4 ms·

I can get on board with most of what you're saying here but I get the impression that a lot of people want to change history as part of a present-day political

I can get on board with most of what you're saying here but I get the impression that a lot of people want to change history as part of a present-day political battle, rather than pursuing a better understanding of history. Those same people often have a really shallow europe-centric historical understanding (the standard greece->rome->skip 1k years->renaissance->napoleon), so I don't trust them. Like, Mansa Musa was the richest man on the planet at one point during the time period we're talking. Dude collapsed several economies on his pilgrimage to Mecca by giving away too much gold. Give me that, don't give me Morgan Freeman shoehorned into Robin Hood.

UncleMeat 6y ago
Where do you get that impression? Social media? Blog posts? I know an unusual number of history academics and I've literally never seen anything other than "pursuing a better understanding of history". I have seen Sean Hannity (literally yes) call out an acquaintances' history class as "unamerican" on national television despite obviously not reading past the class title. This makes me immensely skeptical of people who worry about academia suffering due to injected ideological battles. Go read some history manuscripts from the 50s if you want to see scholarship suffering due to ideology. Some analysis will be moving along nicely and just swerve hard into idiocy because the author was blinded by their own racism or sexism. I find this to be an interesting broader problem. For whatever reason people seem to feel like they understand the state of modern humanities or social sciences academia even if they haven't interfaced with faculty but they don't tend to feel these same things about something like math or computer science. This leads to people forming really strong opinions about what it is like inside the ivory tower without actually talking to people.

UncleMeat 6y ago

Where do you get that impression? Social media? Blog posts? I know an unusual number of history academics and I've literally never seen anything other than "pursuing a better understanding of history". I have seen Sean Hannity (literally yes) call out an acquaintances' history class as "unamerican" on national television despite obviously not reading past the class title. This makes me immensely skeptical of people who worry about academia suffering due to injected ideological battles. Go read some history manuscripts from the 50s if you want to see scholarship suffering due to ideology. Some analysis will be moving along nicely and just swerve hard into idiocy because the author was blinded by their own racism or sexism. I find this to be an interesting broader problem. For whatever reason people seem to feel like they understand the state of modern humanities or social sciences academia even if they haven't interfaced with faculty but they don't tend to feel these same things about something like math or computer science. This leads to people forming really strong opinions about what it is like inside the ivory tower without actually talking to people.