What liberties should video games take with the historical record and who gets to decide? Or, as some of the people interviewed in “Are Video Games like Assassin’s Creed Rewriting History?” suggest, is there no meaningful historical record beyond the interpretations that we put forward? A commonplace—“History is no longer a set of disputable, footnoted […]
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History as a Career, ca. 1960
In 1961 the American Historical Association published a short guide for undergraduates, History as a Career. To Undergraduates Choosing A Profession. The pamphlet opens: TO UNDERGRADUATES CHOOSING A PROFESSION In former centuries parents chose spouses and professions for their children. Today’s men and women can select their own. Chances are that another person will make […]
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History is Always Advocacy
In the comments to the post Gopnik on Galileo people have raised some good points that warrant further reflection. I want to begin by underscoring my point in that post: Gopnik repeats a number of problematic historical tropes. Historians of science have for years refuted those tropes, revealing how and why they are fallacious. Despite […]
Sarah Dunant’s opinion piece, “What is history’s role in society” makes some good points. These and many works like them have helped to revolutionise our view of the past, incorporating the richness of the ordinary and the iconoclastic. Like a huge pointillist painting, the background to all those well-known central figures is slowly but surely […]