Equidistance and critical reading are not the same. I find for the latter it's generally more useful to compare historians to their original sources than to each other
I generally try to avoid alleging my roots (geographical, national, historical or however you wish to call it) but in this situation I think it would be necessary to clarify my point of view. I'm from Poland, a small country in Central Europe, not to bore you with history: rubed out from maps by a few political powers for over a hundred years, independent for twenty years, then after Second World War for half a century under forced Soviet "protection". Sorry if you know that all, but I think it may be important here that I'm neither American nor Western European. Polish access to bare facts and the possibility to freely discuss it were limited for a time long enough to teach us how easily facts can be manipulated, forcing to learn how to find them, digging in the mass of author's opinions. The line between left and right wing was so thick that it was easy to bascially guess sometimes even before opening the book what a person from a particular group will write, making reading a kind of game: what to omit and what to search for and how to separate author's opinion.
Of course, there are no "both sides", but many - either the author is from the left wing and pro-Revolutionary, or from the right wing and anti-Revolutionary.Of course, there are as many shades as many authors exist, but generally you are able to sense one of these directions. Objective historians do not exist.
I try to read as much as I can to know in which moments the author manipulates the facts to make them go well with his or her personal outlook on life.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-06-06 06:39 pm (UTC)I generally try to avoid alleging my roots (geographical, national, historical or however you wish to call it) but in this situation I think it would be necessary to clarify my point of view. I'm from Poland, a small country in Central Europe, not to bore you with history: rubed out from maps by a few political powers for over a hundred years, independent for twenty years, then after Second World War for half a century under forced Soviet "protection". Sorry if you know that all, but I think it may be important here that I'm neither American nor Western European. Polish access to bare facts and the possibility to freely discuss it were limited for a time long enough to teach us how easily facts can be manipulated, forcing to learn how to find them, digging in the mass of author's opinions. The line between left and right wing was so thick that it was easy to bascially guess sometimes even before opening the book what a person from a particular group will write, making reading a kind of game: what to omit and what to search for and how to separate author's opinion.
Of course, there are no "both sides", but many - either the author is from the left wing and pro-Revolutionary, or from the right wing and anti-Revolutionary.Of course, there are as many shades as many authors exist, but generally you are able to sense one of these directions. Objective historians do not exist.
I try to read as much as I can to know in which moments the author manipulates the facts to make them go well with his or her personal outlook on life.