In article
,
says...
Someone who might have read many popular books on health care does not become
professionally qualified to practise medicine in a hospital. One can find
something in print to support nearly every conceivable view of history (for
instance, from Daniel Goldhagen to David Irving on German history 1933-1945).

Any really interesting historical subject tends to involve considering some
incomplete, inconsistent, or conflicting evidence. Yet not every source in
print is of comparable reliability or value, and professional historians are
generally better than amateurs at separating the wheat from the chaff.


Dear Nick,

The words "professional historian" have been sorely
abused for some time now. Given Daniel Goldhagen's
position at Harvard one could count him as a professional
historian, without necessarily agreeing with the reality
of his chaff. David Irving's research methods were
praised by John Erickson in his notes to either "The Road
to Stalingrad" or the "Road to Berlin"; yet I suspect you
would agree with me that Erickson is a historian par
excellence. Not that this prevents the odd slip up (e.g.
on page 120 of the first edition of "Road to Berlin" the
text reads: "Now Koniev could strike for Kharkov, though
intelligence reported the presence of SS Das Reich,
Totenkopf, Wiking, and 3rd Panzer divisions which had
been moved back from the Izyum-Barvenkovo area: SS Gross
Deutscheland was moving into the Kharkov area from
Orel."), probably due to tiredness and late night working
at what I consider a very impressive book.

Newspapers further muddy the water by describing highly
dubious individuals as historians: one person so termed
purchased his degree, he then went on to libel another
who won the subsequent court case, not that the victim
ever saw a penny from the libeller: indeed in one of the
appeals, this time with the libeller as plaintiff, the
presiding judge found the plaintiff's case so
preposterous that he ordered the plaintiff's lawyers to
pay the costs of the defence, there being no possibility
of monetary redress otherwise.

Biographies are properly overlapped with history: I can
recall the favourable reviews of Norma Major's biography
of Joan Sutherland; I had the dubious pleasure of being
given this as a present, it would never have occurred to
me to buy it. What was wrong with it was not Major's poor
vocabulary (e.g. she seemed not to know that anticipate
is not a synonym for expect, nor that "refute" should not
do the work of "reject", never mind her bidding "complex"
to replace "complicated"), an all too common, and
probably lost, battle (possibly sometimes deservedly,
e.g. I consider "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" a
superb book despite its poor grammar and the associated
historical baggage): my objection was that Major had so
little idea what to write, not being a musician or
musically trained, that she was reduced to describing the
operas that the great diva performed in, which does not a
biography make, I threw the book away. Contrast this with
the great Maxim Gorky when he wrote (or was told) a great
singer's biography. Yet biographies written by those who
know the subject are frequently of great value, for
instance the biography of Rosenbach has many fine
stories, such as "The Rape of York", which are not
without value.

Unfortunately, history is an easy subject to pretend to
an expertise in. I suspect that is why there are so many,
how can one put it, society historians. In eighteenth
century England, it was easy to laugh at the
presentations, sometimes justified, made to the Royal
Society because of the presenter's ignorance of the
method of fluxions; today it is even easier, and with
more justification, to dismiss the efforts of charlatans
in the mathematical sciences: in history it is not so
simple.

We both know that much of the material on Napoleon's 1813
campaign (amongst others) is based upon the work of
Petre; yet it is not sufficient just to read him.
Likewise many people relied and rely upon Wedgewood's
excellent book "The King's Peace" for 17th century
English constitutional history. But there are many highly
questionable, or so I believe, books doing the rounds,
which are merely inferior rewritings of these.

Apart from the Erickson quote, I have written this from
memory, so please forgive any inaccuracies.


Regards,


Simon.