Saturday, April 9, 2011

Mis-understanding history

How many genealogists are better off than these poor students? A lot, I hope.

2 comments:

Lois said...

This jives well with my sense of reading history. Seems to me if teachers talked more about this - it's not obvious to a student IMO - it would increase understanding of history and the world by a lot. Also of interest in studying history if you understand how it is coming through the author's filters of what matters and what is of interest. Of course this leads me to figure that if I really wanted to understand history I would have to go to the sources and make my own interpretation of what I would find there.

Harold Henderson said...

. . . or, if you're not quite that industrious, read some good historians who have different angles on the same subject, and triangulate. If they disagree on a lot, the stuff they agree on may be more solid!