>How likely do you suppose that this historian would be open to new information... New "information", yeah, not very likely at all. New "evidence", very likel

>How likely do you suppose that this historian would be open to new information... New "information", yeah, not very likely at all. New "evidence", very likely indeed. "Evidence", can be investigated for veracity. Information, is no better than you and I sitting around making up stuff. I think that's a subtle but important distinction that I think a lot of people don't understand about the work of a historian. You have plenty of people who wrote down a story about Agincourt for instance. Plenty of people will still tell you some story about Agincourt today. But only a very, very, few of those stories are consistent with the evidence. For example: ---- Hmm, there are a shit ton of arrow heads at Agincourt. Wow! They're all laying in EXACTLY the distribution that long dead historian X indicated given his account of the battle. Hmm. None of them are where long dead historian Y indicated given her account of the battle. ---- You analyze historical site after historical site, and after a while, you figure out that the accounts of long dead historian X nearly always align closely with the physical historical evidence. So... yeah... naturally after a while, over the hundreds of years that pass, more and more historians start believing long dead historian X rather than long dead historian Y.