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<blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 9190914" data-attributes="member: 7025997">I like to get sources from a few different time points if I really want to know something (as opposed to a historically-inspired game where, hey, maybe Zhuge Liang really was a wizard). After all, the reassessors have their own biases we may call into question in forty years.Probably the big thing is to think about what biases the person writing at the time may have--to take the most obvious example, British nineteenth-century historians were pro-imperialist, twenty-first-century historians are anti. But apart from the winds of history, most people want to think well of their nation (and in some time periods and places, might have been imprisoned or killed if they spoke ill of it). I remember picking up a French world history book and the American revolutionary stuff was all about the intellectual influence of the lumieres and the French support for the Americans. We may not want to admit it while their descendants are invading Ukraine, but it was the Russians who sacrificed the most to stop Hitler (25-30 million dead), which naturally gets elided in American Cold War movies made while Russia was Hollywood's geopolitical enemy.Another thing is that if you really want to go deep on primary sources, you are going to have to learn other languages, and that winds up being a hard barrier for most at some point since you can't learn every language in the world.It's worth noting that some stuff, like Holocaust denial, wasn't taken seriously even at the time.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Blue Orange, post: 9190914, member: 7025997"] I like to get sources from a few different time points if I really want to know something (as opposed to a historically-inspired game where, hey, maybe Zhuge Liang really was a wizard). After all, the reassessors have their own biases we may call into question in forty years. Probably the big thing is to think about what biases the person writing at the time may have--to take the most obvious example, British nineteenth-century historians were pro-imperialist, twenty-first-century historians are anti. But apart from the winds of history, most people want to think well of their nation (and in some time periods and places, might have been imprisoned or killed if they spoke ill of it). I remember picking up a French world history book and the American revolutionary stuff was all about the intellectual influence of the [I]lumieres[/I] and the French support for the Americans. We may not want to admit it while their descendants are invading Ukraine, but it was the Russians who sacrificed the most to stop Hitler (25-30 million dead), which naturally gets elided in American Cold War movies made while Russia was Hollywood's geopolitical enemy. Another thing is that if you really want to go deep on primary sources, you are going to have to learn other languages, and that winds up being a hard barrier for most at some point since you can't learn every language in the world. It's worth noting that some stuff, like Holocaust denial, [I]wasn't taken seriously even at the time[/I]. [/QUOTE]

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