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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Favorite examples?
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Tuchman’s silent mirror that I’m reading now inspired this thread. Another I remember from long ago is Shirer’s rise and fall of the third reich which I read as a teenager.
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I mean, people can't even agree what happened this year.
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Tuchman is also theoretical. She’s always wondering whether it is still possible to reconcile democracy with social order and individual liberty and how liberalism has a been contending first with the absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism. She’s always plotting around that
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Yeah sure, but a big theory meme isn’t front and center as it is with pop bestseller types like graeber
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A downside to "pre-theoretical" texts like Rise and Fall by William Shirer which you mention elsewhere is that in the case of Shirer, the book is riddled with historical inaccuracies in another sense -- factual errors, missing information crucial to later historical theories, etc
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