Can we become historian and make a doctorate in history without doing history studies but only by being passionated by history and learning a lot about it?

I strongly suspect most of us “amateur” historians/people interested in history are well advised not to study history formally in a university setting. Academic historians almost always have to find an area of specialization where they can do research and publish material that has not already been produced by earlier generations of historians. So instead of reading about and discussing large-scale issues in history, as a professional, you’d be almost always getting down deep in obscure details that would probably bore the pants off any non-professional historians (and probably lots of them who aren’t in the same general area of study).

There’s a woman on TikTok who has amassed a huge audience for her “historic” work denying that there ever was a Roman Empire and pretending that everyone who believes it existed has been brainwashed by Big Academia. Sometimes finding a technique that blends “debunking” with confident presentation is all it takes to fool a lot of folks.

Many teachers also prefer not to discuss conflict/warfare in historical contexts either from personal pacifist beliefs or for fears of exciting the wrong kind of reaction from the students. I posted a quote of the day a couple of years back that nicely encapsulated this " QotD: We call it the Corded Ware culture, not the Battle Axe culture to make it less interesting to boys"

Yes, I enjoy and appreciate a good history video that also happens to be entertaining in its own right, but several times I’ve stopped watching a particular channel as I started noticing more mistakes or misinterpretations presented as hard fact but with good graphics and lively patter to cover the issues. Every historical topic is open to some interpretation, but when all the errors and omissions co-incide with on particular ahistorical viewpoint, it’s now disguised propaganda and not history.

When I took “modern” history in high school, we stopped in 1914, picked up again in 1929 (how the God-King FDR cured the Great Depression and a little bit on Hitler’s rise to power), and then stopped again in 1939. Next topic was the amazingly wonderful United Nations and how if only we could get the US and the USSR to give up nuclear weapons we’d be living in a utopia. We very briefly touched on Saint Lester B. Pearson’s invention of peacekeeping and how Canada’s military was now totally devoted to that mission and that was “modern” history.

Okay, I exaggerate somewhat, but the course actively avoided discussing either world war, the Korean
War, and Vietnam, and only mentioned the Suez Crisis and Arab-Israeli conflicts due to the minor Canadian involvement.

:joy:

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Aren’t we all? (At least you, me, Dan, Chewie, and Co.) :joy: :joy:

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For anyone confused, yes, this actually happened.

Now, I do have to say that Big Academia is entirely capable of giving one the wrong impression of history, just not in the way this TikTok gal thinks it does (a good example of that is, of course, the lionization of FDR).

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Perhaps the reason why I see some historians either gradually shift focus from and/or completely leave out military history. I understand complaints of oversaturation, but leaving it out completely seems very wrong to me.

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It apparently was a figment of the Spanish Inquisition …………

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I’ll note that TimeGhost itself is guilty of not just making mistakes (forgivable; everyone makes mistakes, even the best historians), but also presenting falsehoods (@obiwanbul complained about it regarding the way TG talked about Bulgaria in the latest WAH episode; I complained about it at times in the forum) and also not taking too kindly to genuine criticism (just ask MikeB).

I’m still pissed at their racism special and their Hollywood special, the latter in which they painted Joe Breen as a rabid antisemite (when in reality, he was not so unless you count angry remarks as evidence by the logic of which I’d have been a bigot too, considering my remarks during my hockey days).

And the less said about their Ukraine videos, the better, imo.

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

The academic lionization of Franklin never ends, does it? I remember seeing that idolization on C-SPAN as well during a special on Presidents back in the late '90s.

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“It is OK son, you can still be lawyer”. :rofl:

Did you get the reference? No? It’s from Steven He’s (the Emotional Damage meme) skit on Asian parents.

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What’s next? The holocaust did not happen? Oh…wait… such people exist. Looks over to David Irving.

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I fully agree, but as I was in high school in the 1970s when we still had a few WWII vets among the teachers (including a shop teacher everyone assumed was former SS), they couldn’t completely ignore it, but my son’s history classes were far less likely to cover anything to do with the military. His favourite teacher was the one exception … at one point he re-enacted the attack on Vimy Ridge at the front of the class!

And did anyone expect it? NO!

I’ve been a strong supporter of the channel from the very beginning, and the Ukraine videos and one or two of the special episodes are the only ones I neither watch nor share. I don’t think it’s possible to treat current events dispassionately and objectively if only because we have so little to confirm or disprove the claims of both sides and will not for quite some time.

At risk of going too far off-topic, it still amazes me how the popular histories painted the Hoover administration’s reaction to the economic crisis (all intervention, all the time) as being totally hands-off laissez-faire non-intervention even though FDR campaigned against all the government actions Hoover had taken, then once elected FDR doubled- or tripled-down on all the failed interventions Hoover had started. Hoover was a bad president, but not for being too hands-off when the stock markets crashed and foreign trade took a dive…

Who is still, despite everything, seen as a good historian by far too many people.

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Vielen Dank für diesee Referenz !

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Thanks for these advices !
True that one has to see also what are also the negative points of a job and not just see the positive ones…
I don’t think I will be historian by profession but I will keep studying it and do some researches in it that will be related to my professionnal field, thats seems the best option for me .

True that if I was afraid of blod I would really have to seriously reconsider doing medecine !:joy::rofl:

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Wow ! Not talking about the two world wars ! Me to in my school we didnt talked about ww1 but did some small (really small ) stuff about ww2, I understand that they are pacifist, but we cant just let students dont know about two wars full of lessons that shaped the present world…

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Totally agree with this, to understand the modern world and to know more about all the horrors that men are capable of we really need to get interest into studying the military history, it’s a part of our daily formation that make us understand our world…

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We should tell her say her thesis ( roman empire never existed ) to these guys singing : https://youtu.be/3q9bCtSLUWI

Or tell her if these guys are her neighbors :slightly_smiling_face:

:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

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Well… the people who consider him a good historian either know too little about the history, they are reading or do not want to change their views after reading SO much of his “work” and the other “histories” do not sound logical.

So why not ban his books like the book of a certain Austrian Painter with a funny mustache?

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Not sure Mein Kampf is still banned. The creepy thing about Irving is that he writes in a convincing way using fake sources or basically misreads these. Unless you go fact /source checking one wouldn’t know some Japanese revisionist do the same and it is harder then one would think to weed out the trash. Cool assigments though Sherlocking around :male_detective:

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Not a fan of book banning, burning, e-deleting of any kind. It never ends well. In the US, we fight this battle constantly “for the children”

Batter to let the trash stay out there so the classics don’t get deleted as well.

To those of you who are shocked that the wars are not taught, do you think it is better that you learn it from a teacher who doesn’t want to teach it and does a poor job and ruins the enjoyment of history? I think the whole curriculum needs to be reviewed because at the end of it all what does a high schooler tend to remember? You get maybe 45 minutes a day for 8 months max to learn about 5,000 years of history. How do you make this effective?

Of course it gets much easier to just say the Roman Empire never existed. Knock off almost 2 thousand years right there.

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It migth depend on the country, but Main Kampf is not banned anymore. If I remember well it was not even really banned (at least since some time) but reprint was not allowed by the right owner (the Institute for Contemporary History of Munich). Since 2016 it passed in the public domain, which led the Institute to publish a new critic version of it, to make sure that there is at least a version publish with some serious work around it, and not just leave the landscape filled with version published by who knows who “nostalgic” person.

An enormous french version with more side texts and notations based on this last version have been release since, it’s called Historiciser le mal (not fan of the title), a friend of mine have offer me a version of it. I’m not that use to these kind of book, but the amount of note and context about it are impressives, I will probably never read it entirely but still interesting.

l and I supposed that other other language have probably their own similar kind of work now.

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Having tried to read this book, I feel confident in saying it is not well written and is very difficult to read. The Author should have stuck to painting water colors.

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