I say this as someone who is doing research: if you do not have a lens in place to evaluate your research, you will replicate horrific racism in your work. It wasn’t accurate then, and aging hasn’t made it more accurate.
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Your research has to include research into the prejudices of the time so that you can untangle what you’re reading. And even then, if you’re stuck with English language sources, there are still things you will miss.
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Even *with* English language sources for England, you have to be careful. There are English language sources who genuinely cautioned that women’s brains could not handle higher mathematics.
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Most of us, I think, can conclude that IN FACT, women did not have different brains back then and this was irrational prejudice.
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But there are hundreds of ways that prejudice seeps in, and we have to interpolate properly.
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This thread from
@debreese very clearly gets into these same details. https://twitter.com/debreese/status/1213110470892294147?s=21 …https://twitter.com/debreese/status/1213110470892294147 …Show this thread -
She is much better at outlining exactly the issues at play here than I am—unsurprising, since she has a PhD and many years of experience—and if you aren’t following her already, I suggest you do so.
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She is one of the calmest, most courageous voices I follow, and she gets endless waves of BS for it. So support her in the important work she does.
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Oh god yes this. (...I say this as a classicist more than a historian, but it makes me want to scream when people point to some excerpt from Cicero or Seneca as proof of historical fact, with no further examination.)
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It sometimes helps if I compare using Cicero to prove a point as "What if the majority of our knowledge of the 1990s came from transcripts of 2% of Rush Limbaugh's shows?"
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