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The question is, why those specific things? Surely there's hundreds of other issues not being considered in the book, so telling you which several issues out of

• bee_rider 5y ago
  Because they are the currently popular way of doing new analyses of history, and people will typically expect new scholarship on already well-covered topics like the Napoleonic Wars to be performed in the currently popular fashion? I don't think Information Theory is typically covered at the 100 level, but if it were, I'm sure they would include things like conditional and relative entropy.
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  The first sentence says what is considered >This is history from above, which deals with foreign policy, war and some of its domestic ramifications as far as saying gender, race and generational relations were not considered I guess we know the reason, because there are people who consider these issues of overriding importance and are bound to question why they were not included in anything they read. Perhaps the author has already had these questions asked by people who reviewed the book and they decided to forestall further questions by saying there was insufficient space to address the issues.
  • jhgb 5y ago
    Well, to be fair, even the "positive" information here seems quite a bit broader than the "negative" information. Like, "war" is a very broad topic on its own. You can describe the events (battles and such), you can describe the technological issues of war (there's lots of books specifically dealing with history of military technology), the logistical issues (which is basically a specific branch of economic history if you think about it -- how do you supply an army on the move has always been critical), etc. etc. So even if to some extent the scope was mentioned, saying that a book about Napoleonic Wars is (surprisingly!) a book about war (which is essentially what "foreign policy, war and some of its domestic ramifications" basically boils down to) isn't quite what I'd expect as new specific information on what a book about Napoleonic wars might tackle. Subtracting a few very specific aspects doesn't help here.
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      >Well, to be fair, even the "positive" information here seems quite a bit broader than the "negative" information. Like, "war" is a very broad topic on its own. war is broader than gender? Everyone has the latter. I don't think I would agree that war is a broader issue than generational issues, since generational issues might be different from generation to generation but war tends to be a pretty well known subject. Hey this show is about war, ok I know what that is, and this show is about generational issues - ok what's that about then? In short, I do not agree that war is a broader issue than at least two of the mentioned issues. Not sure about race but if I were to guess I'd say war is probably broader - given that race is not a real thing and thus dealing with race must in fact be dealing with racism.
      • jhgb 5y ago
        > war is broader than gender? Everyone has the latter. Everyone has a species, and yet we share most genes with other mammals. So when you're describing some fundamental topic like the role of glucose in a mammal cell, the fact that everyone has a species suddenly becomes much less relevant. Furthermore, your question probably should have been "war is broader than gender aspects of war?", since it's quite obvious that there is a vast space of gender topics outside of war and merely "gender" covers those (hence the broad topic), but they're also irrelevant here. Ditto generational issues, etc.
        • pasabagi 5y ago
          I guess the point is that gender is the most salient social structure/feature of the napoleonic world, and this is a panoptic, 'monumental' history, so it's a notable omission.
          • jhgb 5y ago
            > gender is the most salient social structure/feature of the napoleonic world I don't even know what that means. To me that's like saying that net wealth is a social structure. Or that nationality is a social structure. I mean, in a war of nation states, nationality of an individual for example would be obviously of prime importance, but I still don't know how it is a social structure in a war.
• vkou 5y ago
  > The question is, why those specific things? Because for how important they have been over the course of history, a lot of historical analysis has closed its eyes to them. It's like writing an analysis of bovines without any mention of the fact that they are domesticated. It doesn't mean that it's a bad analysis, it's a broad field, and anyone working in it can freely choose which particular subset of it to cover. But it is a notable omission.
  • jhgb 5y ago
    Again, there's like a hundred topics that have been omitted from history books, and saying which three of those your book doesn't cover isn't helpful if you're trying to promote a book. If I were to write a book about Ancient Egypt, I wouldn't say "I'd like to present to you my new book about Ancient Egypt. The book is NOT involved with Middle Kingdom metalworking or the lives of lower rank scribes. Thank you for your attention." or anything like that, since you'd still have no idea of what it is about. Your uncertainty about the content would have decreased very little compared to some other things I could have told you in about the same volume of text -- for example that the book was actually about the estimated quantitative economic history of Egyptian agriculture (crop yields, taxes, etc.) from Old Kingdom to Roman Egypt or something like that.
• obvcrittheory 5y ago
  Is it not obvious? It's an apology that the book is not written with the lens of Critical Theory. This is necessary because the advocates of Critical thought deem any other "positionality" other than one that centers "marginalized" peoples by adopting that lens to be "problematic." The author is trying to stave off an online mob generated by Critical academics and activists through a preemptive apology for choosing a problematic lens