5 ms·

Nice article, but these days I am always suspicious whenever I read anything that offers a "surprising view" on some historical figure. The reality of today's

Nice article, but these days I am always suspicious whenever I read anything that offers a "surprising view" on some historical figure. The reality of today's history is that there are way too many historians and it requires lots of hard work to add new factual knowledge (other than speculations and theories) to the field. So to make a name or at least somehow make money in this discipline, historians have an incentive to come up with "shocking" and "controversial" theories so a lot of work that gets exposure is stuff like "was Socrates sexist?" or "Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great" or articles like this which questions a figure we know little about, it's actually a fact he was a great builder but as the only highlighted point in the article says "he had seven wives and a number of concubines" ... which of course is the point why he wasn't "great" ... if you want to learn something about Ramses II I recommend to just read his wikipedia page, it's more interesting and way more informative.

moksly 7y ago
> add new factual knowledge The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge. Fields like archeology deals with facts, history is almost always an interpretation and as such there is often value in reevaluating what’s come before. Sometimes it’s to deal with intentional manipulation, other times our society has simply shifted to a point where we view things differently, but we’re almost never capable of getting to a point where we know for a fact how things were. Especially not when we go that far back. I had a professor who had written numerous papers, and later a few commercial books, on the topic of the roman emperor cult. His source material was a few one-liners from a few gravestones. Not to take anything from him, this is just an example, because this is how a lot of our generally accepted “historical facts” come to be.
- michalu 7y ago
  >Fields like archeology deals with facts Yes, that's what I was referring to - archeology and things like deciphering ancient languages, which can can help to read discovered documents. There aren't many archeological sites to be discovered (or so it seems) so historians work with existing artefacts over and over.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Archaeology deals with facts, but they are usually thin, and specific, and extrapolated in sweeping ways to fill in the gaps. It's a little like trying to raytrace a scene, except for most of the pixels on the screen, you're not casting any rays at all, and a bare few have many samples.
- foldr 7y ago
  >The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge. I find this statement very odd. We know a vast amount about the past through normal historical methods. Lots of historians are (probably) doing crap, pointless or silly research, but that happens in all academic disciplines.
  - freedomben 7y ago
    Not really, unless you consider, "Person X kept a written record of their experience with Y" to be factual knowledge. What Person X writes about an event can definitely help historians piece together "what really happened," but people lie, exaggerate, and sometimes just get things wrong even when they were eye witness to the event. Think about the old saying, "History is always written by the winners" for example. This is just one example of why history is a game of trying to figure out what is reliable and what really happened.
    - foldr 7y ago
      If you apply that kind of skepticism consistently you'll come to the conclusion that we don't know anything much about anything. It's actually extraordinary how much we know about the distant past. For example, Julius Caesar lived over 2000 years ago, but we know beyond any reasonable doubt a great many details of his life. Take, say, the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Caesar. We know all of that.
      - freedomben 7y ago
        I mostly agree, but any time I get into serious historical scholarship it's amazing how much contradictory information there is that is usually left out for the books and stuff targeted at Lay people. I'm a huge fan of Bart Ehrman for example, and of course anything around religion is going to be polarizing, but he has a long list of contemporary sources that describe the same event with blatant contradictions in them. Flash forward to the modern times and despite having powerful tools like the internet, we still suffer from fake news and honest mistakes. I think the skepticism is healthy, tho I don't take it to "we can't really know anything" (but I concede it may have seemed like I was saying that).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
foldr 7y ago
I'm a bit confused by your comment because the article doesn't seem to be presenting any kind of revisionist history.
- michalu 7y ago
  I wish there were some revisionist theories, but to propose a revisionist theory you need tons of work and very credible studies to back it up ... to simply say "hey Ramses was a bad guy" is much easier, it won't attract attention of any credible historians who may try to discredit it but it will get published and may even give you an opportunity to write a pop-science book, so you can go from a poorly paid "one in a million" historians to hopefully "an author of the popular science bestseller".
  - foldr 7y ago
    >to simply say "hey Ramses was a bad guy" is much easier, But the article doesn't say this.
    - lurquer 7y ago
      It's his revisionist version of the article.
mandevil 7y ago
I think its much more complex than just "the facts don't change." We change, all the time, and are interested in different things and so pay attention to different things and choose to tell different stories. To use the historiography of the US Civil War since 1945 as an example: From roughly 1945-75 the general focus in Civil War studies was on the life of the individual soldier, as a generation molded by service in WW2 tried to relate their experience to the most violent struggle in American history. From roughly 1975-1990 the focus was more on the Civil War as a struggle over slavery, as a generation molded by the Civil Rights movement tried to relate their experience to the most violent struggle in American history. There was a short era in the 1990's where women- and broader social history- and the US Civil War became the focus, as people tried to grapple with the way that the most violent struggle in American history had totally remade society as a way of relating their own experiences with a rapidly changing society. And finally, I would say that the past 15 years of study in have largely been shaped by a focus on Reconstruction, as people have suddenly grown interested in how a militarily dominant US Army, victorious in battle and occupying a restive population, lost a decade long guerrilla war, withdrew, and watched the collapse of the political regimes left behind. Obviously there was research on all of these topics in all of these eras. I'm just making subjective summaries of where I've seen the most intense activity in history research during these eras. (So, e.g. Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote give way to James McPherson give way to Drew Gilpin Faust give way to Allan Guelzo and Brooks Simpson as the most prominent Civil War scholar of each era.)
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  I think that kind of proves the OP's point though. That people come along and "create new angles" an awful lot in history. You don't really need much data, if you need any at all. And at the same time, like journalists, historians want something that "bleeds" so it can "lede". Wall Street Journal, CNN, FOX, The Economist, etc etc etc, will all write endlessly on what this or that senator meant in the debate on this or that bill. Those outlets have audiences many times larger than C-SPAN, which simply televises the debate and the vote, along with a link to the exact text of the bill on its website. You know why no one watches C-SPAN? Because facts like that are boring as tar, and no one cares about them anyway. (We generally adhere to our own worldviews on subjects like that in any case.) Same with the Civil War example, if people really wanted to know the reason the states began fighting, they could just read the various Declarations of Causes. Written by the people who seceded themselves, declaring exactly why they intended to secede and fight. You know why practically no one has read any of the Declarations of Causes? Because they're boring as watching paint dry, and no one cares about them anyway. (We generally adhere to our own worldviews on subjects like that in any case.) In such an environment, you need something new and imaginative to capture peoples' imaginations. That's just the reality of the state of the study of History right now.
burtonator 7y ago
I did a deep dive on Ramses II about a decade ago when I just randomly found a book about him on the streets of San Francisco. He's definitely an amazing historical figure. However, we DO know that a large number of his statues were usurped from other great figures.

moksly 7y ago

> add new factual knowledge The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge. Fields like archeology deals with facts, history is almost always an interpretation and as such there is often value in reevaluating what’s come before. Sometimes it’s to deal with intentional manipulation, other times our society has simply shifted to a point where we view things differently, but we’re almost never capable of getting to a point where we know for a fact how things were. Especially not when we go that far back. I had a professor who had written numerous papers, and later a few commercial books, on the topic of the roman emperor cult. His source material was a few one-liners from a few gravestones. Not to take anything from him, this is just an example, because this is how a lot of our generally accepted “historical facts” come to be.

michalu 7y ago
>Fields like archeology deals with facts Yes, that's what I was referring to - archeology and things like deciphering ancient languages, which can can help to read discovered documents. There aren't many archeological sites to be discovered (or so it seems) so historians work with existing artefacts over and over.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Archaeology deals with facts, but they are usually thin, and specific, and extrapolated in sweeping ways to fill in the gaps. It's a little like trying to raytrace a scene, except for most of the pixels on the screen, you're not casting any rays at all, and a bare few have many samples.
foldr 7y ago
>The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge. I find this statement very odd. We know a vast amount about the past through normal historical methods. Lots of historians are (probably) doing crap, pointless or silly research, but that happens in all academic disciplines.
- freedomben 7y ago
  Not really, unless you consider, "Person X kept a written record of their experience with Y" to be factual knowledge. What Person X writes about an event can definitely help historians piece together "what really happened," but people lie, exaggerate, and sometimes just get things wrong even when they were eye witness to the event. Think about the old saying, "History is always written by the winners" for example. This is just one example of why history is a game of trying to figure out what is reliable and what really happened.
  - foldr 7y ago
    If you apply that kind of skepticism consistently you'll come to the conclusion that we don't know anything much about anything. It's actually extraordinary how much we know about the distant past. For example, Julius Caesar lived over 2000 years ago, but we know beyond any reasonable doubt a great many details of his life. Take, say, the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Caesar. We know all of that.
    - freedomben 7y ago
      I mostly agree, but any time I get into serious historical scholarship it's amazing how much contradictory information there is that is usually left out for the books and stuff targeted at Lay people. I'm a huge fan of Bart Ehrman for example, and of course anything around religion is going to be polarizing, but he has a long list of contemporary sources that describe the same event with blatant contradictions in them. Flash forward to the modern times and despite having powerful tools like the internet, we still suffer from fake news and honest mistakes. I think the skepticism is healthy, tho I don't take it to "we can't really know anything" (but I concede it may have seemed like I was saying that).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

foldr 7y ago

I'm a bit confused by your comment because the article doesn't seem to be presenting any kind of revisionist history.

michalu 7y ago
I wish there were some revisionist theories, but to propose a revisionist theory you need tons of work and very credible studies to back it up ... to simply say "hey Ramses was a bad guy" is much easier, it won't attract attention of any credible historians who may try to discredit it but it will get published and may even give you an opportunity to write a pop-science book, so you can go from a poorly paid "one in a million" historians to hopefully "an author of the popular science bestseller".
- foldr 7y ago
  >to simply say "hey Ramses was a bad guy" is much easier, But the article doesn't say this.
  - lurquer 7y ago
    It's his revisionist version of the article.

mandevil 7y ago

I think its much more complex than just "the facts don't change." We change, all the time, and are interested in different things and so pay attention to different things and choose to tell different stories. To use the historiography of the US Civil War since 1945 as an example: From roughly 1945-75 the general focus in Civil War studies was on the life of the individual soldier, as a generation molded by service in WW2 tried to relate their experience to the most violent struggle in American history. From roughly 1975-1990 the focus was more on the Civil War as a struggle over slavery, as a generation molded by the Civil Rights movement tried to relate their experience to the most violent struggle in American history. There was a short era in the 1990's where women- and broader social history- and the US Civil War became the focus, as people tried to grapple with the way that the most violent struggle in American history had totally remade society as a way of relating their own experiences with a rapidly changing society. And finally, I would say that the past 15 years of study in have largely been shaped by a focus on Reconstruction, as people have suddenly grown interested in how a militarily dominant US Army, victorious in battle and occupying a restive population, lost a decade long guerrilla war, withdrew, and watched the collapse of the political regimes left behind. Obviously there was research on all of these topics in all of these eras. I'm just making subjective summaries of where I've seen the most intense activity in history research during these eras. (So, e.g. Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote give way to James McPherson give way to Drew Gilpin Faust give way to Allan Guelzo and Brooks Simpson as the most prominent Civil War scholar of each era.)

bilbo0s 7y ago
I think that kind of proves the OP's point though. That people come along and "create new angles" an awful lot in history. You don't really need much data, if you need any at all. And at the same time, like journalists, historians want something that "bleeds" so it can "lede". Wall Street Journal, CNN, FOX, The Economist, etc etc etc, will all write endlessly on what this or that senator meant in the debate on this or that bill. Those outlets have audiences many times larger than C-SPAN, which simply televises the debate and the vote, along with a link to the exact text of the bill on its website. You know why no one watches C-SPAN? Because facts like that are boring as tar, and no one cares about them anyway. (We generally adhere to our own worldviews on subjects like that in any case.) Same with the Civil War example, if people really wanted to know the reason the states began fighting, they could just read the various Declarations of Causes. Written by the people who seceded themselves, declaring exactly why they intended to secede and fight. You know why practically no one has read any of the Declarations of Causes? Because they're boring as watching paint dry, and no one cares about them anyway. (We generally adhere to our own worldviews on subjects like that in any case.) In such an environment, you need something new and imaginative to capture peoples' imaginations. That's just the reality of the state of the study of History right now.

burtonator 7y ago

I did a deep dive on Ramses II about a decade ago when I just randomly found a book about him on the streets of San Francisco. He's definitely an amazing historical figure. However, we DO know that a large number of his statues were usurped from other great figures.