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All big history is revisionist history. If you’re tracing a legible narrative throughline through more than 100 years of history, you’re cherrypicking to feed confirmation bias. Little history (“little” in sensemaking ambition terns not years) tends to present the mess almost raw
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Big histories in this sense: most standard school textbooks, Graeber, Harari, Zinn, Diamond, Toynbee, James Scott, Fukuyama, Arendt,... all revisionist, historicist, and “wrong” in a shallow sense. Some are slightly redeemed by making a larger metahistorical point or two.
Replying to
Ironically James Scott manages to legibilize history through the very act of using illegibility of reality as a critical lens on institutional actions. This shows up more in his other books like against the grain.
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When I read history, I try to pick sources that are pre-theoretical. They’re just inventorying the events in a place and time, carving reality at the joints as best they can, compensating for implicit theoretical biases as best they can. No active agenda besides curiosity.
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Being gloriously wrong in a big history way is almost preferable to being right in a “little history” sense. Being able to place yourself and others in a grand narrative is eschatology