Its all viewpoints, innit?

'WHICH VIEWPOINT IS BEST?
It would be easy to write other perspectives: a history of beliefs as Britain moved from a religious age to a secular one; of the gradual triumph of Parliamentary democracy (actually these days perhaps not so easy); or from a scientific perspective showing the change from the time when we believed that the sun went around the earth to the decoding of the genome.

We could even focus on something like food, and show the roast beef and beer of "Merrie England" evolving into the hummus and chardonnay of today.

None of these perspectives is wrong, but on their own they give only a limited view of a much more complicated past.

You can legitimately write histories of a particular aspect of the past as long as you are clear that that is what you are doing. Where I have trouble is with mono-causal overviews of the past or single explanations for a period or for change.

I think you can write good general histories of, say, 20th Century Britain, in which you try and give as complete a picture of it, from high politics to fashion. Such histories have been written and written well by, for example, Peter Clark in Hope and Glory. You get the portrait of an age in the round.

History is always changing its shape and that is why it is endlessly fascinating.'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8097607.stm

I really don't think these concepts are all that complicated. History can only ever be tentative relatively rough drafts, because the complete set of evidence is never going to be available. Thats a simple truth.

It is also an almost impossible task to simply lay out all the evidence without editing out any material. Even if you did, I'm not sure the result could be called history. The editorial task is essential to creating works of history. So what do you leave out? What is the core information, and what is trivial? What is the foreground story, what the background clutter? That is the editors task. But any person who has been trained to know what history is will be able to read a work of history, and if they have sufficient knowledge of the subject already, decide if the criteria for writing history (rather than something else, like propaganda) have been met.

However, the modern school of literary criticism, which says objectivity is impossible, and that all 'viewpoints' are equivalent and equally 'valid' is just tosh. How is that I can read Thucydides 2,400 years after he wrote and understand that despite being an Athenian aristocrat, he still did a creditable job of writing history and not Athenian propaganda? Because people are capable of understanding multiple perspectives at once; and also because there are such things as facts, and what actually happened. Sometimes, writing down what actually happened can be a bitter, devastating activity, emotionally traumatic. But only the lazy denizens of the scholarly establishment would aver that that makes writing history impossible. It doesn't, it just makes it something to be undertaken by the tough-minded and resolute, rather than the feeble and effeminate.

'None of these perspectives is wrong'. That would depend, wouldn't it? If you cherry pick a small, non-representative set of examples of some kind of bahaviour, and only report those in your perspective, it is entirely possible that the less knowledgeable reader will be misled as to the weight and prominence of that behaviour in the period being written about.

Can a whole book be fallacious?

Completely by accident, whilst doing a bit of research for this new blog, I noticed an ad for this book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1859843557/202-1025247-7403845?v=glance&n=266239

"The No-Nonsense Guide to World History", by Chris Brazier. It clocks in at 144 pages. There are three different things about this which immediately set my BS antennae buzzing. Firstly, anything that claims to be No-Nonsense implies that much of the rest of what your have read is nonsense. Secondly, a book that purports to survey all of world history in 144 pages is automatically suspect, were it written by the most pre-eminent of practising historians. And thirdly, the rest of the No-Nonsense titles are:

"The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalisation"
"The No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade"
"The No-Nonsense Guide to Fair Trade"
"The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development"

I suggest that this is a series of political tracts, written from a socialist perspective. Is the No-Nonsense guide to World History one too? Please comment on this post if you know! I couldn't bring myself to buy it.

Welcome to the Protectors of Historical Truth

Hello everybody,

Welcome to the bastion of Historical truth. I hope thats how it will work out anyway. Not only will this blog contain posts that combat particular historical fallacies, it will also scrutinise common fallacies of argumentation used in both legitimate historical works, and newspapers, magazine, the web and all the other places people write about History.

Most readers and writers of History will have come across historical fallacies as they trawl the great sea of literature. Sometimes it will actually annoy them enough to try to overturn that fallacy in the public mind by writing a riposte. I hope that those people will use this blog to further the cause of Historical accuracy in its eternal struggle against myth, carelessness, special pleading, wayward argumentation and plain lying.

Tally ho!