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> While in the past their views may have been countered by equally imaginative narratives from the left — like the liberatory progressivism of Whig historians and Marxist theorists — today it feels as though that ground is too often ceded in favor of “trusting the science.”

The first part describing the webs and flows of objectivity in history, with interesting examples was well written, But the conclusion is a bit odd. The author thinks, if you follow one the links they provide, that the far right individuals like Tolkien's works, and then also invent crockpot alternate histories, and suggests that the left should come up with something similar.

> American narrative in decades, was the work not of historians, but journalists. When the profession has ceded its domination over the public narrative of history, amateurs will take over. [...] Maybe that amateurism is not such a bad thing.

If historians won't do it, the journalists should. I can see interpreting it, yes, but pretending to write whole fictionalized narratives masking as history is a bit extreme. That's exactly what journalists in totalitarian regimes do: in Russia they say that Ukraine is a fictional country, it's just Russians corrupted by the "Satanic West", in North Korea I am sure they tell similar elaborate stories and so on.

> Many scholars have found themselves ‘baffled and confused by the enormous proportion of forged, remade, confected, and otherwise mutilated documents’ that form the premodern historical record.

I'm sure they do. Nonetheless, they make the best of it. This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up story is as good as your carefully researched one."

Similar to intelligent designers saying, "hey, if you throw a bunch of car parts on the floor, they'll never assemble themselves into a car! So it had to be a Designer."

Or homeopaths saying, "There's so much conventional medicine cannot explain. So my herbal cure and natural diet is as good as their chemotherapy!"

>This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up story is as good as your carefully researched one."

It is essentially a denouncement of historical revisionsm though...

While elaborate it is also unconvincingly unspecific. You could write whole books like that without really saying anything.
> This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up story is as good as your carefully researched one."

That itself is a great story!

I wonder how many people fell for it. At least one.

Critical thinking and discernment in evaluating information are inportant
The airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is roughly 20.1 miles per hour.
Without the evidence of firsthand observation to stand upon, what have you got?
Unfortunately, the people most invested in pushing alternative stories of history are not doing it out of some philosophical sense of solipsistic purity (which would at least be admirably consistent, if still useless), it's the people who have vested political interest in rewriting the past to suit their means, in the sense of "nothing happened in Tianenmen Square on June 4, 1989".

Tearing down our current, admittedly flawed, admittedly biased, admittedly fragmentary understanding of history does not cause truth to miraculously reveal itself, but rather creates a vacuum into which will rush the narrative pushed by the people in positions of power. Who controls the past, controls the future. Instead, we can do the best we can, which is to say: produce documents, debate over their veracity, and keep an open mind as to their inaccuracy.

> what have you got?

you've got a discipline that isn't quite a science, but usually makes a best effort to resemble one.

Which still ends up better than the wild ravings of uneducated conspiracists.

Or the calculated lies of propagandists. The fact that ancient histories were written with an agenda in mind may be true, but that does not mean they are improved by adding further layers of ‘constructed truth,’ IE, lies.
You are only imitating the homeopaths and creationists here.
You are technically describing your interpretation. Careful, the supernatural can be found in what would seem like the very most unlikely places.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Do you have some of that for "the supernatural" ?

Judaism is the evolution of a Sun/Ra worshipping cult, its early followers killed Moses and only perpetuated the religion out of guilt, most historical evidence before the 14th century was faked by monks, and the Carolingian dynasty was invented to pad the current date by over 300 phantom years (the current year is actually 1722, not 2024).

That’s officially in my headcanon now.

If Paul Johnson's History of the Jews is to be believed, Judaism arose out of a fanatical cult that worshipped the sky-and-war god El, and all the monotheism stuff was a big retcon that evolved out of El insisting that he was the best and strongest god among many gods, not a sole god of everything.
Very true, there are other sources of the same ideas. It's even in the Bible: "You shall have no other gods before me", implying that El is the number 1 god.

Paul Johnson has gone out of fashion but his wide works have stood the test of time.

Sounds like a Dan Brown fanfic
I know it's not well written, but God as my witness, Dan Brown is like cotton candy for the brain and I feel no shame about loving his books.
@dang why is this four day old post [1] suddenly resurrected as if I posted it today? This is the second or third time I've seen it happen.

Can you let people karma farm repeat posts without this nonsense?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throwup238&next=4095...

Fortunately for Charlemagne, calendars and reams of historical documents from Asia and the Americas refute the phantom time theory.
> University departments tried to ban his books and boycott his publisher, but Velikovsky still found himself the subject of documentaries and the star of speaking tours until his death in 1979.

When has censorship ever accomplished anything except to turn a crank into a martyr?

Totally unrelated to the content of the article, but I absolutely hate the font on those blockquotes!
> Inspired by archaeological discoveries in Amarna in Egypt, Freud posited that the monotheism of Moses was, in fact, of Egyptian origin: an evolution of the worship of the sun god, Aten. Even more scandalously, he asserted that ancient Jews had murdered Moses and perpetuated this monotheistic faith not from religious devotion, but from an unconscious sense of unresolved spiritual guilt.

I wonder how much of that had to do with the Nazi demonization and dehumanization of Jewish people. Monotheism is one of the big contributions to culture by Judaism. The other 2 major modern monotheistic religions- Christianity and Islam are explicitly based on Jewish monotheism.

Framing this as them stealing it from the Egyptians and killing Moses (similar to Jesus) seems very inline with what the Nazis would want to portray.

Monotheism is one of the big contributions to culture by Judaism.

Presumably you mean Abrahamic monotheism -- as monotheism throughout the world has had multiple sources of origin, generally predating Judaism (and Yahwism).

But Yahwism itself most likely arose out of the Canaanite pantheon (and its monotheism).

So really is the latter -- the mighty Canaanite religion -- that we should be thanking for this great gift to the world that has been Abrahamic monotheism.

Right, but apart from their mentions in the Hebrew Bible, the Canaanite religion and culture are a lot more obscure and a lot less powerful-seeming than ancient Egyptian if you're a Nazi propagandist. It's often the case that the true story is more interesting and more exciting than fiction.
What an awful article. Leaving aside the later half, which is just a vague denouncement of various right wing stances on history, the former part concerns itself with revisionist history, which seeks to rearrange ancient or medieval history.

History will always be plagued by the various issues the article point out, most narrators are totally unreliable, most documents which have existed are lost and might have been intentionally destroyed, physical evidence is selected by the surrounding environment, measurement techniques are imprecise and the amount of things that happened is incredibly vast. This state of affairs means that we should expect that there are strong arguments for multiple contradicting theories and that there is a great variety of theories which are supported by much of the evidence. Essentially revisionism should be the default state of history, but of course it isn't.

In physics we have learned in the last hundred years that roughly everything we had previously known was false and that most of the assumptions made were in fact wrong.

He meditated. He prayed. He fasted. He ate mushrooms. He dwelt in the wilderness. And by doing so he saw something more. Something realer than what is popularly called reality.

But I won't do any of that. What I will do is read stories about the people who did all that and interpret them with a conventional eye.

Funny.

To approach the present moment with mindfulness generally does not allow greater insight into the distant past than archaeology and anthropology.

Edit: I misinterpreted your comment. Yes, I agree that it is possible/likely that much of theology is built on top of select few people's transcendant experiences.

> "The longer we treat our field as sterilized objective truth, we lose more students to the alt-right"

Shockingly bad article. Objectivity is an ideal. It's impossible to reach, but the point is to try. As soon as historians give up trying to be objective, they start producing garbage.