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Agreed. Far too often in history books/podcasts/shows you see guesses as to what normal life was like, but they’re just guesses. Because no one bothered writing
by freehunter 6y ago
Agreed. Far too often in history books/podcasts/shows you see guesses as to what normal life was like, but they’re just guesses. Because no one bothered writing down exactly what the average Roman went to war wearing or how they lined up or what their tactics were, because the contemporary audience already knew. It would be considered boring and too much information. But 2000 years later, we’re still guessing what the Gallic Wars looked like, sounded like, smelled like. Because it wasn’t important enough to write down.
We still have some of these same issues today, but given the rate of change in technology, we’re talking years instead of centuries or millennia. What was the average life like for a startup employee during the Dotcom era (1995-2001)? I have no idea because I was too young to experience it and I’ve never been able to find any books or accounts of the average daily work life even 20 years ago.
- reaperducer 6y agoFar too often in history books/podcasts/shows you see guesses as to what normal life was like The problem is that history books/podcasts/shows are not intended to reveal that level of granularity about life. They exist to provide a summary within a specific set of boundaries (printed pages, run time, etc...). If you want to know the nitty-gritty, you need to start with the source material. There's more source material on daily life available in the world's museums and university archives than you could ever digest in a lifetime. That's why it's summarized in the above-mentioned forms.
- freehunter 6y agoNot true at all. Listen to History of Rome and you’ll hear historian Mike Duncan constantly saying “we don’t know how this happened because no one ever wrote it down”. Dan Carlin says the same thing a lot in Hardcore History. If was just a matter of too much details they would have said “this detail doesn’t matter” or just bypassed it. It’s not that the medium isn’t granular enough, it’s legitimately that no one wrote this stuff down so it’s just gone forever. There is no source material to start with.