Good historians read everything and take their time to understand their result. The biggest crime an historian can make is to come up with the assumption first and gear everything to make their assumption the end result. That is like a detective going after one person when all the evidence points to someone else. Imagine how upset you would be if your favorite crime show began ignoring glaring evidence. You wouldn't trust them would you?
Lots of lawyers used to first graduate with a bachelors in history because it was the method that best trained a lawyer to do discovery. That was when academics had a more logical bent to it. Now not so much. Instead now subjectivity rules the day.
Now for my personal pet peeve - when they decided to change BC and AD to BCE and CE. WTH is that?
“Now for my personal pet peeve - when they decided to change BC and AD to BCE and CE. WTH is that?”
Before Christ and Anno Domini are too Christian/Western centric, and we can’t have that in the new cultural relativist academy, now can we? Has to be “Common Era” and “Before Common Era” (the “Common Era” just happens to coincide precisely with the birth of Christ)
BC = Before Christ
BCE = Before Common Era
I noticed it in schools about 17 years ago when I worked as Teachers Aide to disabled high school students.
This was just BEFORE 9/11. People were already worrying about such things.
BCE is meant to keep the Atheists from complaining or threatening to sue. They had already ruined Xmas in most schools on the scale it used to be. That wasn’t enough.
The reason for the change is that there are those who do not want to acknowledge the One Who is the reference point.
And for your pet peeve... BCE(Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era.)
Ridiculous isn’t it?
I went to a state college in the late 1950s, and it was an economic struggle for my parents. I was a General Science major and Spanish and education minor. Changed majors after Sputnik. Found it was hard to get a job in science without a masters or PhD. Hard to get any other job without typing and shorthand. My late husband had a BS in business subjects, finally took classes to get a teaching job. Neither of our sons had much interest in college. Now in their late 40s one has 20+ years in Special Forces and the other his own small contracting business. I came to the conclusion that if one enjoyed reading, the only classes that were really necessary were those in Science and language. As for degrees and advanced degrees, the ones that made/make sense are Medicine, Law, and Sciences. I became interested in therapeutic nutrition and as my health improved and need for sleep diminished spent one hour a night reading about therapeutic nutrition and related health material. Then I began to teach classes and counsel others to improve their health. So, as you say, “read everything.” I have read a lot of so-called “professional” “facts” that based on mymuch broader reading know to be false or incomplete.
A recent example here at FR, a posting of an article which said that a million+ year old hominid in Europe was unlikely because the middle east coastal area had an unfavorable climate for migration. Didn’t these “scientists” know that the Mediterranean had frequently been mostly dried up during that time span?
Currently I am enjoying collecting information for two historical novels around 1799 and 1902.
We can be peeved about the BC/BCE change, but given that only 1/5th of the world population is Christian, and we hope to be read in English in other parts of the world it probably makes some sense, especially if we hope to convince others that our ways are better.
Heck, I learned about BCE and CE when I was 8 years old in Hebrew School. I think you can probably figure out why we never went in for "in the Year of our Lord" stuff.