If you’re not curious about history, you’re doomed to be attached to it.
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General observation: people who are curious about history tend to read actual history books. People who are attached to history tend to read biographies and “classics” but studiously avoid developing a broader sense of context around the bits of history they valorize.
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Good histories, whatever their politics, tend to humanize all actors on the stage. It’s hard to remain attached to a cultural identity once a particular set of ancients you might identify with has been humanized. You start noticing how they’re like living people you know.
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3 of the 4 histories I’ve read so far in my pandemic history binge hit that standard. The 4th, Arthur Herman’s Freedom’s Forge, while informative on the subject I was curious about, is not as good. Slides into near-hagiography.
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Pandemic live-reads meta-thread. I have reasons I’m reading these right now and finding them useful for current headspace, but I’ll save those for a blog post. First one was history of Astounding, the legendary sci-fi magazine. twitter.com/vgr/status/123…
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One of the best things about post-Columbian American history is that it is short enough and well-documented enough, you can humanize every bit of it. There is no confounding mist of legend and mythology to penetrate. Which is why the statues debate is so fraught here.
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The need is deeply embedded but the specific anchoring can shift around as history humanizes specific bits.
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This might be why the US is the only developed western Christian -heritage nation to be developing-world level literally religious. A source of identity sufficiently cloaked in mist to be immune from humanizing historiography.
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