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Young people from Europe would be maimed and killed. There would be much confusion on who is and is
not the enemy. African children would die in the horrible mess. World opinion would not be kind
especially from the Chinese who have North Africa for their Riviera. Every stumble in the campaign
would be used to rouse anti-European sentiment. Many Africans would hate the Europeans for years to
come. |
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Naturally the better the research the better the history understanding. Of course there's a market
for everything, even lazy hack history analysis. The more superficial the research the greater
their odds of spinning the story to match whatever sociopolitical bias they're trying to prove. |
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It’s always surprising and a little disturbing to see how few authors of popular history books
actually take the time to engage in archival research. With an increasing amount of secondary source
literature and some published primary sources available on the internet, even university libraries
are being frequented far less and I feel that a sort of laziness has settled over many researchers.
Yet nothing truly replaces original archival research, no matter how tedious and frustrating it can
sometimes be. When you use collections deposited at national, local or thematic archives, you may
very well be the first person to have ever handled a specific document and—depending on your
topic-- you are likely to make discoveries that can truly shake previously held beliefs or
assumptions about our past.
There is no doubt, of course, that archives can be problematic as well for the researcher. Some
sensitive documents are restricted, while others have not yet been de-classified. In some cases,
parts of a collection have strangely gone missing. I was working at a few archives in Eastern Europe
earlier this summer on former state security agencies and espionage activity against western
countries during the Cold War. I was frustrated and angered to find that key documents in a given
file had been “lifted out” of the collection, had never been deposited in the first place or
were destroyed. Conveniently, most of these were files detailing the activities and personal
information of former agents.
Despite these frustrations, anyone who has conducted research in archives will know that there
really is no substitute when writing history, regardless of the limitations. Granted, access to
certain archives can sometimes be difficult, but a little patience will usually go a long way in
finally receiving permission to consult material. Historians should contribute to our body of
knowledge by uncovering new sources and by questioning previously held assumptions, and not simply
re-hash things that have already been written by others. |
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Ok so what your saying is that our historians should conform to what others have said without
thinking "o this might be inaccurate". Your saying that we should all be closed minded conformists.
Yes it is good to consult our history to help our future but we study history to prevent it in the
future. |
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There are too many people reading through pointless tomes trying to find some nugget of truth that
will add to our understanding. For every such venture which succeeds, there are ten thousand which
lead to nothing but wallowing in pointlessness.
There's nothing especially difficult about wallowing in some old diary. Anyone can do it. It's
difficulty is purely logistical - going to the out-of-the way museum where the old diary is kept.
What's far more rare is to find a mind that can do synthesis and pattern recognition, seeing the
patterns in amongst all the noise. Particularly for popular histories, in most cases there is little
point in boring people with the latest abstruse detail of what was discovered two years ago in a
hitherto undiscovered cache of letters by one of Louis XIV's less favoured courtesans. It is more
important to convey a sense of the ebb and flow of big events and to put them into a pattern which
will make sense to the reader.
Primary research historians are ten a penny. Literally anyone with a modicum of intelligence and
literacy could do that kind of journeyman history work. Big picture men, visionaries who can sift
the existing data and see new patterns in it, people like Karl Marx, are as rare as gold dust. When
they appear, they can change the world.
The best thing that can be said for the journeymen and historical clod-heavers, is that they provide
the raw material for the visionaries to work with and eventually make sense of. |
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30 Jul 2008 13:39
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