There was a good Bret Devereaux ACOUP post a while ago On Defending History

The great disconnect here is that, when asked, the public regularly notes that they think history is important, but when their opinions are processed into political outcomes it is clear they do not think history departments or historians or really even history teachers are important. That interaction comes to a head with the notion that large language models (LLMs like ChatGPT) will replace historians, because I think both effects speak to the same cause, which is that while the public understands science as a process of discovery, they understand history ¨C incorrectly ¨C as purely a process of transmission...

Put briefly, I think for the majority of the public, who has, after all, never gone beyond high school history class or at most a 101-level collegiate history survey, has a history as scripture view of the field. In this view, history is a set of basically known and static information ¨C names, dates and so on ¨C which does not change over time, but is merely transmitted, via textbooks and introductory courses, from one generation to the next, the way a religious text is transmitted. That view is why folks get so upset when historians say some of the history they learned in high school we now know is wrong, because if violates the basic principle they understand historical knowledge to function on. It is also why they see no real connection between historians doing research and history as a body of knowledge: ¡®well, we basically know everything about the past, right?¡¯

If you are reading this, I don¡¯t need to explain that we do not basically know everything about the past (right?) but are instead discovering the past continually, both in improving our knowledge of the deep past but also understanding the new past which time, as is its nature, generates at a rate of one minute per minute.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:18 AM on September 16 [15 favorites]

The past is a battlefield. A war is being fought over it right now, always. How we understand history matters so much, to everything. And as with so many areas of modern life, the very wealthy and conservative, and the revanchist post-Civil Rights Movement South understand the stakes quite clearly, and are pot committed to not just winning the argument, but winning the fight. The fact that liberal society sees this more as a discussion where two sides disagree and reject notions of any fiercer struggle is exactly why we are where we are as a country today.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:21 AM on September 16 [8 favorites]

I don't know, the umbrella man has been rumored to be the penguin, badge Man the Riddler, the second gunman, Catwoman, the third man, Orson Welles.
Oswald defected to Moscow and wrote a
'historic dairy'. Dairy. is that true, is it the burden of the student or the historian to check this "fact"in this case a typo. is it relevant.

"Testifying before a House committee in 1978, a Dallas warehouse worker named Louie Steven Witt admitted he was the man. His motive was not assassination, but heckling."
The man even brought the same umbrella in to the committee. is that true, (1) The initial rumor was
a symbolic act of sympathy for the Cubans who failed to get American Air support.
is that true, is it a rumor because it has a anti Castro sentiment?
would Robert Lansing or #1 use this methodology for either signaling or some sort of magic dart.

"a single, baffling figure stood out against the cheerful crowd:" from the article
Is that true, was he the most baffling. the optics of the available film footage and photos could lend credence to this but what about other figures that have been noted who stood out, had their backs turned, stood still.
and the mere mention of this burdens the student defining these so-called baffling figures within the available evidence.

from the article
"It is a temperament that is comfortable with uncertainty, sensitive to context and aware of the powerful, often unpredictable rhythms of the past".

this is so well said I'd like to have it in a T-shirt. best example I can think of was being in class, this would have been late second early third year studying Asian History, Japanese history I. by the fourth week there was a few students, you know those kind of guys who are obviously going to drop or fail.
the teacher I had was the most excellent.
I think we were somewhere in just before Kamakura and finally one of these students raised hand and made a comment which was a comparative us custom to something within the pre-daimyo culture which made no sense.
my teacher simply answered the question by not understanding it. I just sat in the back of the class and at that point my eyes opened and I waited for it.
student replied "but you're from Japan, you should know this in a comparative way"
for which my teacher replied, I'm from Hawaii, I used to surf in the morning so I really wouldn't know about that aspect of Japanese culture with-inAmerican culture, if it exists.
never tried so hard to suppress a smile In my life and honestly, that taught me more than I remember about the Daimyos as a whole from memory.

from the article
"When they do address such topics, they often do so in a jargon-laden style that is inaccessible and unhelpful to decision-makers or the wider public."
I have often wondered if this is historiography coming to the rescue from political evisceration of one's career if they get it "wrong".

"The stakes of this disconnect are not merely academic. Bad history, or no history, can lead to catastrophic policy choices."
though it is easy to say this is replete through history I think it's Paramount for the time period chosen. with the Advent of the internet and other possible technical enhancements for the future, one could per se, choose their own history by typing a few words. my pet theory I call instant history fits within this schema.

"The historical sensibility invites us to stay with the mystery a little longer. It asks us to resist the easy answer and to appreciate the ¡°wacky,¡± the contingent and the profoundly human fabric of the past. It reminds us that history is not a set of lessons to be applied, but a vast reservoir of human experience to be explored."

this would be one of the most interesting introductions
to historiography ever.
when I started history, one of my friend's family friend was a chemistry professor which he argued that everything in existence is based on chemistry, how can you argue with that.
I tried dark matter, I'm not sure if it worked but he asked me, history, what does that do?
well, economics does what it does, chemistry does all that it does, political science does it to us...history, well, our job is to keep track of all of you and find relevant correlation.

(1) testimony in original link which leads to a PDF of the witness testimony with diagrams!
posted by clavdivs at 3:06 PM on September 16

History only rhymes, it doesn't repeat itself. If anyone wants to quibble about your interpretation of history, they can find any number of irrelevant distinctions between now and then to refute you. Many of us here think that 2020s Europe and America resemble 1930s Europe and America, and we see the danger in that. But most of my community think that view is comically wrong doomsterism. As did most people in the 1930s!
posted by SnowRottie at 8:40 PM on September 16

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