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
-
Show this thread
-
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.
2 replies 1 retweet 26 likesShow this thread -
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.
1 reply 1 retweet 19 likesShow this thread -
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.
4 replies 0 retweets 20 likesShow this thread -
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.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.