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Jonathan Crain's avatar

Thanks for this essay, David. I’ve been particularly interested in digging deeper into historiography lately, and this was a thoroughly engaging overview of the subject. I especially appreciated the framing of historiography as not merely a quest for “what happened,” but as an evolving dialogue shaped by epistemology, narrative, and power. I’m very much looking forward to the continuation of this series.

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LoLo's avatar

I’m so excited to follow along with this series! I feel like it’s become vogue to focus on the ways we cannot understand the past because of our modern conceptions, but that is so frustrating! Then again, who can say that there ever was an objective “truth” in the world? We can say “this person certainly lived this year, they did this, and they died then” but is this data collection the purpose of history?

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Tara Chirkinian's avatar

Yay! Thanks for writing. I’m a history teacher and I was trying to explain to my student who complains about modern history (he’s an Ancient Rome enthusiast) that the tools we use to study history are the same set no matter what we are studying. This is good supportive info!

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Son de la vie's avatar

as a history post graduate student, i would say I really enjoyed reading THIS!

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Gordon's avatar

Another excellent post David. I’ve been thinking about historiography with reference to wars (in my case WW1 & WW2) and how it is an incomplete history in that context. In many cases incomplete because we don’t know the history/story of those who died. I’m struggling with how we tell their story.

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Denise Wilson's avatar

This was so interesting. My daughter is an historian and now I get it a bit more. So well crafted thank you.

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Purple History's avatar

Really looking forward to the next articles!

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