>Same with history, studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor because most primary sources don't align with our world views. I can d

>Same with history, studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor because most primary sources don't align with our world views. I can definitely see this for individuals. But are you seriously claiming that actual professional historians aren't working from the primary sources? Because if that is your argument, I'm afraid you're mostly wrong. For the most part, they are spending their lives in the archives looking at all the primary sources[1]. But this is an artifact of the specialization of knowledge and work: they trust that I'm over here writing code that works, just like I have to trust that they are over there synthesizing the primary sources into something understandable. Now, some historians are like Fox/MSNBC in that their work is more about flattering the prejudices of their consumers than actually informing, but just like there are plenty of good journalists, there are plenty of good historians. Your nihilism feels unwarranted to me, because there are plenty of people writing interesting new books by tackling new topics, or old topics from different angles. [1]: Source: Before I went into computer programming, I strongly considered going to grad school in history (not the civil war, that example was because I grew up in Virginia so everyone interpreted "history" as solely the War Between the States; I learned to use it as the example of why new history was written) so I spent a lot of time shadowing history professors.