The source is a memoir titled "Mémoire sur la mort de Louis XIV" written by Philippe de Courcillon marquis de Dangeau, on page 24 about midway down the page -- His collected diaries are a source for lots of details about Louis' life. This does present the issue that many memoirs do of often being the only source we have for some things-- making it difficult to corroborate. I forgot to put the footnote there, but you're quite right it's important, so I'm pinning this comment (not a pin of shame)
(I will not provide any citation in this article because it is not academic writing. Furthermore, since the topic is immense and has, from many angles, been written about before, any citation will simply open the question why such authors were cited, and not others. Thus it is merely a personal view-and, as we know, individuals do not matter. )
To be fair to mr. Wightman, Scottish land law was genuinely messed up in a lot of places for instance: did you know that only lords could own land? And that anyone who owned land was therefore automatically a lord? Fortunately those days are behind us but luckily now you can stil do the same thing with this comment's sponsor: Established Titles. Established Titles is an exciting new service that lets y-
That's blatant Rebel propaganda. Our beloved Emperor holds the brave men and women of the Imperial Senate in high regard and would never devalue them with such slander. You're just a conspiracy theorist. Next you'll tell me the Emperor is planning to dissolve the Senate entirely, or that he's building a """superweapon""" out in space somewhere (also entirely unsubstantiated btw)
That's actually a myth. In reality, Stalin, Adolf, and the third guy, all lived in Vienna at the same time. So... Joseph, being the bottom, got pregnant (I assume nobody claims literally Hitler used protection okay) and he died in childbirth with VERY long over-carriage. Their child and final legacy of Fuhrer is putin.
@@michimatsch5862 With lack of specificity from OP, I'm going to pretend it's the Doritos and OP had a spiritual experience eating their first familial-sized bag of Doritos unsupervised.
14:00 Love how he put the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire on there separately as if they were two different empires and not the same empire under different management. Also "Greece" as one cohesive idea instead of a mishmash of petty kingdoms Also Romanov Russia, as opposed to the other eras of Russian government that have lasted both far longer and far shorter Also the fall of the Ottoman Empire being 1570. Even under a vague idea of "falls" that's comically early And this is just the empires he mentioned. I'm surprised he didn't include the Qing Dynasty's 276 years in power, but of course that would ignore the fact that Chinese dynasties have lasted anywhere from 14 to 550 years
Also the start date of Romanovs is just factually incorrect: it’s moved more than 50 years into the future. Apparently so he can make his “250 years” point
There was some sense of "Greek-hood" in ancient Greece, though less in a national sense and more in just a cultural sense; a lot of their philosophers thought very highly of the Greeks, shockingly.
I think it would be better to say "governments" vs. Empires or nations. If culture is similar to a soul of a people, then different cultures need different governments. Think of a "natural consitution" of a nation similar as saying about a person that an attribute of theirs is part of their "personal constitution". Meanwhile how they choose to govern, i.e. self control their constitution is dependent on themselves and what tools they have avaliable from their self created environment. So looking at it from that perspective "cultures", similar to say a person's outward personality will change overtime usually, last about 200 years, or 2 lifetimes, which is enough time for a particular strong 'air' tied to an era to pass. So most "natural constitions" as the classics would put it, last as long as their respective "cultures", and most outward governments of a nation change with it, sort of like the continants with tectonic plates. The culture is the core, generating everything about a people, the natural constitution is the mantle, and the outward institutions are the crust. Some outward institutions though are more adaptable and may last up to 500 years. I know of only two governments 5 governments in the history of the world lasting longer without going functionally defunct. That being the frankish plactica lasting about 500 to 1050 before being slowly replaced by the french parlement, the 2nd HRE which effectively lasted 962 to 1618, and the first 3 chinese dynasties, xia being 550 years, shang likewise, and then zhou being 1122 bc to 476 bc Take care and God bless, hope you enjoyed the comment, sorry if it is hard to understand, I just don't think the proper words for these concepts have been developed in English yet
If one has sources one will not clearly cite, does one ACTUALLY have those sources? At least "it came to me in a dream" is honest about its place in culture.
Funnily enough, I can see "I am the state" and "I die but the state remains" coming from the same person pretty easily. Sort of like "Behold this thing, the state, my life's work. I have created it in my image. It is my legacy and though my body dies, through the state I endure."
yeah, that's what i thought too! the legacy of the ruler persists because it has become synonymous with the state. so the ruler ultimately remains, even if his flesh does not
The Great War seems especially prone to this. Britain's great example is Alan Clark's "The Donkeys"; an important book in many ways, but with deeply flawed scholarship, including the Falkenhayn quote on the cover - that the British troops were "lions led by donkeys." Clark later admitted that he made this up. There is zero evidence that Falkenhayn ever said it. And yet that book has gone on to utterly form Britain's view of the First World War - from "O What a Lovely War" to Blackadder. My least favorite thing, across the board, is the unevidenced ascription of intent.
Made up quote aside, though, isn't Blackadder a much more accurate view of the war than the 'O What a Lovely War' newspaper cutting I think you might be referencing? Certainly the former is an over-the-top comedy and the latter is the lived experience of an actual soldier, but given the collected accounts of many first hand witnesses, it does seem like a horrifically callous and meaningless meatgrinder.
@@joemerino3243Absolutely - in fact I go further than that and think we Brits should on balance not have fought it. But there is more subtlety than that involved (mad officers etc) and I would prefer history to be based on sources rather than assumptions.
@@joemerino3243 No war is meaningless, a better wording of the sentiment that we share is that it was horrible for the masses of working class people in europe
@@joemerino3243 He was referencing the stage/film musical of the name "Oh! What a Lovely War", which beyond having some great recordings of period songs, shaped and influenced what people think the First World War "really" was in the "lions led by donkeys" vein. It's a poignant film, but history it is not.
And there’s no easy way to combat that sort of issue on Wikipedia, it takes exactly 0 effort to shove a false reference into an article and as long as it doesn’t get reverted instantly you’re looking at a ridiculously complicated and long process of argumentation that essentially comes down to consensus among a small group of people over whether or not the source *actually* backs up the claim. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time editing/dealing with Wikipedia knows just how awful it actually is for anything besides very basic information.
What’s infuriating is that I’ve seen the same thing happen in academic papers. Or the cited source has a conclusion that is common sense *and wildly opposed to the actual results*
@@Christopher-gp9iv I know this is kind of petty but it's kind of a good example of the kinds of biases that pop up even within well moderated articles. There was once a rather ridiculous argument on the F-15 about how it being the vehicle mode for several Transformers characters was irrelevant because "it's just a dumb cartoon from the 80's that children watch." But then the same people kept arguing that a video shown only in 1 aircraft museum in Arizona, seen by about 100 people (including this particular mod) was not only worth its own section on the page, but also worthy as a citation source. The ultimate compromise was to mention neither, until the mod quit and someone reinstated the Transformers trivia unopposed.
Posts and memes about how Chinese History is merely a series of rising and falling dynasties (with big catastrophic rebellions and court corruption interspersed throughout) have become ubiquitous on my social media feed. It's really disappointing because although dynastic periodization can be useful (periodization can be useful, but should be well-informed) it's become one of those simple truisms that detracts from our ability to understand change and continuity as it relates to certain periods of Chinese history. I enjoyed this video a lot!
Our brains seem to heavily rely on mnemonics and categories to remember a broad swath of information, which lets so many of the important details get lost. It also lets the nuances of change and continuity, like you said, become obliterated and makes it very difficult to see how history is a river, not a series of dams. Breaking history into chunks is both necessary and unfortunate.
@@genovayork2468 I believe this 'state' you try to depict may be wrong. If the Five Dynasties could be considered a consecutive state, why not see the Chen dynasty as a continuation of the Southern Liang dynasty? And also, why not see Cao Wei as a continuation of the Eastern Han Dynasty? Indeed, I think it is possible to depict the Northern Wei Dynasty (at least from the Western Wei Dynasty, a successor to the Northern Wei.) to the Tang Dynasty as a single state - we could identify evolutions (not upheavals) of institutions and ruling class through this group
I cannot stand it when people take the "Chinese guy becomes warlord. Thirty-million die" meme seriously. China has always had a massive population due to how fertile China Proper is, and the (contemporary) centralized state made any revolts deadly.
@@llq5081 I thought Liang and N. Liang are the same state, not Liang and Chen. The latter may be better. N. Liang is akin to Taiwan, and we view it as the different state, not the PRC. Cao Wei began in 220, Han ended in 224, no? Western Wei doesn't exist. 534 was not a partition, it was E. Wei declaring independence from Wei. Wei remained the same in the west.
Unironically your videos have made me hyper conscious of sourcing my own claims (even just casual "talking about rhythm game history" stuff with my friends) which has helped me both become better at practicing truth and feel more stable in my own knowledge. It's a habit that'd be so useful in non-academic spaces (especially here on youtube, where it feels like videos are mass made on topics with info only from word of mouth)
Sourcing your claims about rythm game history is crazy but in a very good way tbh. I love this comment as a Humanities graduate and rythm games enthusiast 😭
I dunno what I would want to read more (for wildly different reasons); a highly-researched and detailed history of rhythm games", or "GGS of rhythm games and its musics"
@@elpito9326 The Megaman fandom as a whole started citing sources because we ran into a huge problem of "source some interview I don't recall" and "source dan sidera's fan theories which quote sources but strings them together on a corkboard with color-coded yarn and pins", to the point one of the final bosses got a fan name that made it into the wiki page for the boss SOMEHOW. Now the biggest issue we have is when there's citations of the Kodansha MMX encyclopedia because it only got translated into spanish, so the spanish side of the fandom has to feed the rest of us until we can translate it in english eventually.
@@sponge1234ify The former is really fun, obessesively well researched videos on completely unimportant topics are the best because you can just enjoy them with no fuss.
Pirate history is plagued by this problem. Because everyone assume pirates had those pretty clothes from the Errol Flynn movies, or the revolutionary ideas of POTC, and the whole garments given to them by hundreds of years of pop culture. They were violent, motivated by money, outright racist and if not, morally ambiguous. Women were not allowed on ships, they spent all they gained, and they profited a lot from slavery. And their fashion? They were no different from the sailors, they just had their weapons on them at all times. But then again, you can't talk about true pirate history and NOT have someone shouting One Piece references right in your face. This sub-sub-subfield is a lost cause.
An experienced pirate's fashion would have been different from average sailors of the period. Your average sailor had to make do on poor wages often sending a part of his earnings home. Pirates, on the other hand, could plunder nice textiles from merchant ships they captured and were way less incentivized to save their money up. This series of incentives lead more experienced pirates to wear a lot of their wealth on their bodies like rings, sashes of silk, or other gubbins that could be stolen from your average merchant on the spanish main.
@@juwebles4352 Pirate: “Look at this fancy silk shirt I can afford! Boy, I sure hope nothing happens to it.” The uncaring salty depths: The British Navy: Other Pirates:
@@juwebles4352 They didn't wear those big boots you see in the movies, and definitely not that many clothes because of the, you know, SCORCHING HEAT of the Caribbeans or the Indian Ocean. Plus having hats on a ship is usually not advised.
I hope this comes across in the sincerely positive way/connotations it was meant with (I realised it could be read as snarky or demeaning and wanted to nip that in the bud). Like, often you're examining not just the historical event but the mechanisms at play within how that history of said events/periods are engaged with outside of the academic field of History, or to put another way, you do the historiography of "pop history", which is related but not exactly the same, if you know what I mean
When I was a freshman in high school, I took a world history class that was built entirely around Guns, Germs, and Steel, which had, at that point, been debunked for exactly 20 years.
Whenever I realise that some supposed historic fact I believed to be true to the level of an axiom, and it turns out not to be, I realise that it was something I learned in school. I think teachers know this, but doing differentiated source-based history is too high effort for the rather limited medium of school, so they resign on transmitting a transparent picture, in favour of making the picture larger so it roughly grasps the basics. In the end we all come out of school knowing a lot of information vaguely related to factual sources, but at least we get to pretend our education was complete in its scope. If it weren't complete, we'd have to have a serious argument about our education system, and that's a pit nobody wants to fall into
@@neotronextrem In this case my teacher was a self-described libertarian who was pretty transparent about not wanting us to leave the classroom thinking that capitalism and colonialism were at all responsible for the world’s inequalities, and made us write an essay defending either free trade or fair trade after spending the whole semester telling us fair trade was naive.
@@neotronextrem it's less about how much effort the teachers are going to put in and more about the fact that the teachers job is not to teach the students to prepare the students to pass standardized exams. Therefore, no matter how passionate is to give the student a holistic understanding of the content they are teaching, they are always limited by the fact that if what they're teaching does not help the students past the exams reflects poorly on the teacher
@@MuddafukhingdisKUST Yeah, the modern teacher is in a tricky situation; the American education system is shaped both by the ideas of the liberal arts - that education is inherently valuable and that it is important to have an educated society - and by its own roots as an institution set up by private industry in the early 20th century as a way to train more people to work as accountants. That utilitarian philosophy was retained by the public education system we have now - we still have arguments that academia should become even LESS supportive of classical education goals than it already is. Even a teacher who wants to help their students to learn to think to think about their subject is still beholden to the systems of exams and homework that are designed to reward recitation and repetition, and to systems of grading designed to emulate the supposed merit-based hierarchy of the workforce. This isn’t even getting into the ways that standardization leaves students who think differently or have learning disabilities behind to flounder.
Dude man, ever since i started academically studying Political Science and IR, I grew to hate going to bookstores. Pop-psychology, pop-history and pop-politics alongside pop-political science with the most wild, unfounded claims are everywhere and academics being academics and rather socially lets say "inept" barely do anything to criticise or raise a voice againts them publicly. Oh in academia we laught and mock these books and then return to our own publishers and literature. Meanwhile these books are read and influence all kind of people even people in power who dont know any better because they are not educated in that. It's like "Clash of Civilizations" fiasco all over again smh...
I hold nothing, but active contempt for the history section at a Barnes and Noble. I'll go back to see it and I don't know if it's getting worse or if I'm just paying more attention to it.
@@Mr.internet.Lag. The only time ill ever trust a history book I find in a library is if its either an easily fact checked encyclopedia or an author/book I already know is trustworthy The idea of going to the store and just buying a big history book with 0 beforehand research is insane to me
@@binbows2258I think my history textbooks in school had errors in them too if I remember right. As a non-academic who will probably never become one, how could I do proper history research that doesn't take forever to cover one area, or is the whole area just that plagued that it's impossible currently?
@@chillinchum read academic papers, recommended books, primary sources etc use libgen, scihub etc (u can find more pretty easily by checking relevent subreddits), never give journals money
On the "If books could kill" podcast, they have their "one book theory" based on the observation of what you called Theories of Everything books. They tend to all be structured similarly and lead to similar conclusions.
"I'm not telling you this so you can be a contrarian or an annoyance at parties-- if you're watching this video you probably don't need help with that." Man just destroyed my entire way of life.
The red flag is if the author presents themselves as being a rebel against the "current orthodoxies" in the history field. You'll get pushback, but that's normal in any historical field, and it's necessary for said field. If you see yourself as rebelling against the field, you'll take on positions simply because they're against the grain no matter how silly or downright vulgar the methods you draw on or the conclusions you reach. Also, the truism I personally wince at is "history is written by the victor." Its a nothing statement to feel more special for having a unique knowledge. History is done by historians, and it's more fruitful to examine that than have a manichean view of the process.
I've always preferred (paraphrasing from where I originally heard it) "History is written by people who can write". There's plenty of people who lost or were losing or just not involved who left us histories, and tonnes of victorious illiterates who only left us what other people had to say.
I have my own anecdote about the etymology of the term ¨Molotov Cocktail¨ which keep saying was coined by the Finns as a response to Molotov's bombardment using cluster bombs which were (allegedly) referred to as breadbaskets and they called it a molotov cocktail as a ¨drink to go with the bread¨, wikipedia lists this as the origin for the term, at least english wikipedia, their sources are a british trivia quiz, a website without a source and a search for the term ¨molotov cocktail¨ in SWEDISH newspapers. Neither ever gives a proper source to the breadbasket thing, the russian version apparently claims the term was coined by the russians. And this claim is all over the internet either sourcing wikipedia or nothing at all, itś such a ¨did you know¨ trivia factoid. Now I don´t speak Finnish, this might actually be true but maybe if you don´t have a proper source for it don´t make an entire wikipedia article chapter dedicated to this, expecially when the talk page even says that this is a disputed claim.
Swedish newspapers from Sweden or Swedish-language newspapers in Finland? It's a common enough language there (and even more common back then) that the latter would be a reasonable source.
I managed to stumble into a similar rabbit hole yesterday but luckily I got a historian friend with access to archives who could actually find a source for it.
In Finnish the ¨Molotov Cocktail¨ is actually called polttopullo (burn bottle). Its called polttopullo in the original Finnish instructions and that's what many veterans call it. Ive always had the theory that the term "Molotov Cocktail" was coined by some foreign newspaper or if it was coined by Finnish troops it was not a wide spread nickname. The word cocktail is also quite awkward to say in Finnish and it would be spelt koktaili
Regarding when citations are needed - when I do my writing, I tend to frame 'citation needed' less in terms of "How do I prove that I'm not just pullin' this out of my nethers and that there's something actually provable here?" and more in terms of "If someone reading this was interested in learning in-depth about the thing I just said, where could they go to find out more?" Not saying the former isn't important! I just find that it gets (mostly - some things are both rare knowledge that needs backing up, and also kinda boring as heck) subsumed into the latter motivation for citing things, and the latter is a more useful and interesting motivation for writing (and reading) citations when they're formatted and motivated in that way. When I'm in the act of writing citations, it also sidesteps the 'common knowledge' issue. Whether something is common knowledge or not is irrelevant to the question of whether someone may want to learn more about a thing, and irrelevant to where they can find out more about it. It still comes up, but much more rarely, and usually only when I'm doing a second pass on sourcing with the "nether-regions" question in mind to make sure I didn't drop the ball anywhere.
“Whether something is common knowledge or not is irrelevant” i think is the best possible way to think not only about your own citations, but for evidence as a whole. Just because “everyone knows that!” does not mean that it is true.
Senator Armstrong is actually a fascinating case study for historical linguistics students who minored in polisci. Like how they made us read Kantor's Dilemma in Ethics in Science class.
My Roman history professor told us about this issue too and his example was interesting. It was about the so called "salting of Carthage" so nothing would ever grow again, and his own professor wanted to know the origin. So my professor's professor tracked down the original author and asked him what his ancient source was, and the author said "I just made it up, it sounded nice". Which just goes to show what some will do and then the pop history gets stuck with us, and every time I hear someone talking the salting of Carthage I know it's made up.
Ok this has sent me into paranoid mode because I'm currently reading Stephen Kotkin's biography of Stalin and on page 155 of 'Paradoxes of Power' he also repeats the information about Lidia Pereprygina without a source. Now I don't think it can be argued that the Kotkin work isn't academia, it certainly has a thorough list of footnotes, but this glaring omission being pointed out makes me wonder what else I missed. Oh look Montefiore is in the bibliography.
12:18 “I am not telling you this to turn you into a contrarian at house parties. If you’re watching this video… you may not need my help with that.” Absolutely broke me
I love watching your videos, because you ask genuine questions about the work you're writing and make a real attempt to answer them, both to forward the piece and to legitimize your point in a format and media sphere where having a genuine debate about a point you want to make is so rare. People very often either take things at face value and agree or disagree vehemently, neither with any substantiating claims or research. You make a real effort in your videos to add nuance and discuss it the best you can under a limited time frame. The fact you're actually putting in the work to make these things rather than waffling for an hour about how "pop culture bad" and including some supporting references is refreshing. That being said, it's also incredibly funny if you look at these videos as someone just arguing with themselves over questions they are also asking. Real "debating the man in the walls" sort of vibe.
I genuinely think to some extent this is a consequence of academia's flaws and that it's elitist accessibility issues have left a perfect opening for opportunists in search of, in the best case money, and in the worst case spreading a narrative. As it stands, a historian has two jobs, being a researcher and being a teacher. Academia already does a pretty poor job of forming academics as university-level teachers and that's its own can of worms, but there's a third job missing, communicator. If we don't have people specifically formed to make enticing, easy to read history books, that also adhere to academic scrutiny even if they don't need to adhere to its demands of innovation, then this will just continue happening. Ideally all three areas would be taught to every academic and they'd be able to do a good job of all of them, but seeing the results of that with my own teachers in university I genuinely believe that in research careers such as history or even physics and whatnot, there should be means to specialize in either research, pedagogy or communication.
There is a lot to this! I have a PhD in medieval history and I wish there was more (monetary) incentive to going into pure history communication. During my degree I took/participated in many seminars and classes on how to communicate to non-academic audiences, and there are many interesting ways, but it's hard to live off them. I think this is a big part of the problem
yeah Bret Devereaux (an actual historian) has been hammering on this point for years. Academia isn’t very successful in public communication because it’s often actively bad for one’s career to do it, the incentive structure is broken.
Yeah, a lot of academic history is written as if the writer actively hates the reader and doesn't want their work to be read and understood. Why use 10 words when 50 longer words will do.
Honestly, the one big thing I started thinking of during this video, is "Why is academic history uniquely opaque?" -- And by that I mean other academic fields don't seem to have the same degree of issue, sure pop-science books abound but it's relatively easy for a layperson to find an academic paper in those fields and even if the body of the paper is hard to interpret the abstract and conclusions often provide a lot of useful insight. I must have seen hundreds of physics and math papers in my life, and even social science which I don't really care fore has directed me to a good amount of academic publication. But history, I can't really think of one - and I know they exist, but just normal paths of research don't seem to lead to them as readily as they do with other fields, instead you end up at newspaper citations or interviews or all varieties of primary sources (or even more pop history).
@@blob22201I disagree with this to be honest - i have never encountered a paper or book that felt opaquely written on purpose. Sure I have encountered badly written stuff, but also lots of really good stuff -- however for all disciplines academic writing is very specific, which can make it difficult to digest or outright boring
An interesting thing from WWI- there are, as far as I can tell, no documented instances of a “trench shotgun” in use by American forces in WWI. Supposedly, the Signal Corps tightly controlled pictures that came from the war and were published, so anything with one of the infamous American pump action shotguns was never published. I did once find a political cartoon mocking the German protests of American shotgun use in combat, but that’s it. Why is this important? Shotguns were not a critical war winning weapon, as small arms rarely are. The myth of American doughboys using shotguns in the trenches is part of a narrative about the new Americanized ways of war, and the idea that Americans could enter the European theater of war and strike so much fear into the German generals that they filed a formal protest about the use of this quintessentially American weapon. It’s a myth, real or imagined, about American exceptionalism in warfare and American moral superiority, since how could the Germans protest the use of pump action shotguns as they exploded chemical weapons over the heads of our boys? (The political cartoon from above references exactly this- it points out a supposed German hypocrisy).
I've noticed that when the average person talks about war or the military in general they normally focus on infantry and anything more complicated (artillery, tanks, navies, logistics, air superiority, etc) generally isn't even though of. No idea why 'guy with gun' is the baseline so often.
@@ADADEL1 systems are much harder to understand, and popular sources are hilariously wrong about everything relating to military hardware. Look at the discourse surrounding the F35 as some disaster and the bad reporting around what the money for F-35 has actually been spent on. Regardless, the human story is much easier to sell people on, for whatever your purpose is and whatever your relation to the war in question is. “Germany is protesting our use of shotguns in war” is an interesting phrase and myth for a few macro level reasons. I’ll list a deconstruction: 1) our basic technology is so effective, our enemies are terrified to the point that they have no will to fight. 2) our will to fight is greater 3) they have done things much worse than this but are now protest, so we are morally superior 4) they have used gas, machine guns, and high explosive on our boys, isn’t that horrible? There’s a lot of meaning packed into a propagandistic phrase like that, all around a weapon that may or may not have even existed in the theater of war.
@@ADADEL1 also, I think on a large scale, for the US military specifically, the Global War on Terror represented a a shift from the large and technical systems of the Cold War era to a more infantry centric model- you can’t occupy a nation with air strikes. Some of the horrific US casualties early in the counter-insurgency wars came from the military trying to fight guerrillas with a military that was designed to fight Soviets. The military had to quickly change its focus from “better tanks, better planes, better carriers” to “body armor and better infantry systems.” Just seemingly basic things like casualty care completely changed from 2001 to now, or the fact that almost every infantry rifle has an optical sight of some sort now. These things changed massively, and the focus really went from systems to individual soldiers- because soldiers themselves are a system, and there’s more of a focus on that, now. There’s also a popular narrative surrounding the mythology of special forces, which has really been growing in the public mind since Vietnam and the British Princess Gate hostage crisis.
today i learned we probably didnt use shotguns in ww1 edit: whats annoying is trying to find proof we didnt use it, you get alot of articles and videos about how we did, and no real source on how many were used Edit 2: found one, did basically say "may have been issued but the effect was incredibly minor" hence why no one else seemed to use them beyond drilling shotguns- this makes more sense then germans just ..refusing to use something that effective if it was? cause they used gas and machine guns and tanks so i cant imagine theyd decide to just lose the war more by avoiding some new tech that was crazy good
I believe the “Not only to inform but also persuade” is an odd way to distinguish the academic from the non academic. Now in the context of political sophistry, it’s understandable but much of academic writing is designed to persuade. He wears his motivation to persuade on his sleeve but history and related discipline are rife with academics seeking to that in far more subtle ways whilst adhering to the methodology that pop history writers do not.
I would argue proper academic work strives not to persuade for the sake of spreading an idea, it seeks to persuade the reader that the data/findings are true. Personally I think “persuasion” does not quite capture the intent of academic works, they arent made with the point of changing peoples minds, but changing the information that people draw conclusions from.
@@defnotthekgb8362 Many academic works definitely are written to persuade about conclusions… Seeking to “persuade the reader that the data/findings are true” is changing minds in the first place (and there are also works that seek to persuade that particular findings are false) but many works also seek to persuade about new conclusions and arguments that are made using those new data and findings (whether original by the author or research by others that is cited). To me it seems obvious if you just look at well known academic debates, like “What caused the Bronze Age Collapse” or “What was the Proto-Indo-European homeland” which are debates about what conclusions should be drawn from findings.
What's inferred is that OP is concerned with an author trying to persuade the reader into a particular worldview, social or political alignment, or other mental ascent outside the framework of the subject itself. We could of course split hairs here and say "studying the American revolution IS political", but I'm hoping you'll operate in good faith and understand the point being made and avoiding reducing terms and ideas into a null meaning.
There's an interesting kind of sensational revisionism which is just "Historians circles have known this for decades, but the classic version has been so entrenched no one cares and you can keep publishing pop history versions of "upending" the status quo". This kind is usually fine history but very annoying to read the discussions around it if you know the academia.
Q: "How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?" A: "As long as it takes to hammer into the general public's attention the fact that the Kaiser's Germany did indeed start the war for its own motives, supported and praised its Turkish and Austrian allies' genocides in occupied territories, planned to deport millions of people from Poland and Lithuania to create lebensraum for German settlers _to start with,_ and then sloppily covered up those plans once Versailles rolled around."
@@bomberharris1943 Ah, but have you considered that the HOI4 community has assured me that the Kaiser was Based™, Blessed™, and Actually Would've Been Very Cool And Good If He Won The War™ (because Hitler was spawned into existence ex nihlo the moment French troops stepped into Alsace-Lorraine)?
This video brings up a lot of valid instances of pop history pushing readers to believe specific inaccuracies or unsubstantiated rumors because they support the structure of their rhetorical argument. However, condemning all pop-history works as useless or even counter-productive is, in a sense, gatekeeping history from the general public. Not saying Rosencreutz believes this, but that this is the implication being created by only talking about pop history in a negative context without any qualifying statements on the topic. However unintentional, the subtext of this video is that watching a youtube documentary about that time the [interest empire here] tried to do something and failed spectacularly is intaking history the *wrong* way, and you instead need to dust off the dryest and most serious text you can find to properly learn about a history topic. It's good to critique others' works and want them to do better in the future, but gatekeeping, no matter the field, should be avoided wherever possible.
"Gatekeeping" is a very broad term, and we shouldn't confuse the "gatekeeping" of _expecting someone to know something about a topic before talking about it_ for the "gatekeeping" of _dismissing marginal voices._
@@lepercolony8214 When an error is major and obvious, or something was omitted that undermines the entire thesis of a work of pop history, then I think it's fair to demand the author reevaluate and rework their research practices. However, all too often I've seen pretty aggressive criticisms levied at pop history works (mostly youtube videos) where the mistake boils down to a relatively minor detail or the omission of a period of history that (while interesting) didn't have any long term effects on the trajectory or a nation/region. Some people (and by that I mean those who frequent r/askhistorians) seem to take any error no matter how minor as grounds to accuse an author of not putting in the proper work. The problem is, history is a complicated topic that is filled with creditable sources that nonetheless contradict each other when it comes to the fine details. And unless you're already deep down the rabbit hole of a given topic, you're not going to know which sources are considered more credible than others, which is inevitably going to lead to minor mistakes or pushing misconceptions. Most pop historians love history and want to get the minor details right, so if someone calmly explained where they goofed up, how they goofed up, and why this other source is less of a goof, I have no doubt they would be happy to make a correction annotation or even reupload the video if the error was severe enough. However, people are way less likely to listen when people act like smug assholes, belittle your work, and hold your 20 min. youtube video to graduate essay levels of scrutiny.
@@MathMasterism When I was a teenager, I started reading history via pop-history books, and they instilled a love of the subject that made me consume actual academic histories. I can't stand pop histories now, unless I'm in the mood for something simple to just play in the background (I mainly listen to my books), but I can say for a fact that without Alex Kershaw, I would have never gained a love for history that now has me attempting a career in it. I'm sure there are a million stories like mine, and it proves that however inaccurate or citation-free, pop histories have a valuable place adjacent to academia.
You should definitely make a video on Wikipedia as a source for history. I think Wikipedia’s reputation as a source for general information has increased over time, and many now loathe the classic professor talk of “don’t use wikipedia”, however having finished my degree in history, I realised that, at least for the field of history, Wikipedia is a minefield of citation needed, partizan edit battles and sabotage, and terrible usage of primary sources.
Wikipedia’s great for some things, like getting a broad overview of a topic. It can be tainted by biased or unscrupulous sources, but at least you can check whenever “that doesn’t sound right”
Wikipedia's reliability really varies and that's probably the greatest issue, it's often very reliable when it comes to the natural sciences but not so much in less clear cut fields where things are less clear cut and there's more motivation to misinform. Like there's very little motivation to vandalize the page on Quantum Electro Dynamics and the kind of people who might do that are easy to spot but there's a lot of motivation to vandalize a page on WWII and it's not as easy to spot.
A salient point. I notice that this is also prevalent in other pop-edutaiment circles of youtube as well. One only has to look at all the weird and wacky stuff that comes out of economics youtube that isn't even in the sphere of discussion in actual academia. The clashing of wanting to learn and inform compared to the time required to genuinely do so creates much dissonance
"Did you know that Taiping rebellion was caused by a single clearly crazy guy thay one day had decided that hes brother of Jesus and thats why whole reason for that war? Isnt that wacky?"
I feel like it's slowly starting to get under control when it comes to pop science like pop physics but now the pop science misunderstanding has just become straight up pseudoscientific conspiracy theories.
You mention how some publications charged for research papers. I've heard that sometimes you can reach out to the authors and they'll gladly give you a copy. You can try that or maybe an internet archive has a screenshot of the work saved.
@@vlc-cosplayer I think the problem is that you can't really use that in a youtube video, not exactly a great idea to video document comitting a crime.
I don't know if you can qualify it as "pop history" since it is written like an Academic book and used extensively in Academic settings, but the famous Richard Evans trilogy on the Third Reich is an example of popular narrative history as its best. It's extremely well-sourced, covers every major topic with a unifying theme, regularly sums itself with concluding paragraphs hammering home the subject. I really like how often it uses diaries, letters, SPD agents reports, to give a feel on how the people felt like. On the other hand, each of those books took 4 years to write, so...
I feel like this applies to any "pop" subject. Pop psychology is the bane of my existence because a lot of it is misreadings of outdated studies or drive-by retellings of headlines. Hint, if the person whose work is widely cited for a given psychology "fact" died before the 1990s, they are, at best, out of date or, worse, just made it up (especially if they are classified as Freudian).
I get why it needed to be cut, but god I want those 10 cut paragraphs about Scottish identity and national myths. Also my guess for why people like Service let such inadequacies slide is simple, they agree with the point and so if a "non-historian" can more effectively get across their broad beliefs without the need for rigor it is no skin off their backs. It stacks the decks further for them in a context that already lets whatever nonsense claim about the USSR go uncriticized and unexamined
The dialogue segments in the Stalin books remind me of the dialogue in Fire & Blood from the A Song of Ice and Fire series, a supposedly scholarly treatise written by the scholars of the fictional world that is FILLED with dialogue scenes and some action scenes.
I do feel like a lot of your problem lies not with "pop history" but just the misrepresentation of history. Pop history can be the most blatant example of it, but what its saying could be entirely true yet simplified.
Your comment about how entertainment and authenticity do not need to be in conflict reminds me of my favorite author. Roger Crowley is an actual full on historian who makes devastatingly readable and entertaining works without having to actually inaccuracies the truth, simply by being upfront with the inaccuracies or potential biases of some of the sources statements, but including them anyway. Some of my favorites are from City of Fortune, which is a book about Venice and their dominance over the Mediterranean, and two stories stand out. A ship was on the run from another, and went up a particularly deep river, scuttled itself, waited for the pursuing ship to pass, and then resurfaced the ship to leave. That's hype. Another is about the siege of Constantinople, where he claims how there were byzantine reports of an attacker who, after breaking through the wall, survived attacks that should have killed them but kept fighting on. Regardless of if such an event happened, the fact that there is a source from the defenders only a short time after the event occurred really helps paint a picture of what it felt like to be in that siege more than any "The knight snarled" ever could.
Fantastic video, it feels tight and concise but still wanders all the places I wanted to go when thinking about the problems with this sort of historical media. A friend recommended you so I think I'm gonna go watch your ck3 video next, I've been interested in a discussion on the lenses that games like paradox productions take and it sounds really neat.
The level of articulation used in this script, absolutely and I am surprised and not surprised to see the number of news and subscribers this channel has accumulated, to sum it up in other words TikTok and Idiocracy
Very glad I got around to this video, if a bit late! This is the kind of video that simply makes me better as a writer. I also want to make heavily-researched, well-sourced videos but am scared I'm going to "do it all wrong" because that's not what my background actually is in. So I think internalizing the points here is an important part of my own growth, to speak self-centeredly. Which is to say thank you for making this! I think it's an important asset for the "field" of UA-cam video essays, if that is a field to speak of.
I am the State, but when I die, the State remains. I don’t think the two statements are antithetical. For the King’s lifetime, he embodies The State, but obviously when he dies someone else will take his position, as has happened throughout the history of monarchies.
hey dawg, just wanna say, you be rocking with those triangles; the way the straight lines lead to the straight vertices and really shines onto the silhouette shape you wish to achieve, really fits onto the didactics you wish to present your whole presentation is rocking, dont feel ashamed of it king🔥
Robert the Bruce being of Norman heritage did ring a bell. If I remember correctly "de Brus" comes from either Brix, Normandy, or Bruges, Flanders, and their first Lord of Annandale had come from Normandy to Britain after the Norman Conquest. Kind of weird to disqualify someone as Scottish for being an eighth-generation immigrant, though.
Reminds me of shit I read in undergrad Poli-sci classes about ex-Soviet sphere countries, and my eyes would start glazing over every reference to the transcendentalism of the party or of figures like the new Soviet man, because I got the sense the writers were just riffing in any way to make those countries' policies look insane.
I can't really speak to the books you specifically read, but I think any historian would be hard pressed to present a summary of soviet policies that WOULDN'T make the readers eyes glaze over, with the constant bad decisions and thought terminating cliches rife within the party orthodoxy. Its like (by design) soaping your brain with lye.
But these were real doctrines and policies, like the cookbook which encourages a ridiculous alcohol consumption that goes far beyond alcoholism. These countries had some insane beliefs
Wait till you see that ~250 out of 330 citations in "Early life of Joseph Stalin" attributed to Montefiore, and 100 of 700 on original Stalins page. Sometimes he marked as one of the sources, but other times he is the sole source, with some cases number of the citation corresponding to the number of page - 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151...
As a history major, I struggle a lot with my feelings towards pop history. It is beneficial and even fun to scrutinize these works in classes but at the same time, it feels like we're showing faux concern towards the public perception of history. For example, why would someone write a book review on "The Poor Had No Lawyers" and question the audacity of writing it or state 'why, pray tell, should anyone take the time to read it?' in the abstract only to put it behind a paywall? The majority of people who would actually pay to read this review are those who have enough knowledge on the historical method to question the validity of the book in the first place. If so, is the review trying to validate academia's attitude towards pop history? Or, if the actual review is more tempered than the abstract as you've said, isn't the author of the review committing the same kind of dramatization/exaggeration they look down upon in pop history? In a way, one of the reasons for pop history being so prevalent is the elitism in academia. I'm not writing any of this to downplay pop history's faults, this video manages to bridge some of the gaps between authenticity and availability but I'm mostly frustrated that a lot of historians view these types of easily accesible reviews as being beneath them. When these works actually influence the public consciousness, politics and even the education system (that they'd then have to struggle to dismantle) it feels like it should be taken more seriously. I feel partially responsible/guilty for being in an environment like this ☹
Would love to see an essay with your thoughts on academics writing pop history - as someone burned out on historical reading after finishing a master's, these books have tempted me as ways to ease back into reading history, but they leave me with a weird feeling.
45:57 This really made me think. I'm in my final year of my undergraduate history degree, hoping to go into academia as a social historian of the United States. As a trained historian, it's so easy to be a snob about pop history and its cousins. Like you, I stew over the narrative framework and lack of citations that characterize pop history. Much of my research is for the express purpose of correcting warped understandings of history that have formed over decades or even centuries. (No wonder my favorite podcast is You're Wrong About). However, a historian doesn't have to have a tenured position at an ivy to perpetuate the notion that the study of history should remain within the ivory towers and among learned students. Everyone deserves to have access to nuanced understandings of history.
Also, after a few years of studying history, you develop a sixth sense for historical bullshit. More often than not, it dings whenever someone shares a tiktokified historical 'not-so-fun-fact' that appeals to fascinations with the morbid or outlandish. I think what many don't understand is that people from 100, 200, 1000 years ago are pretty similar to us. They loved, ate, and took care of pets just like we do. Any attempt to convey that people were somehow fundamentally different from us in history usually leads to some wacky ahistorical claim.
Does historical fiction count as pop history? My mom seems to think historical fiction is a reliable source, like every time we talk about something historical she tells me to read some book or watch some movie to learn what some historical period was "really like"
I'm no historian, so I don't know how the philosophy of history defines "history", but I'd say that any historian with an agenda, or that is writing without doing due diligence is automatically writing historical fiction, since they're not making an effort in good faith to portray history as objectively as possible.
I think that depends heavily on how the piece of fiction sells itself. Dunkirk and 1917 both sell themselves as no-nonsense serious historical dramas and definitely inform people's views and opinions about history and should definitely be held to a higher standard. However some historical fiction clearly isn't trying particularly hard and has just adopted the setting for the hell of it. Though honestly games are the worst when it comes to this and Rosencreutz has obviously talked about them a lot.
Ah yes, a pop history video about pop history. Jokes aside, this is great content, I've been binging it for the last two hours or so. Also, nice triangle :D
Hey! I have question, what's your stance on historical materialism? Because from what you said, it might fall under the "theories of everything" category.
I think calling historical materialism a "grand narrative" is a ridiculous strawperson. It's not "telling a story", it's trying to formulate a science of history.
I call it "Kaiser Mad" history. The kind of things you go "Did you know" at dinner parties, like "Did you know America uses shotguns in WWI and it made the kaiser mad"
Thank you for touching on Scotland, I was watching the start of the video and thinking so much of it is applicable to the lens Scotlands history is viewed today. Lo and behold you had a whole section on it. As you said so much of it is viewed through the Highlands, when the reality is much deeper and more complex. I personally think due to underlying political biases many people find it inconvenient to touch on Lowland history or Lowland involvement within Empire.
As a fan of naval history it’s fucking crazy just how many awful examples of bestseller pop culture history are around. The Battle off Samar being a classic example due to an inaccurate (due to multiple missing and/or downright false major details) retelling off the battle being parroted over and over in various other works, including the one that most people praise and use to learn about the battle. Midway is another example, though Shattered Sword’s at least started to correct most of the falsehoods of the usual narrative.
Sometimes it can capture the true purpose of history by creating a study of human nature through a slightly flawed, more storylike narrative. This is what Herodotus did, and no one can deny that he wrote one of the greatest works of history ever. A great contrast is the much more scholarly and exact work of Thucydides, also a great work. They're both valuable in their own way.
On the intro, A disclosed narrative and discloced lense of analysis is always a good sign. History can not not be narrativized. The mear curration of events deemed significant constitute a narrativization (poor story telling does not anule this). A history that begins with outlining its approach and its goal, assuming it is honest in both, can be held to those standards and tells the listeners the limits of its story. Beware the professional "objective" storyteller and wise "common sense" storyteller.
Will you do a video on "Sapiens"? I remember my professor asking us to review it and i went first and i was the only one to oppose it, making the professor mad. Please prove me right for holding my ground lol
At 10:55 what is the source for “I die, but the state remains”? Cause it seems important to have a source for that.
Especially since this line sounds really cool
The source is a memoir titled "Mémoire sur la mort de Louis XIV" written by Philippe de Courcillon marquis de Dangeau, on page 24 about midway down the page -- His collected diaries are a source for lots of details about Louis' life. This does present the issue that many memoirs do of often being the only source we have for some things-- making it difficult to corroborate.
I forgot to put the footnote there, but you're quite right it's important, so I'm pinning this comment (not a pin of shame)
Based comment, "source 🤓"ing the guy who said "source 🤓" in his video LOL
@@RosencreutzzzDamnable law'ya
@@snowcat9308"lmao he wants to verify claims what a nerd"
I read the thumbnail as "I am die. The state remains."
Okay good it wasn't just me
i am become die, remainer of state
Damn so did I
I am die
Thank you forever
Louis suddenly turned into Korone
Hey it still make sense because even after the end of the monarch the state is still centralized
1. It is known
2. It is known
3. It is known
4. IT CAME TO ME IN A DREAM
Water is wet. Fire is hot. Gound is ground-y. The Periodic Table of Elements.
(I will not provide any citation in this article because it is not academic writing. Furthermore, since the topic is immense and has, from many angles, been written about before, any citation will simply open the question why such authors were cited, and not others. Thus it is merely a personal view-and, as we know, individuals do not matter. )
"He who tells the best stories wins" - Stalin
"I am Death, Destroyer of the State" - Louis XIV
"And who has a better story than Louis XVI the Broken?"
@@fakeplaystore7991
On the bright side, no king of France has ever had a closer shave...
"It is far better to be feared, that's why I built a giant robot."
-Machiavelli
@@Leo122188"A weapon to surpass Metal Gear"
-Voltaire
"Kill a third",
Julius Caesar.
"I am die. Thank you forever." -- Louis XIV, probably.
Have Confidence! -- Louis XIV
...No Confidence! -- Louis XVI
"Finger finger." - Louis XIV, probably
My favorite Louis game and MMO
"Yubi, Yubi" - Leopold II.
"I look fabulous, therefore I'm the State!" - Louis XIV
This video has shaped my whole world view since I was 14
Its only been a few hours wow
No. It shaped my world view since I was 14 too.
@@Emery_Pallas I matured quickly
La vidéo, c'est moi.
It’s shaped mine since I was today years old😊
To be fair to mr. Wightman, Scottish land law was genuinely messed up in a lot of places
for instance: did you know that only lords could own land? And that anyone who owned land was therefore automatically a lord?
Fortunately those days are behind us but luckily now you can stil do the same thing with this comment's sponsor: Established Titles. Established Titles is an exciting new service that lets y-
LOL I was about be like "actually lord and laird are different things and that's part of how shit like Established Titles..."
Good one.
@@Rosencreutzzz
Ah the great days of ads for Established Titles on UA-cam!
Of course the real quote is "Le Sénat, cest moi."
Je suis le Sénat!
*French monarch jumps on the knights*
Pas. Encore.
Somehow, Napoleon returned.
I prefer "la republique c'est moi !"
so I threw the senate at him, like the whole senate.
*"I am die. State you forever."*
That's the quote from louie the 14th I'll use
He never said this
He obviously said it in french
@@uwc. "Je suis mort. État tu pour tojours."
"Wait WHAT?"
Next time you will tell me that chancelor Palpatine didn't say "I am the senate" before becomming emperor.
"And you can't touch me
I am the Senate
I hold the power
Over the people in it
So don't come at me
You will regret it
I am the Senate"
That's blatant Rebel propaganda. Our beloved Emperor holds the brave men and women of the Imperial Senate in high regard and would never devalue them with such slander. You're just a conspiracy theorist. Next you'll tell me the Emperor is planning to dissolve the Senate entirely, or that he's building a """superweapon""" out in space somewhere (also entirely unsubstantiated btw)
he actually said “I die, but the Senate remains.” The movies are Jedi propaganda
I never knew that Stalin impregnated Louis XIV
Mainstream history doesn't want you to know.
That's actually a myth. In reality, Stalin, Adolf, and the third guy, all lived in Vienna at the same time. So... Joseph, being the bottom, got pregnant (I assume nobody claims literally Hitler used protection okay) and he died in childbirth with VERY long over-carriage. Their child and final legacy of Fuhrer is putin.
😂😂😂😂
that triangle has shaped my whole worldview since i was 14
As someone who just listens to these...what triangle?
@@michimatsch5862fr I’m gonna have to skim through it later
@@michimatsch5862 With lack of specificity from OP, I'm going to pretend it's the Doritos and OP had a spiritual experience eating their first familial-sized bag of Doritos unsupervised.
The one at 4:00 minutes in I suppose
14:00 Love how he put the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire on there separately as if they were two different empires and not the same empire under different management.
Also "Greece" as one cohesive idea instead of a mishmash of petty kingdoms
Also Romanov Russia, as opposed to the other eras of Russian government that have lasted both far longer and far shorter
Also the fall of the Ottoman Empire being 1570. Even under a vague idea of "falls" that's comically early
And this is just the empires he mentioned. I'm surprised he didn't include the Qing Dynasty's 276 years in power, but of course that would ignore the fact that Chinese dynasties have lasted anywhere from 14 to 550 years
Also the start date of Romanovs is just factually incorrect: it’s moved more than 50 years into the future. Apparently so he can make his “250 years” point
The Solomonic Empire alone lasted for 700 years.
@@satqur how does ethiopia have so many extremely long lasting empires when it's like the most easily divisable country to exist???
There was some sense of "Greek-hood" in ancient Greece, though less in a national sense and more in just a cultural sense; a lot of their philosophers thought very highly of the Greeks, shockingly.
I think it would be better to say "governments" vs. Empires or nations. If culture is similar to a soul of a people, then different cultures need different governments. Think of a "natural consitution" of a nation similar as saying about a person that an attribute of theirs is part of their "personal constitution".
Meanwhile how they choose to govern, i.e. self control their constitution is dependent on themselves and what tools they have avaliable from their self created environment.
So looking at it from that perspective "cultures", similar to say a person's outward personality will change overtime usually, last about 200 years, or 2 lifetimes, which is enough time for a particular strong 'air' tied to an era to pass.
So most "natural constitions" as the classics would put it, last as long as their respective "cultures", and most outward governments of a nation change with it, sort of like the continants with tectonic plates. The culture is the core, generating everything about a people, the natural constitution is the mantle, and the outward institutions are the crust. Some outward institutions though are more adaptable and may last up to 500 years.
I know of only two governments 5 governments in the history of the world lasting longer without going functionally defunct. That being the frankish plactica lasting about 500 to 1050 before being slowly replaced by the french parlement, the 2nd HRE which effectively lasted 962 to 1618, and the first 3 chinese dynasties, xia being 550 years, shang likewise, and then zhou being 1122 bc to 476 bc
Take care and God bless, hope you enjoyed the comment, sorry if it is hard to understand, I just don't think the proper words for these concepts have been developed in English yet
If one has sources one will not clearly cite, does one ACTUALLY have those sources?
At least "it came to me in a dream" is honest about its place in culture.
Cite that dream, brother! No one can stop you! "Robert I of Scotland, personal conversation with author, 2014 dream."
"My source is that I made it the fuck up!" - Senator Steve Armstrong, PhD in History at University of Colorado.
My source is that I remember it. I was there. Reincarnation.
@@trioptimum9027 That would be so fucking based
citation laundering
Funnily enough, I can see "I am the state" and "I die but the state remains" coming from the same person pretty easily. Sort of like "Behold this thing, the state, my life's work. I have created it in my image. It is my legacy and though my body dies, through the state I endure."
Had pretty much the same thought. Put into proper context they wouldn't be mutually exclusive.
yeah, that's what i thought too! the legacy of the ruler persists because it has become synonymous with the state. so the ruler ultimately remains, even if his flesh does not
shout out to ted kaczynski for (as far as i can tell) originating a wonderful title format for manifestos and essays of all kinds
Teddy "better known for other work" K.
Ted kaczynski and his consequences have been a disaster for online discourse
@@sirllamaiii9708 This would be a great video essay thesis.
shout out to ted kaczynski for dropping such a bomb of title format!
The Great War seems especially prone to this. Britain's great example is Alan Clark's "The Donkeys"; an important book in many ways, but with deeply flawed scholarship, including the Falkenhayn quote on the cover - that the British troops were "lions led by donkeys." Clark later admitted that he made this up. There is zero evidence that Falkenhayn ever said it. And yet that book has gone on to utterly form Britain's view of the First World War - from "O What a Lovely War" to Blackadder.
My least favorite thing, across the board, is the unevidenced ascription of intent.
Made up quote aside, though, isn't Blackadder a much more accurate view of the war than the 'O What a Lovely War' newspaper cutting I think you might be referencing? Certainly the former is an over-the-top comedy and the latter is the lived experience of an actual soldier, but given the collected accounts of many first hand witnesses, it does seem like a horrifically callous and meaningless meatgrinder.
@@joemerino3243Absolutely - in fact I go further than that and think we Brits should on balance not have fought it. But there is more subtlety than that involved (mad officers etc) and I would prefer history to be based on sources rather than assumptions.
@@joemerino3243 No war is meaningless, a better wording of the sentiment that we share is that it was horrible for the masses of working class people in europe
@@pablojn4826 Fair enough, that is a better wording.
@@joemerino3243 He was referencing the stage/film musical of the name "Oh! What a Lovely War", which beyond having some great recordings of period songs, shaped and influenced what people think the First World War "really" was in the "lions led by donkeys" vein. It's a poignant film, but history it is not.
Often time you see people citing sources but if you actually read the sources it doesnt really back their claims. Happens a lot on Wikipedia.
And there’s no easy way to combat that sort of issue on Wikipedia, it takes exactly 0 effort to shove a false reference into an article and as long as it doesn’t get reverted instantly you’re looking at a ridiculously complicated and long process of argumentation that essentially comes down to consensus among a small group of people over whether or not the source *actually* backs up the claim. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time editing/dealing with Wikipedia knows just how awful it actually is for anything besides very basic information.
the same thing happens in peer reviewed journal articles and books
What’s infuriating is that I’ve seen the same thing happen in academic papers. Or the cited source has a conclusion that is common sense *and wildly opposed to the actual results*
@@Christopher-gp9iv I know this is kind of petty but it's kind of a good example of the kinds of biases that pop up even within well moderated articles.
There was once a rather ridiculous argument on the F-15 about how it being the vehicle mode for several Transformers characters was irrelevant because "it's just a dumb cartoon from the 80's that children watch."
But then the same people kept arguing that a video shown only in 1 aircraft museum in Arizona, seen by about 100 people (including this particular mod) was not only worth its own section on the page, but also worthy as a citation source.
The ultimate compromise was to mention neither, until the mod quit and someone reinstated the Transformers trivia unopposed.
Sometimes the source, when read in its entirety, even refutes their claims
Posts and memes about how Chinese History is merely a series of rising and falling dynasties (with big catastrophic rebellions and court corruption interspersed throughout) have become ubiquitous on my social media feed. It's really disappointing because although dynastic periodization can be useful (periodization can be useful, but should be well-informed) it's become one of those simple truisms that detracts from our ability to understand change and continuity as it relates to certain periods of Chinese history. I enjoyed this video a lot!
There was one long state from Wei to Song, 386-1279. Another one Cao Wei - Liang, 220-587.
Our brains seem to heavily rely on mnemonics and categories to remember a broad swath of information, which lets so many of the important details get lost. It also lets the nuances of change and continuity, like you said, become obliterated and makes it very difficult to see how history is a river, not a series of dams. Breaking history into chunks is both necessary and unfortunate.
@@genovayork2468 I believe this 'state' you try to depict may be wrong. If the Five Dynasties could be considered a consecutive state, why not see the Chen dynasty as a continuation of the Southern Liang dynasty? And also, why not see Cao Wei as a continuation of the Eastern Han Dynasty?
Indeed, I think it is possible to depict the Northern Wei Dynasty (at least from the Western Wei Dynasty, a successor to the Northern Wei.) to the Tang Dynasty as a single state - we could identify evolutions (not upheavals) of institutions and ruling class through this group
I cannot stand it when people take the "Chinese guy becomes warlord. Thirty-million die" meme seriously. China has always had a massive population due to how fertile China Proper is, and the (contemporary) centralized state made any revolts deadly.
@@llq5081 I thought Liang and N. Liang are the same state, not Liang and Chen. The latter may be better. N. Liang is akin to Taiwan, and we view it as the different state, not the PRC.
Cao Wei began in 220, Han ended in 224, no?
Western Wei doesn't exist. 534 was not a partition, it was E. Wei declaring independence from Wei. Wei remained the same in the west.
Unironically your videos have made me hyper conscious of sourcing my own claims (even just casual "talking about rhythm game history" stuff with my friends) which has helped me both become better at practicing truth and feel more stable in my own knowledge. It's a habit that'd be so useful in non-academic spaces (especially here on youtube, where it feels like videos are mass made on topics with info only from word of mouth)
Sourcing your claims about rythm game history is crazy but in a very good way tbh. I love this comment as a Humanities graduate and rythm games enthusiast 😭
I dunno what I would want to read more (for wildly different reasons); a highly-researched and detailed history of rhythm games", or "GGS of rhythm games and its musics"
@@elpito9326 The Megaman fandom as a whole started citing sources because we ran into a huge problem of "source some interview I don't recall" and "source dan sidera's fan theories which quote sources but strings them together on a corkboard with color-coded yarn and pins", to the point one of the final bosses got a fan name that made it into the wiki page for the boss SOMEHOW.
Now the biggest issue we have is when there's citations of the Kodansha MMX encyclopedia because it only got translated into spanish, so the spanish side of the fandom has to feed the rest of us until we can translate it in english eventually.
@@sponge1234ify The former is really fun, obessesively well researched videos on completely unimportant topics are the best because you can just enjoy them with no fuss.
Pirate history is plagued by this problem. Because everyone assume pirates had those pretty clothes from the Errol Flynn movies, or the revolutionary ideas of POTC, and the whole garments given to them by hundreds of years of pop culture.
They were violent, motivated by money, outright racist and if not, morally ambiguous. Women were not allowed on ships, they spent all they gained, and they profited a lot from slavery. And their fashion? They were no different from the sailors, they just had their weapons on them at all times.
But then again, you can't talk about true pirate history and NOT have someone shouting One Piece references right in your face. This sub-sub-subfield is a lost cause.
B-but Oda would never lie to me 😔
Feel free to disregard the historical opinions of anyone who unironically says something like this.
An experienced pirate's fashion would have been different from average sailors of the period. Your average sailor had to make do on poor wages often sending a part of his earnings home. Pirates, on the other hand, could plunder nice textiles from merchant ships they captured and were way less incentivized to save their money up. This series of incentives lead more experienced pirates to wear a lot of their wealth on their bodies like rings, sashes of silk, or other gubbins that could be stolen from your average merchant on the spanish main.
@@juwebles4352
Pirate: “Look at this fancy silk shirt I can afford! Boy, I sure hope nothing happens to it.”
The uncaring salty depths:
The British Navy:
Other Pirates:
@@dionysus913 All of those things could, and likely would, kill a pirate aswell so at that point who cares about your shirt.
@@juwebles4352 They didn't wear those big boots you see in the movies, and definitely not that many clothes because of the, you know, SCORCHING HEAT of the Caribbeans or the Indian Ocean. Plus having hats on a ship is usually not advised.
See, I wouldn't say you are "pop history", Rosencreutz, but more "pop historiography", which is much needed!
P.S. Nice triangle ;P
I hope this comes across in the sincerely positive way/connotations it was meant with (I realised it could be read as snarky or demeaning and wanted to nip that in the bud). Like, often you're examining not just the historical event but the mechanisms at play within how that history of said events/periods are engaged with outside of the academic field of History, or to put another way, you do the historiography of "pop history", which is related but not exactly the same, if you know what I mean
When I was a freshman in high school, I took a world history class that was built entirely around Guns, Germs, and Steel, which had, at that point, been debunked for exactly 20 years.
Whenever I realise that some supposed historic fact I believed to be true to the level of an axiom, and it turns out not to be, I realise that it was something I learned in school.
I think teachers know this, but doing differentiated source-based history is too high effort for the rather limited medium of school, so they resign on transmitting a transparent picture, in favour of making the picture larger so it roughly grasps the basics. In the end we all come out of school knowing a lot of information vaguely related to factual sources, but at least we get to pretend our education was complete in its scope. If it weren't complete, we'd have to have a serious argument about our education system, and that's a pit nobody wants to fall into
@@neotronextrem In this case my teacher was a self-described libertarian who was pretty transparent about not wanting us to leave the classroom thinking that capitalism and colonialism were at all responsible for the world’s inequalities, and made us write an essay defending either free trade or fair trade after spending the whole semester telling us fair trade was naive.
@@neotronextrem it's less about how much effort the teachers are going to put in and more about the fact that the teachers job is not to teach the students to prepare the students to pass standardized exams. Therefore, no matter how passionate is to give the student a holistic understanding of the content they are teaching, they are always limited by the fact that if what they're teaching does not help the students past the exams reflects poorly on the teacher
@@failedrevolutionary9497 good teacher
@@MuddafukhingdisKUST Yeah, the modern teacher is in a tricky situation; the American education system is shaped both by the ideas of the liberal arts - that education is inherently valuable and that it is important to have an educated society - and by its own roots as an institution set up by private industry in the early 20th century as a way to train more people to work as accountants. That utilitarian philosophy was retained by the public education system we have now - we still have arguments that academia should become even LESS supportive of classical education goals than it already is. Even a teacher who wants to help their students to learn to think to think about their subject is still beholden to the systems of exams and homework that are designed to reward recitation and repetition, and to systems of grading designed to emulate the supposed merit-based hierarchy of the workforce. This isn’t even getting into the ways that standardization leaves students who think differently or have learning disabilities behind to flounder.
Dude man, ever since i started academically studying Political Science and IR, I grew to hate going to bookstores. Pop-psychology, pop-history and pop-politics alongside pop-political science with the most wild, unfounded claims are everywhere and academics being academics and rather socially lets say "inept" barely do anything to criticise or raise a voice againts them publicly. Oh in academia we laught and mock these books and then return to our own publishers and literature. Meanwhile these books are read and influence all kind of people even people in power who dont know any better because they are not educated in that. It's like "Clash of Civilizations" fiasco all over again smh...
I hold nothing, but active contempt for the history section at a Barnes and Noble. I'll go back to see it and I don't know if it's getting worse or if I'm just paying more attention to it.
@@Mr.internet.Lag. The only time ill ever trust a history book I find in a library is if its either an easily fact checked encyclopedia or an author/book I already know is trustworthy
The idea of going to the store and just buying a big history book with 0 beforehand research is insane to me
Omfg you made me remember the México part in the "why countries fail" book.
Eso no se hace carnal.
@@binbows2258I think my history textbooks in school had errors in them too if I remember right.
As a non-academic who will probably never become one, how could I do proper history research that doesn't take forever to cover one area, or is the whole area just that plagued that it's impossible currently?
@@chillinchum read academic papers, recommended books, primary sources etc
use libgen, scihub etc (u can find more pretty easily by checking relevent subreddits), never give journals money
On the "If books could kill" podcast, they have their "one book theory" based on the observation of what you called Theories of Everything books. They tend to all be structured similarly and lead to similar conclusions.
"I am die. The state remains."
This is like the 4d varient to "Don't dead. Open inside."
"Did you know the Persians tied cats to their shields and the Egyptians just didn't fight back!!??"
Quick, train the AI on this comment!
@@AToZed71
Our friendly neighbourhood historian should never be allowed to forget allowing this nonsense to slip past him.
"I'm not telling you this so you can be a contrarian or an annoyance at parties-- if you're watching this video you probably don't need help with that."
Man just destroyed my entire way of life.
The red flag is if the author presents themselves as being a rebel against the "current orthodoxies" in the history field.
You'll get pushback, but that's normal in any historical field, and it's necessary for said field. If you see yourself as rebelling against the field, you'll take on positions simply because they're against the grain no matter how silly or downright vulgar the methods you draw on or the conclusions you reach.
Also, the truism I personally wince at is "history is written by the victor." Its a nothing statement to feel more special for having a unique knowledge. History is done by historians, and it's more fruitful to examine that than have a manichean view of the process.
At most you can say "History [writing] is funded by the victor," but that's almost as much of a nothing-burger statement, too.
I've always preferred (paraphrasing from where I originally heard it) "History is written by people who can write". There's plenty of people who lost or were losing or just not involved who left us histories, and tonnes of victorious illiterates who only left us what other people had to say.
History is written by the victor falls apart the moment you enter an American bookstore's Vietnam War section
It gets even worse when this rebel mindset gets used to peddle Crank conspiracy stuff masquerading as a real work to take seriously
Let’s face it, that quote is most commonly uttered by sore losers who think the world is unfair because it doesnt conform to their standards.
I have my own anecdote about the etymology of the term ¨Molotov Cocktail¨ which keep saying was coined by the Finns as a response to Molotov's bombardment using cluster bombs which were (allegedly) referred to as breadbaskets and they called it a molotov cocktail as a ¨drink to go with the bread¨, wikipedia lists this as the origin for the term, at least english wikipedia, their sources are a british trivia quiz, a website without a source and a search for the term ¨molotov cocktail¨ in SWEDISH newspapers. Neither ever gives a proper source to the breadbasket thing, the russian version apparently claims the term was coined by the russians. And this claim is all over the internet either sourcing wikipedia or nothing at all, itś such a ¨did you know¨ trivia factoid. Now I don´t speak Finnish, this might actually be true but maybe if you don´t have a proper source for it don´t make an entire wikipedia article chapter dedicated to this, expecially when the talk page even says that this is a disputed claim.
So did you find any actual sourced etymology of it?
Swedish newspapers from Sweden or Swedish-language newspapers in Finland? It's a common enough language there (and even more common back then) that the latter would be a reasonable source.
@@404_nowheresnotfound3 no
I managed to stumble into a similar rabbit hole yesterday but luckily I got a historian friend with access to archives who could actually find a source for it.
In Finnish the ¨Molotov Cocktail¨ is actually called polttopullo (burn bottle). Its called polttopullo in the original Finnish instructions and that's what many veterans call it. Ive always had the theory that the term "Molotov Cocktail" was coined by some foreign newspaper or if it was coined by Finnish troops it was not a wide spread nickname. The word cocktail is also quite awkward to say in Finnish and it would be spelt koktaili
Regarding when citations are needed - when I do my writing, I tend to frame 'citation needed' less in terms of "How do I prove that I'm not just pullin' this out of my nethers and that there's something actually provable here?" and more in terms of "If someone reading this was interested in learning in-depth about the thing I just said, where could they go to find out more?"
Not saying the former isn't important! I just find that it gets (mostly - some things are both rare knowledge that needs backing up, and also kinda boring as heck) subsumed into the latter motivation for citing things, and the latter is a more useful and interesting motivation for writing (and reading) citations when they're formatted and motivated in that way.
When I'm in the act of writing citations, it also sidesteps the 'common knowledge' issue. Whether something is common knowledge or not is irrelevant to the question of whether someone may want to learn more about a thing, and irrelevant to where they can find out more about it. It still comes up, but much more rarely, and usually only when I'm doing a second pass on sourcing with the "nether-regions" question in mind to make sure I didn't drop the ball anywhere.
“Whether something is common knowledge or not is irrelevant” i think is the best possible way to think not only about your own citations, but for evidence as a whole. Just because “everyone knows that!” does not mean that it is true.
Senator Armstrong must be the bane of all historians existence. Looking forward to new videos. And the triangle.
Nah, that would be Gibbon
Senator Armstrong is actually a fascinating case study for historical linguistics students who minored in polisci.
Like how they made us read Kantor's Dilemma in Ethics in Science class.
“We’re making the mother of all omelets here jack. Can’t fret over every egg.” t. Senator Armstrong
“All your memes of production are belong to us” Karl Marx
My Roman history professor told us about this issue too and his example was interesting. It was about the so called
"salting of Carthage" so nothing would ever grow again, and his own professor wanted to know the origin. So my professor's professor tracked down the original author and asked him what his ancient source was, and the author said "I just made it up, it sounded nice". Which just goes to show what some will do and then the pop history gets stuck with us, and every time I hear someone talking the salting of Carthage I know it's made up.
Ok this has sent me into paranoid mode because I'm currently reading Stephen Kotkin's biography of Stalin and on page 155 of 'Paradoxes of Power' he also repeats the information about Lidia Pereprygina without a source. Now I don't think it can be argued that the Kotkin work isn't academia, it certainly has a thorough list of footnotes, but this glaring omission being pointed out makes me wonder what else I missed. Oh look Montefiore is in the bibliography.
Well that's depressing to read.
I thought he had a justly low opinion of Montefiore's pot boilers.
Goes to show that even good historians slip up.
12:18 “I am not telling you this to turn you into a contrarian at house parties. If you’re watching this video… you may not need my help with that.” Absolutely broke me
I love watching your videos, because you ask genuine questions about the work you're writing and make a real attempt to answer them, both to forward the piece and to legitimize your point in a format and media sphere where having a genuine debate about a point you want to make is so rare. People very often either take things at face value and agree or disagree vehemently, neither with any substantiating claims or research. You make a real effort in your videos to add nuance and discuss it the best you can under a limited time frame. The fact you're actually putting in the work to make these things rather than waffling for an hour about how "pop culture bad" and including some supporting references is refreshing.
That being said, it's also incredibly funny if you look at these videos as someone just arguing with themselves over questions they are also asking. Real "debating the man in the walls" sort of vibe.
I genuinely think to some extent this is a consequence of academia's flaws and that it's elitist accessibility issues have left a perfect opening for opportunists in search of, in the best case money, and in the worst case spreading a narrative. As it stands, a historian has two jobs, being a researcher and being a teacher. Academia already does a pretty poor job of forming academics as university-level teachers and that's its own can of worms, but there's a third job missing, communicator. If we don't have people specifically formed to make enticing, easy to read history books, that also adhere to academic scrutiny even if they don't need to adhere to its demands of innovation, then this will just continue happening. Ideally all three areas would be taught to every academic and they'd be able to do a good job of all of them, but seeing the results of that with my own teachers in university I genuinely believe that in research careers such as history or even physics and whatnot, there should be means to specialize in either research, pedagogy or communication.
There is a lot to this! I have a PhD in medieval history and I wish there was more (monetary) incentive to going into pure history communication.
During my degree I took/participated in many seminars and classes on how to communicate to non-academic audiences, and there are many interesting ways, but it's hard to live off them. I think this is a big part of the problem
yeah Bret Devereaux (an actual historian) has been hammering on this point for years. Academia isn’t very successful in public communication because it’s often actively bad for one’s career to do it, the incentive structure is broken.
Yeah, a lot of academic history is written as if the writer actively hates the reader and doesn't want their work to be read and understood. Why use 10 words when 50 longer words will do.
Honestly, the one big thing I started thinking of during this video, is "Why is academic history uniquely opaque?" -- And by that I mean other academic fields don't seem to have the same degree of issue, sure pop-science books abound but it's relatively easy for a layperson to find an academic paper in those fields and even if the body of the paper is hard to interpret the abstract and conclusions often provide a lot of useful insight. I must have seen hundreds of physics and math papers in my life, and even social science which I don't really care fore has directed me to a good amount of academic publication. But history, I can't really think of one - and I know they exist, but just normal paths of research don't seem to lead to them as readily as they do with other fields, instead you end up at newspaper citations or interviews or all varieties of primary sources (or even more pop history).
@@blob22201I disagree with this to be honest - i have never encountered a paper or book that felt opaquely written on purpose.
Sure I have encountered badly written stuff, but also lots of really good stuff -- however for all disciplines academic writing is very specific, which can make it difficult to digest or outright boring
An interesting thing from WWI- there are, as far as I can tell, no documented instances of a “trench shotgun” in use by American forces in WWI.
Supposedly, the Signal Corps tightly controlled pictures that came from the war and were published, so anything with one of the infamous American pump action shotguns was never published.
I did once find a political cartoon mocking the German protests of American shotgun use in combat, but that’s it.
Why is this important? Shotguns were not a critical war winning weapon, as small arms rarely are.
The myth of American doughboys using shotguns in the trenches is part of a narrative about the new Americanized ways of war, and the idea that Americans could enter the European theater of war and strike so much fear into the German generals that they filed a formal protest about the use of this quintessentially American weapon. It’s a myth, real or imagined, about American exceptionalism in warfare and American moral superiority, since how could the Germans protest the use of pump action shotguns as they exploded chemical weapons over the heads of our boys? (The political cartoon from above references exactly this- it points out a supposed German hypocrisy).
I've noticed that when the average person talks about war or the military in general they normally focus on infantry and anything more complicated (artillery, tanks, navies, logistics, air superiority, etc) generally isn't even though of. No idea why 'guy with gun' is the baseline so often.
@@ADADEL1 systems are much harder to understand, and popular sources are hilariously wrong about everything relating to military hardware.
Look at the discourse surrounding the F35 as some disaster and the bad reporting around what the money for F-35 has actually been spent on.
Regardless, the human story is much easier to sell people on, for whatever your purpose is and whatever your relation to the war in question is.
“Germany is protesting our use of shotguns in war” is an interesting phrase and myth for a few macro level reasons. I’ll list a deconstruction:
1) our basic technology is so effective, our enemies are terrified to the point that they have no will to fight.
2) our will to fight is greater
3) they have done things much worse than this but are now protest, so we are morally superior
4) they have used gas, machine guns, and high explosive on our boys, isn’t that horrible?
There’s a lot of meaning packed into a propagandistic phrase like that, all around a weapon that may or may not have even existed in the theater of war.
@@ADADEL1 also, I think on a large scale, for the US military specifically, the Global War on Terror represented a a shift from the large and technical systems of the Cold War era to a more infantry centric model- you can’t occupy a nation with air strikes.
Some of the horrific US casualties early in the counter-insurgency wars came from the military trying to fight guerrillas with a military that was designed to fight Soviets. The military had to quickly change its focus from “better tanks, better planes, better carriers” to “body armor and better infantry systems.” Just seemingly basic things like casualty care completely changed from 2001 to now, or the fact that almost every infantry rifle has an optical sight of some sort now.
These things changed massively, and the focus really went from systems to individual soldiers- because soldiers themselves are a system, and there’s more of a focus on that, now.
There’s also a popular narrative surrounding the mythology of special forces, which has really been growing in the public mind since Vietnam and the British Princess Gate hostage crisis.
today i learned we probably didnt use shotguns in ww1
edit: whats annoying is trying to find proof we didnt use it, you get alot of articles and videos about how we did, and no real source on how many were used
Edit 2: found one, did basically say "may have been issued but the effect was incredibly minor" hence why no one else seemed to use them beyond drilling shotguns- this makes more sense then germans just ..refusing to use something that effective if it was? cause they used gas and machine guns and tanks so i cant imagine theyd decide to just lose the war more by avoiding some new tech that was crazy good
@@user-bn5df6hl1dking of editing.
I think Sean Connery once said it in Celebrity Jeopardy
"Les Tits Now Si'll vous plaiz"
Its a French xpression
I believe the “Not only to inform but also persuade” is an odd way to distinguish the academic from the non academic. Now in the context of political sophistry, it’s understandable but much of academic writing is designed to persuade. He wears his motivation to persuade on his sleeve but history and related discipline are rife with academics seeking to that in far more subtle ways whilst adhering to the methodology that pop history writers do not.
I would argue proper academic work strives not to persuade for the sake of spreading an idea, it seeks to persuade the reader that the data/findings are true. Personally I think “persuasion” does not quite capture the intent of academic works, they arent made with the point of changing peoples minds, but changing the information that people draw conclusions from.
@@defnotthekgb8362 Many academic works definitely are written to persuade about conclusions… Seeking to “persuade the reader that the data/findings are true” is changing minds in the first place (and there are also works that seek to persuade that particular findings are false) but many works also seek to persuade about new conclusions and arguments that are made using those new data and findings (whether original by the author or research by others that is cited). To me it seems obvious if you just look at well known academic debates, like “What caused the Bronze Age Collapse” or “What was the Proto-Indo-European homeland” which are debates about what conclusions should be drawn from findings.
What's inferred is that OP is concerned with an author trying to persuade the reader into a particular worldview, social or political alignment, or other mental ascent outside the framework of the subject itself.
We could of course split hairs here and say "studying the American revolution IS political", but I'm hoping you'll operate in good faith and understand the point being made and avoiding reducing terms and ideas into a null meaning.
the correct way to learn history is through otome games with totally accurate representations of japanese historical men.
nice triangle
when you go down the citation tree and find that its all BS at the bottom/root, is more disappointing than not having a citation in the first place
43:05 when there are 5 sources but 4 of them came from the same text/author… yeah, really substantiated😂
An incredibly niche suggestion: that background image could use dithering/noise to reduce the color banding and make it more "smooth."
There's an interesting kind of sensational revisionism which is just "Historians circles have known this for decades, but the classic version has been so entrenched no one cares and you can keep publishing pop history versions of "upending" the status quo". This kind is usually fine history but very annoying to read the discussions around it if you know the academia.
Q: "How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?"
A: "As long as it takes to hammer into the general public's attention the fact that the Kaiser's Germany did indeed start the war for its own motives, supported and praised its Turkish and Austrian allies' genocides in occupied territories, planned to deport millions of people from Poland and Lithuania to create lebensraum for German settlers _to start with,_ and then sloppily covered up those plans once Versailles rolled around."
Like the spanish black legend
@@bomberharris1943 Ah, but have you considered that the HOI4 community has assured me that the Kaiser was Based™, Blessed™, and Actually Would've Been Very Cool And Good If He Won The War™ (because Hitler was spawned into existence ex nihlo the moment French troops stepped into Alsace-Lorraine)?
This video brings up a lot of valid instances of pop history pushing readers to believe specific inaccuracies or unsubstantiated rumors because they support the structure of their rhetorical argument. However, condemning all pop-history works as useless or even counter-productive is, in a sense, gatekeeping history from the general public.
Not saying Rosencreutz believes this, but that this is the implication being created by only talking about pop history in a negative context without any qualifying statements on the topic. However unintentional, the subtext of this video is that watching a youtube documentary about that time the [interest empire here] tried to do something and failed spectacularly is intaking history the *wrong* way, and you instead need to dust off the dryest and most serious text you can find to properly learn about a history topic.
It's good to critique others' works and want them to do better in the future, but gatekeeping, no matter the field, should be avoided wherever possible.
"Gatekeeping" is a very broad term, and we shouldn't confuse the "gatekeeping" of _expecting someone to know something about a topic before talking about it_ for the "gatekeeping" of _dismissing marginal voices._
@@lepercolony8214 When an error is major and obvious, or something was omitted that undermines the entire thesis of a work of pop history, then I think it's fair to demand the author reevaluate and rework their research practices. However, all too often I've seen pretty aggressive criticisms levied at pop history works (mostly youtube videos) where the mistake boils down to a relatively minor detail or the omission of a period of history that (while interesting) didn't have any long term effects on the trajectory or a nation/region.
Some people (and by that I mean those who frequent r/askhistorians) seem to take any error no matter how minor as grounds to accuse an author of not putting in the proper work. The problem is, history is a complicated topic that is filled with creditable sources that nonetheless contradict each other when it comes to the fine details. And unless you're already deep down the rabbit hole of a given topic, you're not going to know which sources are considered more credible than others, which is inevitably going to lead to minor mistakes or pushing misconceptions.
Most pop historians love history and want to get the minor details right, so if someone calmly explained where they goofed up, how they goofed up, and why this other source is less of a goof, I have no doubt they would be happy to make a correction annotation or even reupload the video if the error was severe enough. However, people are way less likely to listen when people act like smug assholes, belittle your work, and hold your 20 min. youtube video to graduate essay levels of scrutiny.
@@MathMasterism When I was a teenager, I started reading history via pop-history books, and they instilled a love of the subject that made me consume actual academic histories. I can't stand pop histories now, unless I'm in the mood for something simple to just play in the background (I mainly listen to my books), but I can say for a fact that without Alex Kershaw, I would have never gained a love for history that now has me attempting a career in it. I'm sure there are a million stories like mine, and it proves that however inaccurate or citation-free, pop histories have a valuable place adjacent to academia.
You should definitely make a video on Wikipedia as a source for history. I think Wikipedia’s reputation as a source for general information has increased over time, and many now loathe the classic professor talk of “don’t use wikipedia”, however having finished my degree in history, I realised that, at least for the field of history, Wikipedia is a minefield of citation needed, partizan edit battles and sabotage, and terrible usage of primary sources.
Wikipedia’s great for some things, like getting a broad overview of a topic. It can be tainted by biased or unscrupulous sources, but at least you can check whenever “that doesn’t sound right”
Wikipedia's reliability really varies and that's probably the greatest issue, it's often very reliable when it comes to the natural sciences but not so much in less clear cut fields where things are less clear cut and there's more motivation to misinform. Like there's very little motivation to vandalize the page on Quantum Electro Dynamics and the kind of people who might do that are easy to spot but there's a lot of motivation to vandalize a page on WWII and it's not as easy to spot.
A salient point. I notice that this is also prevalent in other pop-edutaiment circles of youtube as well. One only has to look at all the weird and wacky stuff that comes out of economics youtube that isn't even in the sphere of discussion in actual academia.
The clashing of wanting to learn and inform compared to the time required to genuinely do so creates much dissonance
"Did you know that Taiping rebellion was caused by a single clearly crazy guy thay one day had decided that hes brother of Jesus and thats why whole reason for that war? Isnt that wacky?"
Jack Rackham is so fucking obnoxious. And his research is generally quite shit. His Stalin video is a particularly egregious example.
I feel like it's slowly starting to get under control when it comes to pop science like pop physics but now the pop science misunderstanding has just become straight up pseudoscientific conspiracy theories.
You mention how some publications charged for research papers. I've heard that sometimes you can reach out to the authors and they'll gladly give you a copy. You can try that or maybe an internet archive has a screenshot of the work saved.
There's also websites that sail the high seas and host copies of research papers. You could try Anna's Archive.
@@vlc-cosplayer I think the problem is that you can't really use that in a youtube video, not exactly a great idea to video document comitting a crime.
I don't know if you can qualify it as "pop history" since it is written like an Academic book and used extensively in Academic settings, but the famous Richard Evans trilogy on the Third Reich is an example of popular narrative history as its best. It's extremely well-sourced, covers every major topic with a unifying theme, regularly sums itself with concluding paragraphs hammering home the subject. I really like how often it uses diaries, letters, SPD agents reports, to give a feel on how the people felt like.
On the other hand, each of those books took 4 years to write, so...
i just adore your channel. i’m not into strategy games, but even those vids manage to align with my general interests. i really admire your work!
I feel like this applies to any "pop" subject. Pop psychology is the bane of my existence because a lot of it is misreadings of outdated studies or drive-by retellings of headlines. Hint, if the person whose work is widely cited for a given psychology "fact" died before the 1990s, they are, at best, out of date or, worse, just made it up (especially if they are classified as Freudian).
I get why it needed to be cut, but god I want those 10 cut paragraphs about Scottish identity and national myths. Also my guess for why people like Service let such inadequacies slide is simple, they agree with the point and so if a "non-historian" can more effectively get across their broad beliefs without the need for rigor it is no skin off their backs. It stacks the decks further for them in a context that already lets whatever nonsense claim about the USSR go uncriticized and unexamined
The dialogue segments in the Stalin books remind me of the dialogue in Fire & Blood from the A Song of Ice and Fire series, a supposedly scholarly treatise written by the scholars of the fictional world that is FILLED with dialogue scenes and some action scenes.
I do feel like a lot of your problem lies not with "pop history" but just the misrepresentation of history. Pop history can be the most blatant example of it, but what its saying could be entirely true yet simplified.
For the Malcolm Combe paywalled review just on the off chance it isn't known in the field, sci-hub's paper yoinking did manage to catch even that.
Your voice is so pleasant and soothing I can listen to it all day even on topics I am very well informed about.
Your comment about how entertainment and authenticity do not need to be in conflict reminds me of my favorite author.
Roger Crowley is an actual full on historian who makes devastatingly readable and entertaining works without having to actually inaccuracies the truth, simply by being upfront with the inaccuracies or potential biases of some of the sources statements, but including them anyway.
Some of my favorites are from City of Fortune, which is a book about Venice and their dominance over the Mediterranean, and two stories stand out.
A ship was on the run from another, and went up a particularly deep river, scuttled itself, waited for the pursuing ship to pass, and then resurfaced the ship to leave. That's hype.
Another is about the siege of Constantinople, where he claims how there were byzantine reports of an attacker who, after breaking through the wall, survived attacks that should have killed them but kept fighting on. Regardless of if such an event happened, the fact that there is a source from the defenders only a short time after the event occurred really helps paint a picture of what it felt like to be in that siege more than any "The knight snarled" ever could.
Fantastic video, it feels tight and concise but still wanders all the places I wanted to go when thinking about the problems with this sort of historical media. A friend recommended you so I think I'm gonna go watch your ck3 video next, I've been interested in a discussion on the lenses that games like paradox productions take and it sounds really neat.
excited to see this triangle
Good Pop history happens when the author does the same amount of research as an academic but just has a better style of writing.
Would love to see your full length take on Sapiens!
bro cooked with that thumbnail
The level of articulation used in this script, absolutely and I am surprised and not surprised to see the number of news and subscribers this channel has accumulated, to sum it up in other words TikTok and Idiocracy
Very glad I got around to this video, if a bit late! This is the kind of video that simply makes me better as a writer. I also want to make heavily-researched, well-sourced videos but am scared I'm going to "do it all wrong" because that's not what my background actually is in. So I think internalizing the points here is an important part of my own growth, to speak self-centeredly. Which is to say thank you for making this! I think it's an important asset for the "field" of UA-cam video essays, if that is a field to speak of.
I am the State, but when I die, the State remains. I don’t think the two statements are antithetical. For the King’s lifetime, he embodies The State, but obviously when he dies someone else will take his position, as has happened throughout the history of monarchies.
hey dawg, just wanna say, you be rocking with those triangles;
the way the straight lines lead to the straight vertices and really shines onto the silhouette shape you wish to achieve, really fits onto the didactics you wish to present
your whole presentation is rocking, dont feel ashamed of it king🔥
There's so many people who use disclaimers like "I'm not a historian" as a get out of jail free card when talking about history
Robert the Bruce being of Norman heritage did ring a bell. If I remember correctly "de Brus" comes from either Brix, Normandy, or Bruges, Flanders, and their first Lord of Annandale had come from Normandy to Britain after the Norman Conquest. Kind of weird to disqualify someone as Scottish for being an eighth-generation immigrant, though.
Reminds me of shit I read in undergrad Poli-sci classes about ex-Soviet sphere countries, and my eyes would start glazing over every reference to the transcendentalism of the party or of figures like the new Soviet man, because I got the sense the writers were just riffing in any way to make those countries' policies look insane.
That stuff wasn't made up by the authors, it was made up by the Soviets. It was in every way a real thing, and it was ridiculous.
I can't really speak to the books you specifically read, but I think any historian would be hard pressed to present a summary of soviet policies that WOULDN'T make the readers eyes glaze over, with the constant bad decisions and thought terminating cliches rife within the party orthodoxy.
Its like (by design) soaping your brain with lye.
But these were real doctrines and policies, like the cookbook which encourages a ridiculous alcohol consumption that goes far beyond alcoholism. These countries had some insane beliefs
Aint nobody is citing sources
@@beatthegreat7020ridiculously good.
Wait till you see that ~250 out of 330 citations in "Early life of Joseph Stalin" attributed to Montefiore, and 100 of 700 on original Stalins page. Sometimes he marked as one of the sources, but other times he is the sole source, with some cases number of the citation corresponding to the number of page - 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151...
You missed an apostrophe in c'est. It's a compound word of 'ce' and 'est', essentially It's the equivalent of 'it's'.
Literally got a midroll ad from Expedia that said “Like empires, prices rise and fall”
As a history major, I struggle a lot with my feelings towards pop history. It is beneficial and even fun to scrutinize these works in classes but at the same time, it feels like we're showing faux concern towards the public perception of history. For example, why would someone write a book review on "The Poor Had No Lawyers" and question the audacity of writing it or state 'why, pray tell, should anyone take the time to read it?' in the abstract only to put it behind a paywall? The majority of people who would actually pay to read this review are those who have enough knowledge on the historical method to question the validity of the book in the first place. If so, is the review trying to validate academia's attitude towards pop history? Or, if the actual review is more tempered than the abstract as you've said, isn't the author of the review committing the same kind of dramatization/exaggeration they look down upon in pop history? In a way, one of the reasons for pop history being so prevalent is the elitism in academia. I'm not writing any of this to downplay pop history's faults, this video manages to bridge some of the gaps between authenticity and availability but I'm mostly frustrated that a lot of historians view these types of easily accesible reviews as being beneath them. When these works actually influence the public consciousness, politics and even the education system (that they'd then have to struggle to dismantle) it feels like it should be taken more seriously. I feel partially responsible/guilty for being in an environment like this ☹
I laughed when Guns Germs and Steel came on the screen because it has shaped my whole worldview since I was 16. I am still rather young though
3:54 That's a mighty fine triangle ya got there, pilgrim.
Love your videos man. Keep it up. You're the pop historian we need but don't deserve
Heigal would spin in his grave if he saw that thumbnail.
Would love to see an essay with your thoughts on academics writing pop history - as someone burned out on historical reading after finishing a master's, these books have tempted me as ways to ease back into reading history, but they leave me with a weird feeling.
This is just "🤓☝️um actually " but with piano music
10/10
Erm, do you have a source?
45:57
This really made me think. I'm in my final year of my undergraduate history degree, hoping to go into academia as a social historian of the United States. As a trained historian, it's so easy to be a snob about pop history and its cousins. Like you, I stew over the narrative framework and lack of citations that characterize pop history. Much of my research is for the express purpose of correcting warped understandings of history that have formed over decades or even centuries. (No wonder my favorite podcast is You're Wrong About). However, a historian doesn't have to have a tenured position at an ivy to perpetuate the notion that the study of history should remain within the ivory towers and among learned students. Everyone deserves to have access to nuanced understandings of history.
Also, after a few years of studying history, you develop a sixth sense for historical bullshit. More often than not, it dings whenever someone shares a tiktokified historical 'not-so-fun-fact' that appeals to fascinations with the morbid or outlandish. I think what many don't understand is that people from 100, 200, 1000 years ago are pretty similar to us. They loved, ate, and took care of pets just like we do. Any attempt to convey that people were somehow fundamentally different from us in history usually leads to some wacky ahistorical claim.
Does historical fiction count as pop history? My mom seems to think historical fiction is a reliable source, like every time we talk about something historical she tells me to read some book or watch some movie to learn what some historical period was "really like"
I'm no historian, so I don't know how the philosophy of history defines "history", but I'd say that any historian with an agenda, or that is writing without doing due diligence is automatically writing historical fiction, since they're not making an effort in good faith to portray history as objectively as possible.
using "The Death of Stalin" as an actual documentary about the death of stalin
I think that depends heavily on how the piece of fiction sells itself. Dunkirk and 1917 both sell themselves as no-nonsense serious historical dramas and definitely inform people's views and opinions about history and should definitely be held to a higher standard. However some historical fiction clearly isn't trying particularly hard and has just adopted the setting for the hell of it. Though honestly games are the worst when it comes to this and Rosencreutz has obviously talked about them a lot.
Yo. Good job on that nice triangle. Really liking that it has three angles and three edges.
Great Triangle.
Ah yes, a pop history video about pop history.
Jokes aside, this is great content, I've been binging it for the last two hours or so. Also, nice triangle :D
Hey! I have question, what's your stance on historical materialism? Because from what you said, it might fall under the "theories of everything" category.
I had the same thought!
I think calling historical materialism a "grand narrative" is a ridiculous strawperson. It's not "telling a story", it's trying to formulate a science of history.
@@neighborhoodmusicsnob5517 I know, just was curious about his opinion
It's more of a philosophy than a "theory of everything" really, dogmatic marxism, which was really common during the soviet era would fit better
@@Bojoschannel Marxism usually rejects dogmatism
I call it "Kaiser Mad" history. The kind of things you go "Did you know" at dinner parties, like "Did you know America uses shotguns in WWI and it made the kaiser mad"
Nice video Rosencrantz! Say hi to Guildenstern for me!
Thank you for touching on Scotland, I was watching the start of the video and thinking so much of it is applicable to the lens Scotlands history is viewed today. Lo and behold you had a whole section on it. As you said so much of it is viewed through the Highlands, when the reality is much deeper and more complex. I personally think due to underlying political biases many people find it inconvenient to touch on Lowland history or Lowland involvement within Empire.
As a fan of naval history it’s fucking crazy just how many awful examples of bestseller pop culture history are around. The Battle off Samar being a classic example due to an inaccurate (due to multiple missing and/or downright false major details) retelling off the battle being parroted over and over in various other works, including the one that most people praise and use to learn about the battle.
Midway is another example, though Shattered Sword’s at least started to correct most of the falsehoods of the usual narrative.
Sometimes it can capture the true purpose of history by creating a study of human nature through a slightly flawed, more storylike narrative. This is what Herodotus did, and no one can deny that he wrote one of the greatest works of history ever. A great contrast is the much more scholarly and exact work of Thucydides, also a great work. They're both valuable in their own way.
On the intro,
A disclosed narrative and discloced lense of analysis is always a good sign. History can not not be narrativized.
The mear curration of events deemed significant constitute a narrativization (poor story telling does not anule this).
A history that begins with outlining its approach and its goal, assuming it is honest in both, can be held to those standards and tells the listeners the limits of its story.
Beware the professional "objective" storyteller and wise "common sense" storyteller.
As a dork, thank you for making this video - I enjoyed it very much :)
Awe. Is that little ole Fredda?
Will you do a video on "Sapiens"? I remember my professor asking us to review it and i went first and i was the only one to oppose it, making the professor mad. Please prove me right for holding my ground lol
loving the timesplitters 2 siberia theme
"Stalin chuckled, 'you mean the Chaos Emeralds?'"
Silence historian, a paradox map game player is speaking