Nice article, but these days I am always suspicious whenever I read anything that offers a "surprising view" on some historical figure.

The reality of today's history is that there are way too many historians and it requires lots of hard work to add new factual knowledge (other than speculations and theories) to the field.

So to make a name or at least somehow make money in this discipline, historians have an incentive to come up with "shocking" and "controversial" theories so a lot of work that gets exposure is stuff like "was Socrates sexist?" or "Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great" or articles like this which questions a figure we know little about, it's actually a fact he was a great builder but as the only highlighted point in the article says "he had seven wives and a number of concubines" ... which of course is the point why he wasn't "great" ... if you want to learn something about Ramses II I recommend to just read his wikipedia page, it's more interesting and way more informative.

I think its much more complex than just "the facts don't change." We change, all the time, and are interested in different things and so pay attention to different things and choose to tell different stories.

To use the historiography of the US Civil War since 1945 as an example: From roughly 1945-75 the general focus in Civil War studies was on the life of the individual soldier, as a generation molded by service in WW2 tried to relate their experience to the most violent struggle in American history. From roughly 1975-1990 the focus was more on the Civil War as a struggle over slavery, as a generation molded by the Civil Rights movement tried to relate their experience to the most violent struggle in American history. There was a short era in the 1990's where women- and broader social history- and the US Civil War became the focus, as people tried to grapple with the way that the most violent struggle in American history had totally remade society as a way of relating their own experiences with a rapidly changing society. And finally, I would say that the past 15 years of study in have largely been shaped by a focus on Reconstruction, as people have suddenly grown interested in how a militarily dominant US Army, victorious in battle and occupying a restive population, lost a decade long guerrilla war, withdrew, and watched the collapse of the political regimes left behind.

Obviously there was research on all of these topics in all of these eras. I'm just making subjective summaries of where I've seen the most intense activity in history research during these eras. (So, e.g. Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote give way to James McPherson give way to Drew Gilpin Faust give way to Allan Guelzo and Brooks Simpson as the most prominent Civil War scholar of each era.)

I think that kind of proves the OP's point though. That people come along and "create new angles" an awful lot in history. You don't really need much data, if you need any at all. And at the same time, like journalists, historians want something that "bleeds" so it can "lede".

Wall Street Journal, CNN, FOX, The Economist, etc etc etc, will all write endlessly on what this or that senator meant in the debate on this or that bill. Those outlets have audiences many times larger than C-SPAN, which simply televises the debate and the vote, along with a link to the exact text of the bill on its website.

You know why no one watches C-SPAN? Because facts like that are boring as tar, and no one cares about them anyway. (We generally adhere to our own worldviews on subjects like that in any case.)

Same with the Civil War example, if people really wanted to know the reason the states began fighting, they could just read the various Declarations of Causes. Written by the people who seceded themselves, declaring exactly why they intended to secede and fight.

You know why practically no one has read any of the Declarations of Causes?

Because they're boring as watching paint dry, and no one cares about them anyway. (We generally adhere to our own worldviews on subjects like that in any case.)

In such an environment, you need something new and imaginative to capture peoples' imaginations. That's just the reality of the state of the study of History right now.

The issue is no one goes back to the primary sources enough? Because life is short and death is forever, we don't have the time to master all the primary sources on all possible topics. So we have to rely on secondary sources for most of our knowledge. That isn't unique to history, that's true of every damn subject.

I actually worked my way through most of Rocket Propulsion Elements by Sutton a few years ago, actually doing the math on how rocket engine design works (I was thinking about building my own as a hobby- had a kid instead and all that free time vaporized). It took me ~9 months of working in my spare time from my day job that had nothing to do with rockets. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to only have an opinion/understanding if they've done all the work themselves. So we have to rely on secondary works, done by people who have an understanding of the primary sources/equations/whatever. That's not "the reality of the state of the study of History" that's the nature of humanity.

The point I was trying to make is not really one about primary, secondary, or tertiary sources. My point was more that in areas such as history and journalism, what a person's world view and belief system is will strongly influence what he or she would consider to be valid sources. The primary source examples are only in my post by way of giving an objective means by which to evaluate the factual validity of secondary sources.

My larger point is, in things like history and journalism, people believe, mostly, what they want to believe. Regardless of validity. Regardless of primary sources. This is why HN User Michalu was correct in asserting that in history, people often come up with takes on historical subjects that contradict primary sources. Because, 1 - No one will check the primary sources in any case. 2 - Their audiences are generally believers in the world view the new take espouses. And 3 - To gain prominence historians and journalists often need these novel theses to provide sizzle to their writings.

While in my younger days I would probably have agreed with this, now I think that it's more defeatist and nihilist than is warranted. The Civil War example I cited above shows why: all of the areas of focus really happened. Soldiers did experience the front lines of combat, but slavery really was the beating heart of the war. Society really was fundamentally altered in ways that heavily affected women (and men and children and everyone, even those not at the front), and Reconstruction really did happen, and the Redeemers really did overthrow it. Books about all of those topics won Pulitzer Prizes and were Best Sellers and all the rest. People did actually learn about these real things, and some of them did incorporate those changes into their world view. They were stories people were interested in, because they spoke to the struggles that they encountered, not as something that flattered their already existing prejudices. That's a hell of a lot better than you are arguing here.

And then something like Hamilton can come along and make a LOT of people reconsider a lot of things all at once. Hamilton might not be particularly accurate as history, but it definitely was a much needed correction to 1776, rather closer than the previous award-winning American Revolution musical.

As for the difficulty of checking primary sources, this is true in any field of knowledge. Just like I can in theory read the Declarations of Succession, I can in theory verify General Relativity, but I'm not actually capable of making observations precise enough to do so, so I have to trust that those who are do a good job. There are plenty of people who would claim that I am being duped, and that I am only accepting that GR exists because it fits my world view. For example, the entire Deutsche Physik movement thought it was trumped up sizzle.

> facts like that are boring as tar

More to the point, typical cable news viewers much prefer someone to tell them what to think.

There are plenty of people who watch C-SPAN, but watching C-SPAN lacks context and doesn’t give the full story anyway; maybe half of the politicians at any given hearing are spewing ignorant misunderstandings or deliberate misinformation, grandstanding, and hoping for soundbites that will please their supporters when replayed on the news. The folks on the other side of the hearing tend to be circumspect, to put it mildly, because there are serious risks to revealing too much publicly.

Others read transcripts of un-televised hearings, long investigative reports, government documents, independent statistical analyses, etc.

But most people don’t have the time or spare thinking space to figure out their own unique conclusions starting from primary sources about every possible topic.

> could just read the various Declarations of Causes

First, it’s not clear who you mean by “practically no one”, but I’m pretty sure that any undergraduate Civil War history course is going to involve reading these. Many high school students surely read them.

But if you take a few minutes to read them, they make it very clear that perpetuating slavery was the Confederate rebels’ primary concern. Which is the same thing most historians will tell you if you ask for a 1-sentence (or 1 page) summary of the war. Here’s the second sentence of the Wikipedia article about the Civil War: “The Civil War began primarily as a result of the long-standing controversy over the enslavement of black people.”

But that’s not the whole story of a gigantic war involving millions of people.

It is true that in the US South, white elites have undertaken a century-long propaganda effort (with help from a few fringe revisionist historians) to minimize the public’s impression that the Civil War was about slavery and to rehabilitate the Confederacy. This has been largely ineffective at changing the minds of historians, but if you ask many modern-day “conservatives” who are caught up in that propaganda cloud, you may hear that the Civil War was about “states’ rights” and that slavery was a marginal consideration.

that's unfair, I love to think, but when my mechanic has a recommendation, I take it. I don't want to have to be as knowledgeable as my mechanic.

I think you both may be slightly missing what I'm saying.

Let's suppose that people do simply want to be told what to think. Well, in such a case, it would be simple to get a viewer of, say, CNN, to watch FOX instead. After all, they just want to be told what to think.

But we know this is not the case. It is nigh impossible to get a viewer of CNN to stop viewing CNN and watch FOX instead. And it is an equally sysiphean task to get a FOX viewer to stop watching FOX and watch CNN full time instead.

I'm positing that this is because we all adhere to some preexisting world view that, for most, won't really change in any case.

Same with history, studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor because most primary sources don't align with our world views.

Certain reliefs in Egyptian temples displayed an alarming, to us, amount of explicitly sexual activity among everyone from the pharoah, to the high priestess, to the slave. So we erased it where we could erase it, and don't talk about it where we couldn't erase it.

Ditto for pagan rituals, so we replace them with good, clean, Christian rituals that weren't so lascivious. But I mean, hey, it's an Easter BUNNY out hunting for eggs. You figure it out.

Again, the Declarations of Causes explicitly state that maintaining slavery is the principle aim of the states in the Confederacy. So if we want the spark of that conflict to be something else, we just ignore those documents and focus on the material put out by historians better aligned with our thinking.

I posit that in all of these cases, we do those things to protect our belief system.

> It is nigh impossible to get a viewer of CNN to stop viewing CNN and watch FOX instead. And it is an equally sysiphean task to get a FOX viewer to stop watching FOX and watch CNN full time instead.

Both CNN and FOX are terrible sources, mostly consisting of bloviating pundits with very scarce factual content. Both come with heavily pro-corporate pro-military pro-US-government viewpoints. The main difference is that CNN has at least some basic standards of journalistic ethics, and wasn’t explicitly set up to be one political party’s propaganda arm. But if someone wants to learn the basics about the daily news, watching CNN is also not a very effective use of time.

> studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor

What exactly do you think happens in undergraduate history classes? What do you think historians spend their time doing? The historians I know all but live in archives and libraries.

> I mean, hey, it's an Easter BUNNY out hunting for eggs.

Yes, both hares and eggs are fertility symbols. But I’m not sure what your point is exactly. Having a hare bring decorated eggs to children isn’t especially pornographic.

>Having a hare bring decorated eggs to children isn’t especially pornographic

That's not how many of the original pagan celebrations worked. That is the sanitized Christian replacement though. I guess I should have made that more clear.

So how did the “original” pagan spring equinox celebration work? What was the connection to hares bringing eggs?

You’re being very cagey here. Just say what you mean.

>Same with history, studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor because most primary sources don't align with our world views.

I can definitely see this for individuals. But are you seriously claiming that actual professional historians aren't working from the primary sources? Because if that is your argument, I'm afraid you're mostly wrong. For the most part, they are spending their lives in the archives looking at all the primary sources[1]. But this is an artifact of the specialization of knowledge and work: they trust that I'm over here writing code that works, just like I have to trust that they are over there synthesizing the primary sources into something understandable.

Now, some historians are like Fox/MSNBC in that their work is more about flattering the prejudices of their consumers than actually informing, but just like there are plenty of good journalists, there are plenty of good historians. Your nihilism feels unwarranted to me, because there are plenty of people writing interesting new books by tackling new topics, or old topics from different angles.

[1]: Source: Before I went into computer programming, I strongly considered going to grad school in history (not the civil war, that example was because I grew up in Virginia so everyone interpreted "history" as solely the War Between the States; I learned to use it as the example of why new history was written) so I spent a lot of time shadowing history professors.

> add new factual knowledge

The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge. Fields like archeology deals with facts, history is almost always an interpretation and as such there is often value in reevaluating what’s come before.

Sometimes it’s to deal with intentional manipulation, other times our society has simply shifted to a point where we view things differently, but we’re almost never capable of getting to a point where we know for a fact how things were. Especially not when we go that far back. I had a professor who had written numerous papers, and later a few commercial books, on the topic of the roman emperor cult. His source material was a few one-liners from a few gravestones. Not to take anything from him, this is just an example, because this is how a lot of our generally accepted “historical facts” come to be.

>Fields like archeology deals with facts

Yes, that's what I was referring to - archeology and things like deciphering ancient languages, which can can help to read discovered documents.

There aren't many archeological sites to be discovered (or so it seems) so historians work with existing artefacts over and over.

Archaeology deals with facts, but they are usually thin, and specific, and extrapolated in sweeping ways to fill in the gaps.

It's a little like trying to raytrace a scene, except for most of the pixels on the screen, you're not casting any rays at all, and a bare few have many samples.

Not really, unless you consider, "Person X kept a written record of their experience with Y" to be factual knowledge. What Person X writes about an event can definitely help historians piece together "what really happened," but people lie, exaggerate, and sometimes just get things wrong even when they were eye witness to the event. Think about the old saying, "History is always written by the winners" for example.

This is just one example of why history is a game of trying to figure out what is reliable and what really happened.

If you apply that kind of skepticism consistently you'll come to the conclusion that we don't know anything much about anything.

It's actually extraordinary how much we know about the distant past. For example, Julius Caesar lived over 2000 years ago, but we know beyond any reasonable doubt a great many details of his life. Take, say, the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Caesar. We know all of that.

I mostly agree, but any time I get into serious historical scholarship it's amazing how much contradictory information there is that is usually left out for the books and stuff targeted at Lay people.

I'm a huge fan of Bart Ehrman for example, and of course anything around religion is going to be polarizing, but he has a long list of contemporary sources that describe the same event with blatant contradictions in them. Flash forward to the modern times and despite having powerful tools like the internet, we still suffer from fake news and honest mistakes. I think the skepticism is healthy, tho I don't take it to "we can't really know anything" (but I concede it may have seemed like I was saying that).

>but he has a long list of contemporary sources that describe the same event with blatant contradictions in them.

And yet we don't conclude from this that we can't know anything about the present.

Ehrman actually defends normal historical methods against the kind of unwarranted skepticism that you were expressing.

The vikings are my favourite example for these kinds of interjections. We think we know a lot about the vikings, there is so much literature on Norse mythology, there is even a very nice Gabriel book turned TV show on Amazon prime.

Yet our only written sources on the subject were written by Christian monks.

You brought up Julius Ceacar as an example in another post, and he’s actually another great point. Because we don’t actually know that much about him, or his life. Most people think he was the first emperor of Rome, but that was actually Augustus.

We do know a great deal about Julius Caesar. He wrote books on what he was doing, and we have letters written about him from his contemporaries.

> Most people think he was the first emperor of Rome, but that was actually Augustus.

I'm talking about what historians collectively know, not what the average person on the street happens to remember.

We clearly do know a huge amount about Caesar and the course of his life. The Wikipedia article, for example, is full of information about Caesar that is known beyond any reasonable doubt.

I'm a bit confused by your comment because the article doesn't seem to be presenting any kind of revisionist history.

I wish there were some revisionist theories, but to propose a revisionist theory you need tons of work and very credible studies to back it up ... to simply say "hey Ramses was a bad guy" is much easier, it won't attract attention of any credible historians who may try to discredit it but it will get published and may even give you an opportunity to write a pop-science book, so you can go from a poorly paid "one in a million" historians to hopefully "an author of the popular science bestseller".

>to simply say "hey Ramses was a bad guy" is much easier,

But the article doesn't say this.

It's his revisionist version of the article.

I did a deep dive on Ramses II about a decade ago when I just randomly found a book about him on the streets of San Francisco.

He's definitely an amazing historical figure.

However, we DO know that a large number of his statues were usurped from other great figures.

This article rather downplays how big a screw-up Kadesh was for the Egyptians.

There is a great lecture from the Oriental Institute about it: https://youtu.be/A1AGe2V0qHo

Recently I read the book 'The Year Civilization Collapsed' by Eric Cline. While being a fascinating read (I can really recommend this), I couldn't shake the feeling that there is a lot of reaching when it comes to really ancient history, especially the bronze age. The book deals with the mystery of the apparent collapse of basically all major mediterranean civilizations around the year 1180 b.c. It's really a mystery, not easily explained by natural catastrophes or conquests. While the period described in the book seems to be one of the more 'documented' periods in history (there are a lot of archeological findings of ccommunications and such), it's still not really transparent. And then, around 1180 b.c., a dark age started. Light's out. That seems to be really depressing for archeologists. Just beeing an amateur, that's starts becoming more obvious especially at the end of the book, when the author mentions complexity theory, which, so he hopes, will shed some light on the reasons for this 'global' collapse. To me, being a software developer, it seems to hint to some kind of deep misunderstanding of what complexity theory actually is about. And that's kind of disheartening, because, simply said, somehow the a whole branch of science which seems to have no clue how to continue.

Ramesses II may have been cool, but I doubt he was as cool as Yul Brynner portrayed him.

Absolutely iconic. Nobody today is in Brynner's league.

We should all try to work "So let it be written, so let it be done." into meetings.

History becomes legend and legend becomes myth.