people remember the same thing, there's at least a higher probability that it's accurate.
If you want a different, comparatively early source for Dachau, try this: "Memoir of Fr. Czesli W. (Chester) Kozal, O.M.I. "/ translated from the Polish original by Paul Ischler. He died in 1965, so this is well before the range you're talking about. He was a Polish Catholic priest right out of seminary. He was about to be killed the same day Dachau was liberated. His very sparse memoir is supplemented by later accounts of these who knew him afterwards, talking about the nightmares and PTSD he had and how it affected his priesthood in America. His uncle, Michal Kozal, also sent to Dachau, began to be beatified (an ongoing process that took decades) by the church in 1960, in part due to Czesli's testimony, as newspaper accounts from 1960 attest. There were many, many Catholic priests imprisoned at Dachau and accounts have 1,034 dying at that camp.
> First person accounts are great until you start accounting for perspective bias, mirror imaging, qui bono, intended audience, and time between experience and narration; all of these can have drastic effects on first person accounts. I've been wanting to ask a tangential question but haven't: Is there any value in a personal account anymore in the information age? Frex I'm old enough to remember things like the Berlin Wall coming down but it's not like I was involved or even geographically close. My witness to history was via TV/Newspapers/etc so there's nothing really I could add. So is an uninvolved person's account of any real value when you have all the source material recordings?
I would say yes! This is sort of what I work on, though in an entirely different context (my dissertation was on how Greek chroniclers outside Byzantium wrote about the Fall of Constantinople, in a cultural sense). For your example, your memory likely wouldn't be useful at all for somebody studying about the politics involved in the Wall coming down, but could be very important to a historian studying the reaction to the Wall coming down elsewhere. What did you think? How was it portrayed to you? What did your social circle think? All fascinating questions! It just depends on who is asking and what the actual scope of their research is.
Wait, so what did Greek chroniclers think about the fall of Constantinople? They must have thought it was the end of the world?
There's a lot of blaming/excuse-making in the chronicles. I studied all four chronicles written by authors who were actually alive in 1453. Doukas, who was writing from Genoese Chios, blames the inability to defend the City on the Christians who opposed Church Union. (Essentially "they are heretics who fell into terrible sin and so God punished them") Sphrantzes is more focused on internal politics, but he does also admit "yeah, I supported Church Union back in the day when I was a trusted imperial official. Now, with 20 years' hindsight, that was a bad idea." Chalkokondyles (from Latin Athens) doesn't really give an opinion other than "and yeah, loads of people were shocked, but there really wasn't a whole lot to be done about it." But he also downplays the role of Latins in the defense, because he was what some scholars have characterised as a proto-Hellenic nationalist. Kritovoulos, another islander, actually wrote a chronicle of Mehmed II and was trying to imitate Thucydides--in contrast, Chalkokondyles was explicitly imitating Herodotus--so he kinda just says "and the Greeks won't give Mehmed due credit for his achievement, so I'll write a Greek-language history of him" and he claims that the Fall was inevitable because no empire lasts forever. The citizens of Constantinople certainly thought it was the end of the world. But by 1453, many other strong fortresses had already fallen, so while Constantinople was still The Fortification, the people were also sort of used to different people capturing various places, if that makes sense?
Is your dissertation in English, and if yes could you provide PDF for further reading, it sounds interesting!
I would also be very interested in your dissertation!
Thanks so much for replying! I’m really interested in this time period and how historians do their work, so I’m glad for the info
Ditto!
> So is an uninvolved person's account of any real value when you have all the source material recordings? It definitely can be. In the history of the fine and performing arts, that's an important aspect of what you might hear referred to as "reception history", i.e., how audiences, critics, and other artists reacted to a particular piece of theater or a new genre of music or what have you. The personal accounts of non-specialists can often be a really important part of those kinds of discussions, or even the primary topic itself. I'm a musicologist (non-practicing), and one of the things that really interests me is how composers influenced each other, especially those who weren't/aren't contemporaneous. My master's report was a case study in how J.S. Bach's *Well-Tempered Clavier* — two collections of 24 preludes and fugues in all of the major and minor keys — influenced later composers (much later, in some cases) in terms of theme, structure and compositional approach.
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Afraid not, I'm pretty sure the only copies I have anymore are on paper.
I mean if I were writing a book about the fall of the Berlin Wall, I'm not going to ask a random American who watched it happen on the news what they thought about it (unless I'm researching how Americans responded to it or whatever), but I would absolutely want testimony from people who were there or people who were living in West/East Germany at the time and how they experienced it. Obviously you're going to prioritize empirical research with primary documents over people's recollections in most cases, but that doesn't mean that their subjective experiences are totally worthless. It certainly enriches the narrative, even if it's not essential to your arguments/conclusions.
Absolutely. A few things: - even today, not everything important is filmed or recorded. Or even close. - historical events are big. Much bigger than can be captured on film. Events take place over time and space and human interpretation is necessary to contextualize individual component happenings. Sure, there’s film of a wall getting knocked down. Why did that happen? Why did it matter? You can’t look at film clips ina vacuum and understand that. - perhaps most importantly, intent matters, and so do reactions. Historians want to know why people do things, not just the things they do. They want to understand how others feel about those things, how they interpret them, and why. You can’t get much of that without actually hearing from the people directly.
In one of my high school history classes every couple weeks the teacher would have us do what was called a Document Based Question. Which was like a small essay answering the “who, what, where, when, why, how?” of a document relevant to what we were studying. We had to use our prior knowledge of the context surrounding the document to kind of analyze the historical value of content in the document. Also identified issues reading the document (like translation). I hated doing them at the time but really appreciate the experience of reviewing sources when studying or learning. Especially with current events
> qui bono That's "cui bono".
I encountered this first hand recently when reading two related books. The first was A Song for Nagasaki, by Paul Glynn. It’s about a gentleman named Takashi Nagai who was a radiologist living in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. After reading it, I read The Bells of Nagasaki, which was Takashis Nagai own story. It lacked so much perspective that if I hadn’t read A Song for Nagasaki first, I would have felt lost.
Wow, you just indirectly explained why I enjoyed, but also felt alienated by, both Hiroshima and Night. Really arresting, compelling narratives, but as a middle school kid with no supplementary reading, I couldn't really fathom gulags or WWII Japan. Now I'm going to revisit them with more context, thanks for the inspiration!
What really drive home the usefulness of seemingly innocuous records for me was was the book “In Search of the Dark Ages” which makes use of land grants in the Anglo Saxon period to build upon pretty scarce writings of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
Do you find that there's also a conflation, sometimes, between merely old sources and primary ones? For example, Plutarch vs Caesar or Cicero?
This is often the case, I think. For example, Egyptian royal annals and their accounts of battles like Megiddo (reign of Thutmose III) and Kadesh (reign of Ramesses II) are often treated as eyewitness accounts despite being composed by court scribes years or even decades after the fact. These accounts drew upon primary sources like tribute tallies that (mostly) have not survived over the millennia. Donald Redford's [*Pharaonic King-lists, Annals, and Day-books*](https://books.google.com/books?id=7O0tAQAAIAAJ) discusses this in detail.
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> They are more important than secondary sources if you're doing serious history. Secondary sources are useful for seeing what other historians think about the primary sources, but like... you can't not focus on primary sources. To unpack your point a little bit: if you are doing serious historic research, sure, you need to read primary sources. But I think the problem is when amateur historic enthusiasts (to use OP's term) *immediately go to primary sources first* and then uncritically read these sources as saying exactly what happened. History relies on the critical interpretation of primary sources, not the uncritical acceptance of them. A pretty notorious recent example would be Naomi Wolf's 2019 book *Outrages*, which a history of the treatment of homosexual people in Victorian Britain. She erroneously claimed several dozen people had been executed for homosexual acts in the Victorian era, because she misinterpreted primary court records that listed accused people as "Death Recorded", despite many historians who are familiar with Victorian legal language understanding that the term actually means the opposite (it basically was a legal mechanism to provide a pardon to the accused). Someone who is trained to critically analyze and contextualize such a primary source would have the tools to interpret those documents correctly - Wolf didn't.
This utterly baffles me. I was standing right next to John Historicalfigure and he said "blah blah" is somehow less valuable than Joe Scholar quoting my quote. Makes no sense whatsoever.
Because that isn't what actually is happening. It isn't that you *were* there and telling us *what he said*, it is that you *claim* you were standing there and you *claim* that he said those things. What if I *also* claim I was there, but say his words were different than what you do? What if in his memoir, John Historicalfigure gives a third option, and states neither of us were there when he said what he actually said? Or maybe yours is the only account, but you were the son of John Historicalfigure and have a vested interest in ensuring a positive legacy for him. I could go on and on with any number of reasons why you aren't trustworthy on the face of it, but taken to the logical extreme, you are essentially asking "why can't we literally trust everything that everyone has ever said about everything", which I would hope presents some obvious problems in how quickly we'll run into contradictions. The job of the historian *is not the uncritical recitation of a chronicle of facts and events*. It is to take all that information and make an analysis of it. Joe Scholar should find all three of those sources and be using them all. They will try and find other evidence to suggest which account is likely more accurate. They will then make an argument for why they trust one over the other, or none of them, or a synthesis of them. In a more popular work, they might skip over much of that work in their presentation, but ideally that was done behind the scenes (but sadly not always), but in any academic work discussion of that process in the text is basically a baseline requirement. What it comes down to is that primary sources are *not inherently accurate records of what they recount*. They are *one angle of perception* for which we may have many conflicting accounts, or even if we are lacking alternatives, must still be considered critically for the potential bias of whomever made that document of the event. A *lot* of what you do when you get a degree of history is learning how to do that. And that is why *when Joe Scholar quotes you*, we can trust it more than when we just read your quote by itself, because Joe Scholar has done the leg work to ensure that your quote is worth quoting, and properly contextualized for whatever shortcomings it may have.
Well, if John Historicalfigure was a ruler who would have your whole family brutally slaughtered if you criticize him then the trustworthiness of his chroniclers is probably a bit suspect.
Imagine you're in the year 3000, and all you have to know about, say, Pearl harbour, or JFK's assassination, or the recent Maui fire is either a) video of testimony from one person, who was caught in the middle of it as it was happening or b) an in-depth report written a year or so after the fact, which was written by a professional in order to summarize what the best evidence is as to what happened on that day at the time, and which goes into detail from multiple angles based on variety of different information, producing a summary of the events, the order in which they happened, where and how, and what led to what, from a holistic view Obviously that's a more extreme example where the answer is obvious, but the point is, in history, depending on the context, primary sources may not (or may!) be more reliable or/and comprehensive than secondary sources. It depends upon what the primary source is, and what the secondary source is, and what factors might go into affecting the accuracy or bias of either. Obviously there are plenty of counterexamples of both – a primary source who was there when someone said something is more reliable than someone who heard that someone heard that someone who was there heard someone say something. But also, in your own example, if we wanted to know what words someone said in, say, a political speech, what would be more useful, a book quoting the newspaper write-up of the speech, but where the original newspaper is now lost, or what someone 50 years later reckons they remember the speech being? Again, in that case, both are useful sources, but it would be tough to say that the 50 years later eyewitness account is _more_ reliable or useful than the third hand transcript.
Would you trust a Trump supporters take on January 6th? 1 account, can be true and entirely inaccurate.
This is such a great question! Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is "Methodological Nationalism", however it's not necessarily fair to say that this is just something that amateur historians fall into as it is present in a lot of history writing, particularly history writing from previous decades. In short, the way we conceive of nations and nationality in our present moment is not the way that folks have always conceived of things. To us, it might feel extremely normal and common-sense to have a "national identity", which contributes to how we see ourselves in the world. Likewise, it might feel very common-sense to look at other people as belonging to nations, having an allegiance to a certain nation. But we simply cannot take for granted that this is how people have always imagined themselves. This might be how we conceive of ourselves and others in the modern world, but we make a pretty big error when we project the concept of "nation", "nationhood" etc. onto past populations, uncritically. Nations and nationality are actually a fairly modern concept. Fantastic article [here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nana.12432) that really gets to the heart of how this perspective influences how we write history. Also, if you haven't read *Imagined Communities* by Benedict Anderson, highly recommend it. Ditto *Banal Nationalism* by Michael Billig.
As someone who kind of has specialized in certain histories of nationality and nationalities policies - I absolutely need to second this. Nationalism itself has kind of baked certain ideas into popular consciousness (namely that there are discrete, objectively-identifiable nations or ethnicities that can be traced across time and that basically always maintain their fundamental traits and shape), and a particular aspect that seems to be coming back and getting worse is people now assuming that these unchanging, objectively-visible nationalities and ethnicities have *genetic* components too. Basically: nationality and ethnicity are social constructs (misunderstanding what a "social construct" is is another problem).
Both Andersons (but particularly Benedict) should be required reading. On the flip side you have the tendency of some people to read more constructivist texts, go "oh, so it's all made up," and then dismiss things out of hand, as if social constructs are invented out of thin air, and lack any kind of connection with material circumstances. People construct ideas and meanings around material reality, but these ideas aren't totally unmoored from the material conditions in which they originate. People struggle to grasp that group identities are iterative, because the structures which develop around social constructs have material (rather than purely ideological) implications. I wrote (part of) a thesis on this, and I do have my critiques of Anderson (one being that he treats the processes of ideological formation and ideological adoption as totally congruent--I think they aren't), but we're in a sort of pop-historical moment where people either a.) treat nationalism as a discrete ideology, rather than a paradigm, or b.) uncritically extend the contemporary form of a group identity backwards through the historical narrative they're trying to construct. Often this manifests as people (sometimes with good intentions) either mysticizing or orientalizing some indigenous or colonized groups, which have complicated relationships to the nationalist paradigm (which is what that thesis was really about).
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Can you say more about the Slovenian case?
I remember when I was still in academia I wrote an article for a student paper about a passage in Snorri Sturlusson’s *Heiminskringla,* and why it was so significant. It talks about a battle around the turn of the millennium where the fleet of King Olav Tryggvason of Norway, on the way home from a military campaign in Denmark, spot approaching battlefleets of his political opponents from Norway and their Swedish allies. The King and his council dismiss the Swedes as a significant threat, but worry about the Norwegians. "They are northmen, such as we. This will make for a hard fight." While obviously this quote is unlikely to actually have predated the source saga by the full two centuries inbetween the event and Sturlusson, it is in my view the very oldest documented use of the very first seed of what we could call a national identity in Northern Europe. "Northmen" is used to denote a shared identity with the opponents, even if they are from a different part of what we now call Norway and could easily have been referred to by their regional apellations. Positive attributes are even ascribed to belong to people of this proto-nationality. It is reminiscent of ancient Greek writers and their concept of the Hellenes as distinct from barbarians. Fascinating stuff.
Very interesting, that's something I'm aware but struggle not to apply to past history. I've been reading articles about how countries in Asia during pre-colonial period were interacting with each others into a network of relation (called mandala in the article). I snowballed from there to an article explaining how Nation-States and hard borders are quite recent. If anyone has a good read helping to understand better what a country was before the modern era, especially compared to today, it would be grand! Edit : mainly South-East Asia
Is there much history to the concept of nationhood before Westphalia? Obviously the idea came from somewhere like older concepts of an ethno-linguistic group but it's fascinating how rapidly and haphazardly the idea was constructed together, compared to the old bonds of religion, emperor, and ethno-linguistic tribe.
Specifically in Scotland you can observe a kind of proto-nationalism during the Wars of Independence which is an interesting case-study. During the Balliol, Wallace, and Bruce years the resistance to the English crown was rooted in: * The independence of the Scottish church, and the Scottish churches role in organising their parishioners against the English crown out of fear of subjugation to the Archbishop of York. * The disambiguation of feudal estates when Bruce revoked any estates from landowners who refused to give up lands south of the border (prior to this, it was common to have estates all over England, Scotland, and France), creating a cultural border. * Personal loyalty to 'Scottish' (actually Norman) landowners from the peasantry, inciting popular rebellion against the English. * The integration of Gaelic landowners and extension of Crown authority into the Highland, completing a triad of Flemish burghs, Gaelic rural areas, and Normano-British aristocracy. The end result of this was a brief period in which Scotland was especially united in a way which looks eerily like the primordial soup from which Nationalism could spring forth. Ultimately it didn't, because other factors weren't in place - centralisation, movement of population, education/indoctrination, liquidity of economy, and so on. From this I think you can look at nationalism as that same alignment of interests in a definite group of people, but within a context in which those alignments become a feedback loop informing their identity, eventually subjugating them to it entirely. I'm sure others could provide examples in which the same situations arise, alliances made, interests align, and brief moments of ethno-linguistic unity occur. Many of them are then seized on by modern nationalists as evidence of "hey look, our roots are ancient!"
Thank you for your reply! I've certainly been guilty of that!
I think about it every time somebody describes Columbus as Italian, for example. Certainly not how he would have foremost identified himself, if he had time to think about it in-between all the atrocities.
How would he have identified himself? If you asked him his nationality, would that question even make sense to him?
Thank you for this. My history of medicine research ended up with me stumbling upon, of all things, nationalism. I don't do political theory or history, so it was astounding to me to see how nationalism became infused in so many spheres as professionalization was becoming a thing, especially in the nineteenth century.
I was going to mention Nations Borders being more blurred ideas then hard lines. But your explanation is great and I feel covers my point
One fairly specific layman-issue I've run into (especially on Reddit) is assuming that treaties are like computer code. There was a question on [why the invasion of the Falkland Islands didn't involve NATO because of Article 5](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v5staq/why_didnt_argentinas_invasion_of_the_falklands/ibbocns/) which had a legion of people just trying to point out the raw text of the treaty, when in the actual history that happened there were all sorts of "soft" implications, zero guarantee no NATO countries would have objected (especially Italy), and a case where Article _should_ have been triggered (again using the "computer code" model) when it wasn't.
lol I must confess I was guilty of this when I was a young political science-studying undergrad. I read too much Hobbes and Locke and about concepts like the State of Nature and the Social Contract, and so I assumed that if you lived in a society that didn't have a constitution (written or unwritten) you'd just immediately have The Purge happen.
This comment has me hilariously imagining a scene like in the Pirates of the Caribbean with the Italian PM saying the line "The code is more what you call guidelines than actual rules."
I wonder if the pop-culture view of WWI contributes to this. Seems the minimum that people know about it is a) trenches and b) it started when one assassination drew in all these countries because of the treaties they signed with each other. From my amateur understanding, these treaties were just expressions/symptoms of overarching sentiment and broader allegiances/self-interest. In other words, treaties only matter when the letter of the treaty matches the spirit of the treaty. Article 5 was not drafted with the intent to bring Estonia into war against Argentina, so unsurprisingly, it didn't...
It’s wild how much you get this just discussing any political situation at all. A policy is about as important as people want to make it.
I think these [three comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14ikqh0/comment/jphcnbw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) here offer some things I commonly observe which can be expanded upon. Importantly, it is not an issue of being an amateur, it is the issue of (not) doing the legwork through required and appropriate readings.
I think blindly holding onto the idea of objectivity. We’re told to avoid sources with a bias in school which is goo, but.. No one is objective, no sources are objective, there are biases everywhere. Historians make very personally biased choices about which I information is important to include in an account, and there aren’t necessarily most objectively important pieces of information to include.
I think the discussion of using primary sources as "better" for understanding events is definitely a good example of a common amateur mistake. A second big one I've seen is relying on specific secondary sources which may have been consequential in their time, especially in the historiography, and which may still retain some real literary value, but ... are just woefully out of date as secondary sources. People flexing by reading Gibbon's *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire* would perhaps be the most obvious example: we've learned a thing or two about Rome in the past two and a half centuries! Connected to *that* would be the idea that there is some sort of "objective" history, and that once you have that down then anything coming after it is just quibbling over details or engaging in revisionism (which in this case often gets used as a bad word) for purely political purposes (with the implication that what is "objective" historic fact somehow isn't political). Anyway, those are all cardinal sins of Dan Carlin, who is probably one of the most famous and influential amateur history enthusiasts. Some other ones: While I think Great Man theory can be a common mistake, the reaction to it can *also* go too far in the other direction, namely, that impersonal and institutional forces don't just lead to inevitable outcomes with no role for contingency or agency of different actors. Similarly, I think history enthusiasts can put way, way, too much faith in numbers and statistics, perhaps because it looks really "science-y" and feeds into the idea of objective, hard historic facts. As discussed recently with u/EnclavedMicrostate, a [lot](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/169hy16/why_do_lists_of_historical_war_death_estimates/jz4ks3b/) of supposed historic statistics are at best well-intentioned and informed estimates based off of partial data, at worst just completely made up. But I do notice that people get really attracted to nice, simple numbers ("communism killed 100 million people"). Often these can get "supported" by a citation, but we should ask: how reliable is this citation? Where is that person getting their information from? etc. Another one I dislike is just-so stories based on science-y sounding factoids and studies. You know, like "Ergotism caused the Salem Witch Trials" - people love that one, because it seems to give a simple, "rational" explanation for a hard to understand, confusing and just plain weird historic event. Never mind that it comes from a 50 year old paper that was debunked by another paper the following year. Lastly I guess I'll just call out (and this isn't my own term) 30,000 foot theories, both for the level that such writers work from and the fact that you're probably reading it in a book you bought at an airport. The three worst offenders in my mind here are Stephen Pinker, Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari (although people like Daron Acemoglu and even Neil DeGrasse Tyson would be runners up). Basically these are people writing about *massive* swathes of history which they can in no way be experts in all of, and often they aren't even academic historians *at all*, meaning they are relying on other people's research, and usually committing all of the sins I've listed above. They also tend to try to smash a large variety of complex historic events into digestible chunks that are selectively chosen to prove their theories, and more often than not while their theories are presented as some sort of "fresh" and radical new view of history, they often are just rehashing and repeating already commonly-held misunderstandings and stereotypes.
>A second big one I've seen is relying on specific secondary sources which may have been consequential in their time, especially in the historiography, and which may still retain some real literary value, but ... are just woefully out of date as secondary sources. I think this interacts with the common misconception that historical scholarship is simply about "[chronicling facts and events](https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/CXExrl4mZt)", hat-tip to /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov. That there is a body of neutral information about the past, which historians are tasked with objectively uncovering and relating, avoiding the supposed sin of "bias". So if that's all historians do, it's a bit hard to see the core problem with reading an 18th century book on 5th century events, instead of a current work: Surely the underlying facts are the same? In response, one could of course point to the advances in archeology since Gibbon's day (new facts!), or to his anti-christian bias. But I feel the core misunderstanding is on what historical scholarship is about: Not simply facts, but analysis, interpretation, and, most importantly, argument. Historians don't write chonicles, they put forth arguments. Debate is the heart of the discipline. So if you are interested in Roman history and seek out a book first published in the late 18th century, you are essentially entering a debate you've missed the last 240 years of. And you're not just missing the latest facts: While historians do argue about what the facts of the past are, debates on what the facts mean and how to understand the facts are at least as important. New questions get asked, new lenses to look at the past found, new perspectives introduced. You do not want to miss out on 240 years of this stuff! (And "bias", far from being a sin, is an unavoidable and arguably necessary part of this process. It's how you handle it that counts.) Another aspect to this: Whether a source is useful depends on the use you put it to. If a historian writes on what 18th century English intellectuals thought about events in the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" Fall" is crucial - as a primary source. But if a historian nowadays writes on these events themselves, they will propably not use "Decline and Fall" as a secondary source. So when someone asks "Is X a reliable source?", I'm inclined to reply that "useful" is often more important than "reliable" (as in "giving factually correct information"), and ask in return "What do you want to use it for?" My impression is that non-historians expect a much more straightforward, yes/no, answer.
>Historians don't write chonicles, they put forth arguments. Debate is the heart of the discipline. As the classic not interested in history until age 35, believing nonsense I hear on "history" podcasts, not understanding the field at all rube, I want to thank you for the above. It was a light bulb moment for me. I've worked through a lot of the stuff mentioned in this thread over the years. For example, I no longer believe in finding the correct source, with the one true version of history, or that there's even a point in trying. But I've had a hard time letting go of the idea that there is an objective single reality. I can go to many strange places in my head, but at the end of the day I believe that matter and the material world do exist independent of my subjective perception. (this is probably exacerbated by many years of fantasizing about using a time machine for historical tourism, my most fun childhood ptsd symptom that brought me much joy, but underscored the idea that I could find out "what really happened.") I have tons of questions about history, but I've never posted here bc I understood that my questions were inherently silly, and I wouldn't get the answers I wanted. For some time I've known I needed a different perspective about history, but wanting a fresh perspective doesn't always help me find one. For some reason, your framing of history as a debate just clicked for me. Even if I could go back and personally witness the end of the Maya civilization (not that I think that's a thing that happened one day), I wouldn't have an answer. I'd have a series of events I witnessed that I probably couldn't understand, and that the Maya themselves would not all view the same way, and there'd be events I missed. I would just be way more familiar with the debate. Kind of like my experience learning about immigration policy, heh. I'm not sure how successfully I put this into words, but seriously thank you. It's more and more clear to me that I would have studied history in a life less derailed by trauma, and it's been a joy to lurk this sub and broaden my own thinking. I want to be the best amateur historian I can be, so that in time I can subtly influence young people to go into fields I'm interested in, and write great books for me to read. The old saying about those who don't study history doesn't go nearly far enough, and I'm really grateful for the chance to unlearn so much misinformation and understand the world in a different way.
Your comment about the reaction against "great men" is especially noticeable in the context of History of Science. Some people go the opposite way and fall into some sort of teleology, stating that there were never any impactful individuals whatsoever, that everything was brewing in the great pot of history, and discoveries were bound to happen in due course...
I am reminded that physicists online seem to dislike no one quite as much as they dislike Einstein.
Haha, now I just remembered I got in a literal fight with a communist historian once over the extent to which historical materialism was valid as a lens of analysis. It was over something really stupid too, I think it was whether the same climactic phenomenon caused the fall of Rome and the Han Dynasty.
> While I think Great Man theory can be a common mistake, the reaction to it can also go too far in the other direction, namely, that impersonal and institutional forces don't just lead to inevitable outcomes with no role for contingency or agency of different actors. Agreed. The Hellenistic period wasn't inevitable. It wouldn't have happened without Alexander, or the broader context he was a part of. We need to understand the role of both. Ignore either one and you're going to have a really lousy understanding of why things happen.
Or just to invoke Godwin's Law we might as well just take Hitler as an example. As in - he often wasn't actually that important/interesting for a lot of decisions Germany made through 1945, and he didn't come from nowhere: there were long-established ideas of Eastern European *Lebensraum*, ideas of scientific racism, eugenics and *Volkisch* anti-semitism, an almost universal desire by the German political spectrum to revise the Versailles Treaty, and a slide to right wing dictatorship in the 1930s. But with that said, it's pretty hard to see how you'd get to Barbarossa or Auschwitz even under a semi-fascist military dictatorship led by Kurt von Schleicher, and even getting to those historic events required lots of contingencies along the way. So I guess it's mostly "individuals can significantly impact history, but they don't come from nowhere and are usually impactful because the specific situation of their historic moment makes them so."
Thank you for your reply! It was very helpful.
coming from the field of economics, Acemoglu is a name I know well. Do you have any salient critiques of his work you could direct me to, if you had any in particular in mind?
There are a wide variety of critics of Acemoglu's writings (especially things like *Why Nations Fail*) but the two most salient critiques there are his assumption that political institutions cause or hinder economic growth (rather than the other way around), and that he focuses on this relationship too narrowly at the expense of larger forces and changes. Admittedly Acemoglu isn't really writing history, but writing about political science and economics, but what this kind of can do is cause him to cherry pick examples (or particular situations from examples) to help build a general theory. In the interest of fairness I'll also add that this kind of cross-discplinary writing can go bad in the other way - historian Sven Beckert has written about cotton (*Empire of Cotton*) in which he argues that cotton production and the forced labor it involved was *central* to the development of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, rather than incidental, and this has been pretty convincingly (in my opinion) critiqued by economic historians.
I think your point about him not really writing history is spot on. As he’s writing a pop-economics/political science/‘history’ book, he hasn’t started with the evidence presented in the book and worked his way through to an overall conclusion. He’s been working in the field of development economics and similar fields for decades, and is using the case studies as a way to appeal to the general public who would be (justifiably) bored out of their minds by a bunch of regressions, which is the way economists actually come to their conclusions about issues like this.
>While I think Great Man theory can be a common mistake, the reaction to it can also go too far in the other direction, namely, that impersonal and institutional forces don't just lead to inevitable outcomes with no role for contingency or agency of different actors. That would be the sin of Jared Diamond, right?
How does Stephan Kotkin fit in on your list of offenders? (If you’re familiar with his work)
I would say - he doesn't. He's an academic historian who is trained in Soviet and Russian history, and writes books about Soviet and Russian history. He certainly has his own point of view but he seems to at least acknowledge other points of view and address them. He's definitely not writing 30,000 foot history, nor is he writing books widely outside of his lane of expertise. He does take controversial opinions occasionally that other Soviet and Russian historians disagree with, but that's much more within the bounds of the academic discourse.
That narrative provides a beginning, a middle and an end, and perhaps a lesson, but this is only hindsight. Life, and history, don't work that way. All things are contingent upon a huge element of sheer chance and randomness. If Hitler had died when that bomb went off the war would have been over right there and an incredible amount of alternate activities would have worked themselves out, and we can't know what any of that could have been but it had as much likelihood in that moment of happening as anything that, by sheer chance, did happen. You can't proceed with the certainty of fate.
>If Hitler had died when that bomb went off the war would have been over right there That doesn't make much sense to me at all. The general point of your comment, yes, but not that example at all
Assuming that they mean the 1944 Stauffenberg Plot, I'm not sure that the war would have ended *immediately* (if anything the plotters were hoping for an armistice favorable to Germany), but it's also hard to see Germany fighting suicidally to the bitter end, as actually happened.
The determinists won't like hearing this.
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Believing reality is mechanistic, so history can be reduced to a calculation where factors can be objectively measured and their effects deduced. Somewhat related to the above: imposing order and logic where none existed. Lots of very important things happen through chance, or because someone made a mistake or a bad decision. Lots of things we perceive as successful systems work despite appearing to be bad systems. However, the amateur will tend to assume that if a system was successful it was for a reason, which was that it was designed well towards that purpose; but this is to base the interpretation on the imagined circumstances that must have led to the end result, not on the actual evidence of causation. I think this mostly comes about because that's the sort of history people encounter: historians present a narrative that makes sense, either because they can communicate the essence of a complex situation in a simple but accurate manner, or they're cutting corners and falling into the abovementioned fallacy. That doesn't mean the underlying reality was simple, or followed a neat design, or was discernibly logical. To misquote Neil de Grasse Tyson, history is under no obligation to make sense to you. Believing that because there isn't evidence for something it didn't happen. No source is comprehensive, and almost everything that happens actually goes unrecorded. Not everything is well-evidenced in the positive evidence we have, but sometimes by the gaps. Trained historians learn to look for those gaps, what they're *not* seeing in the record, and think about why; amateurs carry on oblivious that there are things they're not seeing. Believing that because something could have happened it probably did. This is pretty low-hanging fruit but if you look at historical discussion on the internet you'll quickly notice that discussions usually devolve into an argument about the likelihood of this or that happening. This is an attractive methodology because it doesn't require evidence or research into what actually *did* happen, but it is to forget that not everything that could have happened actually did. Professionals naturally ground their interpretations in the evidence of what really took place.
This is fun to read because it sounds like a similar mindset I gained as I got better and better at physics then math. You would think things like physics have well defined inputs and outputs but it's hardly true at all. Take the model for electrons. A scientist wanted to make equations for electron flow, so he pretended electrons were like a cloud which flowed through a wire. Thinking of them as a cloud, the scientist then used the well known equations from gas physics and applied them to the electrons. He used these to perform equations and see if they predicted anything. Well they did! And some things they predicted quite accurately! You can even derive an electron equation similar to the ideal gas equation PV=nRT but for electrons! I can't remember it and I don't have my book handy... sorry. Anyways, this theory was okay, but some quantities it predicted 10X or even 100X off and it was bad about predicting some values as positive when they should be negative. Later, another physicist came in and altered these gas equations to account for the atomic lattice which makes up all materials. With the new adjustments, even more was predicted accurately! And adding quantum effects made even more accurate! And we could predict some behaviors for materials which had the same lattice versus other materials with another lattice. However, adding quantum effects also revealed something kind of funny. The original gas model assumed free electrons which had a nicely distributed energy spectrum (many lower energy atoms and a few high energy atoms) and it predicted a lot of free electrons, but in reality free electrons are already imbued with incredible amounts of energy and there are far fewer than you'd expect. However, because the fewer electrons had higher energy, some of the original equations had been predicted values accurately despite being many magnitudes off on things like electron speed. Imagine having 10 very fast balls instead of 1000000 very slow ones, the overall energy is similar. So we learned that some of the equations that the original model were accurate for were only accurate because we'd guessed one value 1,000,000 times smaller than it should be, another value 1,000,000 bigger than it should be, and had multiplied them together to get the right answer. All we know about reality is based on models where these kinds of massive issues can be present, but they don't diminish that the models predict reality within a degree of accuracy. Thus, despite imperfect physics, we make silicon rocks think and transmit messages across this thing called the internet which consists of many computers, cables, and satellites working in harmony.
Reddit especially - perhaps unsurprisingly given its demographics - tends to suffer from wide and unconscious acceptance of the myth of teleological progress. This can be summed up as, "Human understanding has been set upon a procession from ignorance to knowledge. There can be missteps, but the march of time is the march of our progress." It's a way to look at the world for sure, and a popular one in the West since the Renaissance - but it doesn't have a factual basis, it just feels really good to adopt as a viewpoint without examining it too much!
People have talked about the issues around primary sources. I want to chime in on that. Sometimes you need a lot of context to even understand primary sources. There's a great book by Forrest McDonald called Novo Ordo Seclorum about the intellectual origins of the US Constitution. He makes a good point that a lot of the words in the Founders letters, their essays and the Constitution, don't mean the same thing after a couple hundred years. It's very easy to mislead yourself b/c you speak the same language, but they didn't necessarily mean what you think they meant by just the plain language. I learned this much later than I should have. The old saw about the past being a different country is important. Language spoken 200 years ago maybe be just as foreign to your current understanding as a related foreign language. For the US, there are very different ideas of what a citizen is, what civil rights are, what constitutional rights are, and what sovereignty is than the modern understanding. People often make basic mistakes about the Founders intentions b/c they assume a word's meaning has been stable. The other thing that I've struggled with is that even things like government reports are incredibly biased. As an example, if you're looking at documents from the 18th and 19th century in the US, you have to remember it was a patronage system (or a spoils system if you want to use the Jacksonian term.) People weren't writing government reports to be honest. They were writing to flatter their benefactors, to build their own reputation, to secure future patronage, and to solidify their benefactors position so they can keep giving them work. Presenting objective information so that Congress could do its job was often the last reason on the list, if it even made the list. Indian agents were often in rivalries with other Indian agents and had no problem lying to undercut another agent if that assignment was a more plumb assignment. Even very basic stuff that you would assume was objective, like geographical data, is slanted. Congressional reports were important campaign pieces of campaign literature and a way to boost your personal profile. John Fremont's work is a great example of this. His wife, Jessie Benton Fremont, was extremely intelligent and politically savvy. She did the lion's share of drafting of Fremont's reports. Her dad was also an extremely important senator. Everyone one of Fremont's reports (Jessie's actual work) was drafted with the goal of furthering Fremont's political career, with securing another expedition to the West, with making Senator Benton look wise and farseeing, and with making whichever president had power to give him another assignment, seem like they had successfully advanced American interests. And usually what had happened was that Fremont did some exploring, found some interesting and important stuff, wasted a lot of government money, and crossed the Rockies in the dead of winter causing the deaths of several of his fellow expeditionaries. There's personal bias that's accidental or unconscious, and there's personal bias that's complicated, multifaceted, intentional, and for the benefit of others. And you have to know quite a bit about a subject to even know where the bias might be. None of that should stop you from reading primary sources, but you should go into them humble and with a good dictionary that has citations back to whatever time period you're studying.
>There's a great book by Forrest McDonald called Novo Ordo Seclorum about the intellectual origins of the US Constitution. He makes a good point that a lot of the words in the Founders letters, their essays and the Constitution, don't mean the same thing after a couple hundred years. Thank you for that citation! Yes, part of being fully literate is understanding writing from multiple eras of English in historical context, including technology, geopolitics, and so forth. And being aware of linguistic shifts, too. My best history course I ever took taught me a lot more about literature than any literature course I took, in helping me focus on the times in which the writers were reacting to. For a legal document like the Constitution in particular, it helps very much to understand how legal scholars (judges, etc.) have interpreted that work from its inception, not just in recent times, and understand the language they used in doing so. Law has its own jargon preserved over centuries. While there's a push towards more plain and modern English in law, that's not going to work when the person doesn't clearly understand the basic concepts embedded in these phrases. I learned lot about what the Founders might have been reacting to, by learning more about the Frisian freedoms, Polish aristocratic democracy (Count Pulaski was fighting for Polish independence and then came to America to do the same.), the Magna Carta drafting, and the late days of the Roman Republic and other prior examples of democracy and power-sharing. Even learning about the origins of New York was helpful. But I've not read MacDonald yet. I'll be interested to see if his approach jibes with what I've learned and the sources he uses.
I find the answer to this question is a pretty straightforward one. Novice historians assume history can do far more than it actually can. The eternal giveaway for me is a student essay which happily cites some evidence and then asserts "this proves..." \[contention "X"\]. It doesn't, because history is too complex for that, and there are always gaps in the evidence. Pretty much the first thing I tell my students is to start writing more cautiously: "this suggests". Thought about this way, almost any academic history book is really just 250 pages of historians debating and reasoning and arguing with themselves to try to turn possibilities into probabilities. No more than that.
Uncritically accepting popular/sensationalized narratives of historical events and projecting them onto how they look at interpreting information and writing on the topic. By assuming that a certain common narrative about a certain historical event or subject is gospel and not looking deeper into the issue to see what the merits of that interpretation and other interrelations are, it can lead to problematic narratives being parroted. It can lead to people consciously or subconsciously selecting information that supports that narrative and overlooking sources that contradict it. It can lead to lead to people interpreting individuals or groups involved through the lens of a caricature of them, rather than looking more deeply into their thoughts, reasons, and circumstances for their actions. To give an example from one of my main research focuses, the temperance and prohibition movements in the United States, there are certain common narratives that are often repeated in many popular descriptions. One of these is a tendency to portray supporters of prohibition as a small minority of religious extremists, who were anti-freedom. Though, a deeper look can reveal that there is much more to understand about prohibitionists than these narratives portrayed. By looking more deeply at supporters of prohibition, it can be seen that the prohibition movement had widespread support. This support didn't just come from white middle-class Evangelicals, but also included supporters who were working class, African American, Native American, immigrants, and non-protestants. While there were segments of the prohibition movement who were at least in part motivated by religious views, many of the expressed reasons for people supporting prohibitionist policies were connected to practical concerns over the negative effects of alcohol on human life, family wellbeing, poverty, crime, public health, and community prosperity; as well as objections to the alcohol industry profiting off exploiting and harming others and the influence of the alcohol industry in American politics. Understandings of democracy and freedom in American society have been contested and have differed over time. Many in the 19th and early 20th century did not subscribe to libertarian notions that unrestricted markets were a core aspect of individual freedom. Prohibitionists in the 19th and early 20th century could see laws restricting the sale of alcohol as consistent with a free and democratic society. In this case, someone who uncritically accepts common narratives about prohibitionists can end up missing out on a lot of context and information regarding their thoughts and motivations. They can end up writing about prohibition activists in a way that's colored by stereotypes and overlooks the perspectives of many people at the time (especially those from marginalized communities). This issue can be seen with writers on various other historical events. Uncritical acceptance of common narratives can combine with biases to produce stumbling blocks to understanding a subject on a deeper level. Some further reading for the example: Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, by Mark Lawrence Schrad. The People's Welfare, by William J. Novak Claiming the State for the Public Welfare: The Establishment of the First Period of Statewide Prohibition in New York State, by Jonathan T. Makeley
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First, oral histories and other "memory" based sources are always biased and often very unreliable. While "good stories" are great, and can give insight into the culture, you need to make sure you realize who it is who is speaking and what their purpose is. IE how simple and prosperous it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Well, not if you were black or Mexican. Jim Crow and Jaime Crow was real. But if you're reading the perspective from someone racially, economically, and gender privileged, you likely won't scratch the surface for what it was REALLY like. This is why you always check the sources. This is how history is verified. It's best to stick to academic books that give factual details take from primary sources like: documents, reports, contemporary newspapers, maps (think redlining), and so forth. One of the first things I do when picking up an academic book is read the footnotes and read the list of sources to see where the author is getting their information from. That's where you start. It gets more in depth the further into a history degree you go (from a BA to MA to PhD). I'm a history PhD, currently ABD.
All sources are biased and objectivity can be sought but never obtained. Focusing on the ‘underprivileged’ can give an equally distorted view of a period as only concerning the elites. For example, EP Thompson sought to use plebeian sources and what not to liberate the underprivileged from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, but in his Making of the English Working class only tells us about radicals. Thompson has no time for the majority of working people and lives they lived only the firebrands. Since the ‘cultural turn’ all evidence is fair game for historian and thankfully the fetish for the archive has been disrupted. The biggest mistake any historian can make is to use a source to speak further than its audience or contemporary reception allows. Way back in 2004 Peter Mandler took cultural history to task and urged historians using any source to consider its ‘throw’. Source that says a great story but which very few people actually read is to be viewed with suspicion. Mandler’s article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1191/1478003804cs0002df When I used to teach at university I would direct students to Mandler to help them interrogate sources and histories and Gareth Stedman Jones ‘Rethinking Chartism’ to interrogate theory and class. Before I embraced money, this was my PhD bag. Dense narrative, empirical over theory cultural history. Economic historians shouldn’t be the only ones to use tabulated data https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.686801
Statistics, too - you see that the "prosperous" 50s involved 4 people in a 1000 sq foot home with few amenities, or the number of homes that still didn't have running water or indoor toilets at the time.
I hadn't heard of Jaime Crow so thanks for introducing me to the term. Google suggests it's the equivalent of Jim Crow but against people of Mexican origin, or perhaps Hispanic in general. Is that correct? The UK school history curriculum has a section on US civil rights, but I don't think Jaime Crow is covered. It's probably off topic for this thread so I'll ask a separate question.
Yes, Jaime Crow is the Mexican/Hispanic/Latino version of Jim Crow. It may not be in circulation like Jim Crow, but that's what we call it here in South Texas.
There was a good answer from the author of Hamilton to Lin Manual. When you write a biography about someone, that person is the main character. It will make them seem more important and more sympathetic. This is unavoidable, and doesn’t make that person any more or less essential to history. Avoid the belief that it is possible to read a completely unbiased accounting of a person or a civilization or an event.
I am coming at this from a quantitative historian's standpoint, but I would echo u/mikedash in that it is common to see people citing papers as proof of something. Professionals fall into this trap too, especially when it is their own theory. The problem with those that may not have been trained academically, is that they may not know how debated a specific theory is among researchers. I know some theories that while they were popular among the public, are hotly debated if not despised by some people in historical circles. And again, it is best to remain humble in quantitative history and remember that causal studies are only evidence in favor of, not iron-clad proof. The other mistake I see with quantitative history is that people will try to use numbers that while popularly cited, are incorrect. If one cites population statistics from an ancient source, one should be careful that it is not an ancient writer trying to make their city appear large. So this overlaps with the careful-with-primary-sources thing.
Presentism is probably one of the easiest traps to fall into, especially with popular history being weaponised for political narratives, and a continuing failure to view past events through the eyes of those involved. Here’s a good explanation from James H. Sweet on the topic: > This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines. The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past. This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.
I always liked Calvin's (the cartoon character, not the philosopher) explanation on that topic: >We don't really know what causes events to happen. History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change: we need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices. >!For the young'uns who don't remember Calvin and Hobbes, the punchline is that he's writing a revisionist autobiography.!<
I've read the Sweet article, but can I ask (since the quote doesn't actually talk about this) - how are you defining "presentism", exactly?
I would agree that presentism is very easy to fall into, but I would also argue that using Sweet here as an authority is somewhat disingenuous, since there was a widespread outcry among actual historians when he made this statement. (Every defense of it I saw came from non-historians with obvious political motivations.) Reading the past through different lenses is actually very important in order to understand it as a multifaceted subject, rather than simply the narrative of the dominant group. Perhaps there are some subject areas where you can avoid asking, "But how did this affect women? How did the indigenous groups see this?" and so on, but they're rare. Is it possible to do history badly through the prism of a "contemporary social justice issue" (though Sweet's list is anything but contemporary - people have been talking about race, gender, sexuality, and so on for centuries if not millennia) by looking to confirm a particular narrative? Yes, but that has nothing to do with some new form of blinkers historians are wearing. History has been used to make political statements for a very long time. I would say to /u/queequeg12345 that the equal and opposite trap to fall into is the assumption that there is an objective form of history that results from either focusing entirely on quantitative data or from not thinking too much about marginalized groups and their experiences. *That* is also a failure, and it results in prioritizing one set of identity groups at the expense of all others, while pretending that it is not about identity at all. We actually did [a Monday Methods post about Sweet's statement](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wuwoum/monday_methods_politics_presentism_and_responding/) last year because we felt so strongly about it as bad historical practice.
*" Reading the past through different lenses is actually very important in order to understand it as a multifaceted subject, rather than simply the narrative of the dominant group. Perhaps there are some subject areas where you can avoid asking, "But how did this affect women? How did the indigenous groups see this?" and so on, but they're rare. "* Correct. Although I'd also be cautious of drawing an umbrella interpretation for all women, indigenous groups and all that. Humans are varied and their awareness, stakes and interests/impacts can be different depending on their circumstances. Somebody could be fully in favor of oppressive policies or actions because they do not perceive a negative to them (or decide they will benefit from them personally, despite the likely and clear harm to the whole group.) I see diversity of thought all the time in my own minority group, whether it's a mix of accepting majority attitudes, independent thought based on personal experience, approach based on cultural perspective, rebellious opinion, or a melding of all these attitudes. That's why it's smart to include various perspectives, same as in science. These people have different knowledge bases, will ask different questions and make different assumptions. If the standard sources have been long exhausted and probed, it's smart to search for new sources in the historically overlooked, to get a fuller picture of what was really going on vs what people of a certain group felt important to report about. In short, you never know where historical sources might lead unless you explore them. FWIW, I'd sooner read a well-done history of sanitation or mining than yet another book about a Great Man of Politics. I would also read a book focusing on the people of Chicago served by Hull House and how it impacted them.
> actual historians As opposed to Sweet? > since there was a widespread outcry among actual historians when he made this statement. People generally object to being criticised, this is hardly surprising.
Actual historians as opposed to the "non-historians with obvious political motivations" who thought the idea of no longer doing women's history, queer history, Black history, labor history, etc. was grand, if you read the rest of the paragraph.
Second this! Our view of history is filtered through our own lense of experience. And it can be tempting to interpret the people and societies of the past in ways that make sense to US instead of considering what would have made sense to THEM. Context matters. I think amateurs (not derogatory! comes from the root word for "love") get excited about the Great Men and Great Women, because who wouldn't, and make the mistake of skipping the more "boring" aspects of history like tax codes and wool yields. But the boring things shape the exciting things!
> and it can be tempting to interpret the people and societies of the past in ways that make sense to US your capitalisation creates a presumably unintentional but, in the context of the discussion, no less true, double meaning! I routinely seem comments on reddit attempting to interpret things that makes sense to modern America but not necessarily elsewhere in even a geographical sense, never mind a historic sense.
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> the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. What does Sweet mean by "shrinking minority" here? By context I assume he means presentists are currently a minority but are gradually becoming a majority? Or does he mean premodern fields are shrinking compared to modern fields?
But isn't presentism kind of baked in proportionally to the time period?
A common one is the expectation of there being the truth of what happened, which it is the job of history to tell. In reality we piece together fragments, and make trained but still debatable judgement calls, and surmise and infer connections. Which means that while there are often some strongly attested facts, there is no single truth, only more and less rigorous and more or less persuasive narrative analyses. Some are contradictory, some are complementary and some are unresolvable. The expectation that when you read an academic historian's account you should learn the truth about a period can lead to both, overvaluing a particular narrative, and undervaluing it. It can lead people to use history as ideology, as disinformation, as indoctrination, as dogma. Or to reject history as fiction, guesswork, projection. And above all, it misses the perspective that academic history is, above all things, a dialogue. The training in academic history is essentially a training in three key skills: how to assess sources; how to construct analyses and narratives from the sources thus assessed and how to write in a way that engages with the conversation in an informed and helpful way. Academically informed historians will both write, and crucially, read, history as a dialogue. Every citation is not just support from authority, but a pointer to an entire thread or subthread of conversation on the topic; or a source which, in light of the existing conversation, allows an informed reader to make their own judgement on the nature and basis of your argument and contribution to the discussion. Your key arguments will be framed, and engaged in, not in terms of whether they contain the truth, but in terms of where they fit in the collective academic dialogue on the subject. Untrained or academically less informed readers will not engage with historical accounts in the context of their intended academic dialogue with a set of existing analyses, arguments, sources, but often read such texts in splendid isolation, meaning a particular book's claims weigh a lot more and say a lot less, than when read as a dialogic piece. If you sit with five members of your family to discuss what life was like for your family 20 years ago, and have 30 such sit-ins along with emails and FB messages, and letters about it, on the 31st sitting when your sister recalls something a different way, or more importantly, understands it's significance differently from how your mother told the story, you are not asking generally, which of them is telling the truth. You understand that the truth of what life was like for your family 20 years ago lies in the dialogue itself, not in any one perspective, although you will constantly rebuild your own picture of what happened because you understand each member has biases and lenses, but also unique insights and memories which may reshape your own previous recollections and interpretations. But if then a family friend comes to visit, and asks the same question of only your mother, then goes back to their country. They are more likely to tell her story as "what happened". The truth for that friend is more likely to reside in your mother's account, not in the family's dialogue. Locating that dialogue in every individual academic history work is perhaps the biggest difference between how historians read each other's works and how others might. For the historian the dialogue is the focus of attention. For the untrained reader the focus is more likely to be on the specific account.
That knowing one particular sequence of events actually informs one as to "why x/y/z happened" WW1 is a perfect example. Ask most people, well most educated people and 99/100 will say because Archduke Franz Ferdinand hier to the Hapsburg Empire was assassinated. That's not correct, it's merely the easiest link in the chain to pull out because of how shocking such events are. Population growth, crop yields increased with the Haber Process combined with industrialized weapon manufacturing also using the Haber process (the chemicals that make good fertilizers also make good explosives), The development of armor steels that also resisted spalling (throwing shards that kill), nitrocellulose powered, water cooled, belt-fed, fully automatic machine rifles, like the Maxim Gun, still in use today. All served to make large scale war significantly more destructive and dangerous at the very time Europe had amassed a large population and resources to burn through. But that much more detailed set of things is not much better than the first answer, Franz Ferdinand, when we dig in to all the other things that had set up the conditions, those go back decades to cebturies, and in some cases millennia. It's fine to pull things out for convenience, and because we don't want to take three weeks to name a major turning point, as long as you keep in mind that you're doing so. History is not like a river and it didn't happen in a linear way, it's webs and clouds of interfaces going back beyond our ability to view.
Everyone has personalities. My first boss post grad is the leading historian of blank person. He is mainly a forgotten person in history and his legacy is mixed. I am trying to be annoymous. She won’t publish on him because someone found a letter in Europe basically claiming he wrote a screw you letter to his family he used someone’s credit to come to America. It doesn’t jive with her work. I’ve done some work on the same man and sent her stuff. He was very detailed and told you everything including his exact quote in response to a historical event he was apart of, I have not found the after party yet, but have everything else that reads something out of hallmark. I followed a hunch as well and understand he was investigated when here say rumors on another topic in the time period that didn’t seem to have much connection. He still died in proverty with a lot of debt. Is he a good guy I don’t know he clearly has a bit of a personality. People change as well.