I struggle to follow / understand a lot of things in the past.
We get history that understandably is written by the more educated from those times. I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking.
Heck even when we get history and information from the people at the time sometimes it is confusing. The English Civil War is completely confusing for me.
> We get history that understandably is written by the more educated from those times. I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking.
One of my favourite history series was HBO's Rome because it tackled this directly.
Sure, you have all the important aristocratic characters, but you also have all the no-name soldiers, slaves, and Roman citizens.
At one point, a legionnaire gets into a bar fight with some Romans. The next day, that same legionnaire is escorting Marc Anthony and they get attacked by an angry mob. Marc Anthony interprets it as an attack on himself, but the mob was actually just pissed at the one legionnaire from the bar fight the night before and forces the group to retreat.
The whole thing is interpreted by the aristocrats as an attack by the Pompeiian mobs on tribune Marc Anthony. This in turn, prevented Marc Anthony from exercising his office, and the whole thing snow balls into Caesar being forced to cross the Rubicon.
Entire history potentially made, because a legionnaire got into a bar fight. Now this is fiction, but it's incredible to think how many stories like this must exist outside of our records.
> I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking.
Yes, that's a big problem. That a big part of why finding Pompeii was important: the volcanic eruption preserved everything, including daily life and random graffiti.
There's also this famous history book about life in the early 1300s in a village located in the Northern Pyrenees: Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 [1]:
> Montaillou examines the lives and beliefs of the population of Montaillou, a small village in the Pyrenees with only around 250 inhabitants, at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is largely based on the Fournier Register, a set of records from the Inquisition which investigated and attempted to suppress the spread of Catharism in the Ariège region from 1318 to 1325, during the reigns of Philip V "the Tall" and Charles IV "the Fair".
> The English Civil War is completely confusing for me.
That's interesting, because I see Cavaliers vs Roundheads as the prototypical debate about the nature of Western culture that we are still having today.
The Pillars of the Earth and its follow-up by Ken Follet are fun (but long) fiction novels set in Medieval England, which help you envision living in that world. I'm not sure how accurate they are when it comes to people's general attitudes, though.
One thing I've learned about the ancient world is it was hyper-violent. Some guys could come over the hill and kill everyone in a tribe for stupid reasons.
We get history that understandably is written by the more educated from those times. I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking.
Heck even when we get history and information from the people at the time sometimes it is confusing. The English Civil War is completely confusing for me.