Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Important Things to Remember About History

You can't trust secondary sources. Not even me.

You can't trust primary sources.

You can't trust eyewitness accounts.

You can't trust translations.

"Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit"

That doesn't mean we can't know anything about the past, but we need to be appropriately skeptical of the frequently unreliable narrators that we are dealing with.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's depressing...