The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge. Fields like archeology deals with facts, history is almost always an interpretation and as such there is often value in reevaluating what’s come before.
Sometimes it’s to deal with intentional manipulation, other times our society has simply shifted to a point where we view things differently, but we’re almost never capable of getting to a point where we know for a fact how things were. Especially not when we go that far back. I had a professor who had written numerous papers, and later a few commercial books, on the topic of the roman emperor cult. His source material was a few one-liners from a few gravestones. Not to take anything from him, this is just an example, because this is how a lot of our generally accepted “historical facts” come to be.
Archaeology deals with facts, but they are usually thin, and specific, and extrapolated in sweeping ways to fill in the gaps.
It's a little like trying to raytrace a scene, except for most of the pixels on the screen, you're not casting any rays at all, and a bare few have many samples.
>The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge.
I find this statement very odd. We know a vast amount about the past through normal historical methods. Lots of historians are (probably) doing crap, pointless or silly research, but that happens in all academic disciplines.
Not really, unless you consider, "Person X kept a written record of their experience with Y" to be factual knowledge. What Person X writes about an event can definitely help historians piece together "what really happened," but people lie, exaggerate, and sometimes just get things wrong even when they were eye witness to the event. Think about the old saying, "History is always written by the winners" for example.
This is just one example of why history is a game of trying to figure out what is reliable and what really happened.
If you apply that kind of skepticism consistently you'll come to the conclusion that we don't know anything much about anything.
It's actually extraordinary how much we know about the distant past. For example, Julius Caesar lived over 2000 years ago, but we know beyond any reasonable doubt a great many details of his life. Take, say, the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Caesar. We know all of that.
I mostly agree, but any time I get into serious historical scholarship it's amazing how much contradictory information there is that is usually left out for the books and stuff targeted at Lay people.
I'm a huge fan of Bart Ehrman for example, and of course anything around religion is going to be polarizing, but he has a long list of contemporary sources that describe the same event with blatant contradictions in them. Flash forward to the modern times and despite having powerful tools like the internet, we still suffer from fake news and honest mistakes. I think the skepticism is healthy, tho I don't take it to "we can't really know anything" (but I concede it may have seemed like I was saying that).
The vikings are my favourite example for these kinds of interjections. We think we know a lot about the vikings, there is so much literature on Norse mythology, there is even a very nice Gabriel book turned TV show on Amazon prime.
Yet our only written sources on the subject were written by Christian monks.
You brought up Julius Ceacar as an example in another post, and he’s actually another great point. Because we don’t actually know that much about him, or his life. Most people think he was the first emperor of Rome, but that was actually Augustus.
> Most people think he was the first emperor of Rome, but that was actually Augustus.
I'm talking about what historians collectively know, not what the average person on the street happens to remember.
We clearly do know a huge amount about Caesar and the course of his life. The Wikipedia article, for example, is full of information about Caesar that is known beyond any reasonable doubt.
The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge. Fields like archeology deals with facts, history is almost always an interpretation and as such there is often value in reevaluating what’s come before.
Sometimes it’s to deal with intentional manipulation, other times our society has simply shifted to a point where we view things differently, but we’re almost never capable of getting to a point where we know for a fact how things were. Especially not when we go that far back. I had a professor who had written numerous papers, and later a few commercial books, on the topic of the roman emperor cult. His source material was a few one-liners from a few gravestones. Not to take anything from him, this is just an example, because this is how a lot of our generally accepted “historical facts” come to be.