h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: How To Do History - A850330
Author: Montana Redhead (I really like the word Lothlorien) - U155915

It's a good start, but I don't know enough about ethnohistory. Would someone care to share the credit?

Yep, a good start. You should ask for help in the collaborative writing workshop (<./>Writing-Collaborative</.&gt, though.

Well, maybe. But I tend to find that the collaborators want to take over.

"Well, maybe. But I tend to find that the collaborators want to take over."



you think it's gonna be safer over here, do you?

You say that "revisionist historians" don't like the teleological approach. Are revisionists another group, are they a combination of some of the groups here, or something else again?

I don't like the title or the first line. If you must use "do History" in the title, then you should state it in some other way in the first line, which should be an explanation of what the entry is about.

I dunno. The intro could certainly stand being a little longer, but I think what's there is okay.

I think this entry should make it - speaking for myself, it's something I hadn't much idea about but found interesting.

Oh, there'll be more coming. I'm having lunch with Mike Davis, a history theorhetician, and I'm going to pick his brain.

'sweat shops' - probably you mean 'sweet shops'


I can't contribute anything useful here, but I like this one very much!

Why thank you sir. It was rather a whim. I think it needs a bit of refining, but we'll see.

Perhaps "Ways of Doing History" would be a better title, since you're not really telling people the correct way to do history, as the current title would imply.

excellent suggestion, that. I think you may be right....

I really like this entry! Maybe you could change the title to 'Ways of Looking at History' though, to make it a bit clearer?

I really like this entry! Maybe you could change the title to 'Ways of Looking at History' though, to make it a bit clearer?

I thinks a couple of the sections need refining.

both the teleological and the revisionist sections are not as clear as they should be. in particular, the revisionist section does not make it very clear that revisionist historians try and deny that any of the inconvenient history actually happened. (as seen with white supremecists and the holocaust).

also, the comparative section is a little on the dismissive side. as long as you are comparing similar things, you can get usefull inforamtion from the comparative approach. in fact it is essential to any interdisciplinary approach to history.

I wasn't trying to be flip about comparative history, although some folk do try to take it too far (such as comparing Mexican immigrants to LA in the 1950s to medieval serfs in Bohemia).

And I obviously need to revise the section on revisionism, if you really think that it means they "deny that any of the inconvenient history actually happened." Because that is emphatically NOT what they do!

But this will have to wait a bit. I have research papers to write!

it does appear tht what you are talking about re: revisionist history is different from what I describe, but unfortunately there is also a use for the term "revisionist history" which absolutely fits with what I described (ie rewriting unhelpfull or inconvenient bits of history out of the history books).

I think you need to go away and check if they are the same thing in different clothes, or if they are completely different.

professional revisionist historians are those that try to apply current standards to historical events. Such as trying to understand ancient greek ore medieval monastic same sex behavior as homosexual behavior, when it wasn't, since the idea of a sexual identity in the way *we* understand it didn't really emerge until the late 19th century.

Another example is when a revisionist writes (as one did)that a white man beating a black slave in Georgia in 1845 was participating in the creation of racism. No, he wasn't. He was beating his slave. Now, is that something that should be done? No, slavery was a deplorable event, but the fact is, that white man was not creating racism, not in HIS mind, anyway.

The "historians" who try to say the Holocaust never happened aren't historians, because no true historian could ever deny the mountain of evidence in front of him or her. Those types are nothing more than rabble-rousers, and what they do isn't history, it's crap.

Of course, I'm showing my bias, by assuming that there is some sort of objective reality that has been experienced by historical groups and individuals. The job of the historian, in my view, is to reconstruct, as closely as possible, that reality.

Which would explain why I'm not an American historian, since Americanists tend to want to view the world through particular lens, such as Marx, or gender.