Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Are you talking about analysis of historical accounts? Because this is the bread and butter of history as a social science. This is a very big subject but I can give you a simple outline. This is the kind of stuff that would be covered in a classic "History of the Roman Republic" first-year university class. You get assigned a reading and in the tutorial sections you would ask questions like:
etc. etc. Basic textual analysis. Use what you know about the period and the situation and the author to expand upon what is written and try to think about all the different influences that might have transformed the narrative from what happened in reality to how it reads on the page.
If you want to read history books that go into this kind of stuff, the ideal subjects are periods where there are limited historical sources: I used classical Rome as an example and it's a great one. Historians in these books will often tell you very directly how they are analyzing accounts and what inferences they are making from them and the other historical evidence available to them.
Thank you for making this post so I didn't have to. I would add that there is a great deal of historical phenomina that we only know anything about due to polemics written against them, decrying their evil and error. Early Christian "heresies" being a good example.
A bunch of these heresies hung on for long enough that we have, if not an objective view, a wide enough variety of biased views to cancel each other out.
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