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Much thanks to my then undiscovered ADHD I spent my university years switching between ”categories” (it’s not exactly the same as majors/minors here in Denmark because everything on a bachelors was tailored for you up front), 7 times before I ended up with Computer Science (which was where I started). Two of those years was spent studying History, and the primary subject through everything was that sources matter. Because history is exactly as described here, influenced by its writer and the context in which it was written. Which is why history as far as academia is concerned tends to be much more “peer-decided” than anything. With good and bad side effects. But basically a lot of history is a group of experts spending their careers discussing whether or not a set of pottery inscriptions can mean that Denmark went on a crusade or not. But that is academia, and though my brief period there I got the impression that it took its sources very serious.

I’d like to say that maybe I got this article wrong, but isn’t what this article talks about more political science than history? The fall or the Roman Empire is a part of history, but how it’s used in political discourse has nothing to do with history, until decades from now anyway. People with an agenda has always used texts and history to further it, but isn’t it those people who are far more in control of what becomes history than the people who wrote the works?

> more political science than history? The fall or the Roman Empire is a part of history, but how it’s used in political discourse has nothing to do with history, until decades from now anyway

This exact example shows how interwoven they are. Which "fall" are you referring to? The end of the western Roman empire, or the end of Byzantium hundreds of years later? Or do you mean the replacement of the republic by the empire proper, and later the decline and division? What you consider the empire and its fall, if you choose to consider it one, isn't just semantics, it's a meme that defines a history based on a political need: for the Holy Roman empire of Germanic Nation, Rome was the mantle of legitimacy from an older time, for the various post renaissance empires the fall and the subsequent "dark ages" was some darkness to push back with their own order and light, for Nazi Germany and various connaisseurs of "degeneration theory" the fall always serves as a reason why they must impose strict social and moral control...history is inevitably tied to the time and politics it is born from (acting as a lens) and the goals it served (possibly subconsciously)

Also, I'm not sure what "until decades from now" means in this context.
I don't agree with this article at all.

If we cannot judge a work without knowing anything about the author, then how are we supposed to judge works like the Iliad and the Odyssey?

Sometimes knowing the bias of an author can impact how our present biases color our own views. For example, most people these days who read Thucydides' Melian Dialogue would assume the correct conclusion is to side with Melos, and it's often a shock that Thucydides himself sided with the Athenians. However, this does not change the quality of the work itself, but merely how we perceive it.

I would agree to the extent that knowing the authors bias might color the text, and that we could infer a more nuanced and realistic picture from that knowledge. But I see no way that Gibbon's sex life (or lack thereof) should influence how we approach his history. To me, that is trying to dismiss a work by attacking the character of the person who wrote it.

The older I've gotten, the more I've become aware that history is simply a matter of trust. No matter who you're dealing with, a large group of people will ignore facts or historical details simply on the basis of deciding that they don't trust the source.

It's probably the main reason that people spend so much time attacking news outlets rather than the specific stories coming out of them (ie, Fox/CNN) to call out a specific bias.

It just means that if you actually want the entire picture, you're going to have to go look for it and then look up citations yourself. In theory, something like Wikipedia should be the ideal way to handle this but even then you end up with "edit wars" as people actively work to remove details with valid citations.

As a reader of a subject where you don't already deeply know the information, you have no way of knowing what's missing. This allows people to selectively include facts while leaving out others. All the "facts" may well be accurate, but the author has opted to skew the context.

I call it the Bob and Tim rule.

"Tim punched Bob."

"Bob punched Tim."

"Tim and Bob shook hands and made up."

If you only report "Bob punched Tim", you've shared a fact but entirely skewed the context and that's why knowing an author's bias matters. It can give you an idea of how much harder you need to look for what's missing.

The simple rule I've adopted when reading any headline or history that includes something bad that a person or country did is to ask, "What caused them to do that? Why?" Cause and effect works with history too. Read history with a lens where you assume people are good by default and ask "Why" when people do something that seems bad/evil. It will often point you in the direction where you need to be digging a lot more to get the complete picture.

>For example, most people these days who read Thucydides' Melian Dialogue would assume the correct conclusion is to side with Melos, and it's often a shock that Thucydides himself sided with the Athenians.

Can you please elaborate what you mean by this? Thucydides, being a native Athenian, obvious fought on the side of the Delian League/Athenian Empire; that isn't so much a choice as a natural course of action, the allegiance to your family/polis being a central part of the identity of the Hellenes. His history of the war was written after he went into exile, and written in a largely neutral way. In fact Thucydides went out of his way to paint certain Athenians, such as Cleon in a very negative light, and was very positive on certain Spartan generals such as Brasidas.

The placing of the Melian Dialogue is particularly interesting not just because it's the only dialogue in the whole work, but because it was immediately before the end of the book, and the following book deals exclusively with the disastrous Sicilian expedition of Athens. Readers going through the work in order would read about the arrogance of the Athenian delegates in the dialogue, directly before reading the absolute misery of the Athenians sent on the Sicilian expedition where they were eventually completely destroyed. It's easy to get the impression that the Athenians have been hoisted by their own petard, and it seems reasonable that is precisely what Thucydides the historian want us to take away from it. Not that the expedition was depicted without sympathy to the Athenian soldiers, the two battles of the Great Harbour of Syracuse contains some of the most gut wrenching scenes of battle ever written in a history, and it's painful to read even now because of the masterful way Thucydides records the despair that have taken over the Athenians by the end of the second battle when their fate was sealed.

Given this larger context, I don't think it is reasonable to say Thucydides "sides with the Athenians" in the Melian Dialogue. It is true he did not record his own moral judgement on the events in the work, but the structure of the history suggests that he certainly did not support what Athens did to Melos.

I was hoping for a response like this!

First, regarding Cleon. I think it's important to ask why Thycydides didn't like Cleon. I would argue that it had nothing to do with regret of Athenian Empire, and more to do with the fact that he wasn't Pericles. It is clear to me that Thucydides believes that if Pericles had still been alive, Athens would have won the war. I believe he viewed Cleon as sub-par and undeserving.

Regarding Brasidas, one argument is that he spoke more highly of him because he had more information about him, seeing as he (Thucydides) was exiled to Sparta. I'll be honest, it's been a few years since I read the book and I don't fully remember his accounting of Brasidas, so maybe I need to revisit it.

One important thing you don't mention is his treatment of Alcibiades. He is very harsh on him, treats him as a bit of a rich kid playboy, who uses his charisma and ego to bully the Athenians into the Sicilian expedition in the first place. I would argue that Thucydides blamed the failure of the expedition, and thus the downfall of the Athenian empire, on Alcibiades. This is especially clear to me if you look at how Thucydides treats Nicias, who in many ways was Alcibiades' counterpoint.

For these reasons, I would actually argue that Thucydides viewed the Athenian empire as great, the Melians as indignant peons, and was very sad to see the collapse of the empire.

I'll argue that knowing the author's life may only color our judgement of a poem, but can drastically alter our judgement of a history.

I think of this essay by Bret Devereaux a lot, where he talks about the propaganda behind Roman histories. If you read Tacitus's Germania without any context, you might never know that's just a bad, second- or third-hand description of the Germanic peoples, and that he very likely never traveled there.

https://acoup.blog/2020/02/07/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

The research on the oral transmission of epic poems should meaningfully affect how you read/think about the Iliad and The Odyssey. Further, the absence of knowledge about Homer himself is useful information (you might even try to use the text itself to make inferences about Homer but that is complicated by the oral transmission).

I agree that there are limits though (what the author had for breakfast on his/her third birthday is probably uninteresting wrt to the text). Drawing the line is necessarily hard.

This article is a book review, so it seems what you are saying is you disagree with the author of the book, Cohen.

As for your comments about Gibbon, I don't recall this review mentioning his sex life, unless you mean him getting reject for marriage? The main idea was that he was short, fat, and unappealing, what with his enlarged scrotum and such. As for why this might impact his history, it is said in this review:

"And what about the poor fellow’s body and its sad infirmities? Cohen thinks (as Woolf did) that his unattractiveness provided Gibbon with an impenetrable cloak of irony. He learned to keep his emotional expectations in check, and this made him a cool analyst of religious zeal."

In my opinion the article seemed to agree with the book. So while I obviously disagree with the book, I also disagree with the book reviewer.

And regarding the comment about how he kept emotions in check, are there other reasons he might have done so? David Hume also wrote a famous history book, how did the author compare Gibbon to Hume? And did Hume have similar sex issues?

I don't want to know the answers to those questions, I am simply saying that I think the author of the book is allowing personal opinion to get in the way. Which is rather ironic, considering the topic at hand.

> I would agree to the extent that knowing the authors bias might color the text, and that we could infer a more nuanced and realistic picture from that knowledge. But I see no way that Gibbon's sex life (or lack thereof) should influence how we approach his history.

This.

The example that’s used in the article seems extreme and the author of the article is not elaborating on how this connection is made. Could be true could be not.

Also, I can add from personal experience that you don’t need to know the author to judge an artwork but knowing the author helps you connect to the art on a whole different level. As another example, first listen to Beethoven’s symphony No. 5 and then read about his personality traits and struggles in life, etc. it is fantastic. This is art of course and history might be another matter in which the artist’s credibility is in question.

I strongly agree with you. I find it disturbing that, in approaching their work this way, critics put themselves above their subject (the texts and the authors). I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who engage in literature and history like this produce inferior work.
> I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who engage in literature and history like this produce inferior work.

yo HOW is this not "put themselves above their subjects" right here?? You drop it as just granted and accepted by all that these works (which works, even?) are inferior.

You've got a lot of work to do if this line is to be taken seriously.

For those who have downvoted me, could you grant the courtesy of explaining why?
Looks like a quality comment to me.

But some will reduce it to:

vote(-isProblematic(wokePerceptualHash(“separate art from artist”)));

So we can't understand the writing without a writing about the writing?

You see how that goes.

When I write, I strive to deliver a complete package with zero dependencies.

My undergrad degree at Cal was history. One of the required classes for the major was historiography, the study of how history is created. This quote from the New Yorker article sums up one of the key ideas of the historiography class:

> It’s that bias in history-making is as inevitable as point of view. You cannot not have it.

I imagine that anyone who majored in history in the USA over the last 20 years is familiar with this idea.

I'm not trying to make a value judgment. Just noting that it's a very widespread idea among academically trained historians.

It's also important to note, I think especially in this context, that this framework isn't really a matter of ideology. I'm not saying you think it is, but I think a fair number of people here are likely to interpret it that way. This view is so widespread because people who practice history find it valuable.

When you come across, for example, a widely known primary document that contradicts or undermines a view common to historians for many years, how do you explain that? The answer isn't in the facts of the documents, it's in the social construction of "history."

I think there's a really common implicit assumption that historians are just people who know a lot of things about history. But once you get away from that and into the understanding of it as a skill- and research-based social practice, you start to need something to explain why we know what we know, or think we do. This ends up being a fairly useful one!

The issue is really whether people are aware of their own biases and actively try to counter them by trying to look at events through the lens of different biases, or just run with their own biases because they're trying to promote them, generally with ulterior motives in mind.

Hence George Orwell: "Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future."

For example, if you ardently believe in investment capitalism as the best economic system in history, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of Wall Street's close ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, such as the IBM story:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ibm-and-the-holocaust-20-yea...

Alternatively, if you ardently believe Marx-inspired socialism is the optimal solution, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine:

https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on...

Historians who are merely trying to promote their own particular ideology, or to justify the past actions of their own particular nation-state, are best viewed as propaganda peddlers.

I've been having a tough time wrapping my head around how little recorded history there is.

All individual people have rich lives and have been around for, what, 200,000 years? But only like 2.5% of that is covered by any written history at all (some inheriting from older storytelling tradition no doubt).

What entire cultural trends and phenomena have we totally forgotten? What were we even doing the other 97% of the time -- just trying to find enough food and not die?

I recently learned that everything we know about Alexander the Great comes from ~5 accounts written by people who lived hundreds of years after Alexander died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_Alexander_th...
It is crazy to think about, I agree. Additionally, before 200 years ago, nobody even owned anything written, except for a tiny amount of people. We spent the vast majority of our existence knowing nothing, at least how we think of knowledge now. But we still had these awesome brains - instead we had it filled with local knowledge - people, places, and things from the environment we lived in, which was pretty small. Can you imagine the detail we understood back then? And yet nobody knew the answers to what we consider important these days. It's really mind warping to contemplate this.

Even now compared to 30 years ago or so is weird. Prior to the internet, largely speaking if your immediate group didn't know the answer to something, you just largely didn't know it ... ever. I mean you could find out if you really wanted to, probably. But there were things we just didn't have the answer to.

"Remember that episode of Three's Company that had that one guy in it? What was his name?"

Guess what - we never found out that answer! The lyric of that song? Never found out before the Internet. Even today I still find myself remembering things I wanted to know growing up but the knowledge was inaccessible back then, but now I can find out in seconds.

Such a weird time we live in if you think about it. We have this weird mono culture, in a way, but within that mono culture we're getting all these tiny nano-cultures embedded in it. My son (13) loves some of the most obscure things and is able to find people also excited about it (Not just SCP, but SCP maps and mods done in Garry's Mod, for instance - there's like 100 people in the world that like that combination).

Now I'm just rambling, but yes, the vast majority of our existence we were isolated (globally speaking) and ignorant in profound ways. And now we are just the opposite.

What does "SCP" refer to in this context?
I was amazed to learn that the Japanese people didn't use a writing system until the 4th century, and even then it was just Chinese. Not an adaptation of Chinese characters, which came later, but the Chinese language.

Japan had agricultural residents since the 4th century BCE. To go 800 years without writing, despite depending on long-term planning and trading to survive, is incomprehensible to me.

In the future, 99% of knowledge will be from 1991 on. Those stacks of books in the library, all that knowledge, don't exist unless they can be hyperlinked.

The medium is the message, and Wiki is History.

Well, let's hear it straight from the horse's mouth:

    History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon

    Napoleon Bonaparte
> All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Maybe in 1850.
> Don't believe everything you read on the internet

> --Albert Einstein

"It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over until we forget that it's a lie." -- Littlefinger.
Wonderfully well written piece, summed up with:

> And that when, late in life, he made a formal proposal of marriage, the woman he addressed burst out laughing, then had to summon two servants to help him get off his knees and back on his feet?

> Cohen thinks that it should matter, that we cannot read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” properly unless we know the person who wrote it, scrotal affliction and all.

There's another side, the post victor generation. Today you can read all about the GAFAM era by young people that may not know about computing, so the world of computing will be just that. Whatever reigns in this world will be the main thing discussed about, because it's what defines the value ladder of the writer's reality.
The status of History and the contents of History school books are not to be conflated.

History, as a science, is a mixed bag of debates and consensus.

History school books are bound to national political ideologies.

Edit: s/confounded/conflated/

Firstly , history isn't a science. History is part of humanities.

> History, as a science, is a mixed bag of debates and consensus.

Science doesn't work via debates and consensus. It works by hypothesis and experimentation.

History is part of myth making which exists to form or preserve a tribe, institution, nation, etc.

The way professionals usually distinguish these is as history and historical memory.
I think you mean conflated, not confounded?
History is what people want history to be, E.g. the Native American Genocide.Always was, always will be.History is always the tool to justify the status quo.
> History is always the tool to justify the status quo.

Strong disagree on this one, especially on the _always_ part. Many times it is, in state propaganda especially. But history is the study of things that have happened and there are many facets and things in the past worth knowing and thinking about. It need not be the only about the things thaught in schools. It is much more, much richer than that.

> History is what people want history to be

Yes

> .Always was, always will be.History is always the tool to justify the status quo.

No and yes. We have various sources to determine what happened. To create a specific kind of narrative using that data is a choice that many can make. But historical data is still there, and different narratives might still arise.

Liberal democracies and the freedom of speech create the fertile ground required for historians to look at past records and explain what happened.

I never witnessed Native American genocide ommitted from any history class, even in elementary school, in a very red state.
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell.

after reading wikipedia articles about the events I have personally watched unfold and paid extremely close attention to, I have absolutely no faith in any written history. some particularly damning lies literally have video evidence that contradicts the editors' headcanon, but good luck challenging that fucking cabal
Can you give some examples?