Amateur historians

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Author	Topic: Amateur historians
Student of Trinity Electric Sheep One Member # 3431	written Wednesday, May 23 2007 12:01 Profile #0 Here's something weird. I've read several books on Napoleon I and his wars, but I only own one book on Waterloo. It's by one David Hamilton-Williams, Bt., B.Sc., ARHist.S. It's engagingly written, has voluminous footnotes citing all sorts of impressively primary looking sources (Hanoverian archives and the like), and offers viewpoints on the battle that are both novel and persuasive. The style is a little more breathless than you could find in an academic historian, but the author comes across as an enthusiastic but very diligent amateur, with a lot of things worth saying. If you google this guy, you find tons of pages about his books. But you also find a lot of allegations that Hamilton-Williams is actually a pseudonym for a guy who is no baronet, but a convicted fraudster. And that most of the primary sources he cites in support of his novel claims do not actually exist. This is the kind of thing that you just can't fight if you're only an amateur history buff, because you have no way of telling that this seemingly cool book is actually a load of crap. If it is; the people who make these accusations are also somewhat vague, and have no evident credentials. As the Old Guard said (or maybe didn't) when asked to surrender, Merde. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 \| Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Iffy Canned Member # 8014	written Wednesday, May 23 2007 12:42 Profile #1 This will happen with books. If you want entertainment, read fiction. -------------------- I can transform into almost anything, though not sanity. Muffins n' Hell. Note that revisions of the first part is down the list. Posts: 1799 \| Registered: Sunday, February 4 2007 08:00
Or else o'erleap. Law Bringer Member # 335	written Wednesday, May 23 2007 13:07 Profile Homepage #2 You, sir, have entirely missed the point of this topic. —Alorael, who has no help to offer. It has interesting internet implications, though. Published, cited fraud makes Wikipedia look even more risky, but on the other hand if you can't trust sourced books you might as well trust Wikipedia. Posts: 14579 \| Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Iffy Canned Member # 8014	written Wednesday, May 23 2007 13:09 Profile #3 Just ignore this post. I have nothing to say here any way. [ Wednesday, May 23, 2007 15:39: Message edited by: I am a 20ft high, flaming muffin ] -------------------- I can transform into almost anything, though not sanity. Muffins n' Hell. Note that revisions of the first part is down the list. Posts: 1799 \| Registered: Sunday, February 4 2007 08:00
Jumpin Salmon ? Man, ? Amazing Member # 5755	written Wednesday, May 23 2007 15:34 Profile #4 Long? -------------------- quote: Originally written by Kelandon: Well, I'm at least pretty sure that Salmon is losing. Posts: 4114 \| Registered: Monday, April 25 2005 07:00
Excalibur Agent Member # 8030	written Wednesday, May 23 2007 15:36 Profile Homepage #5 Giving non-existent sources is rather suspicious, however, it's difficult to write a book centering on one subject while lacking information on it. As for quality of the material, it's more or less personal taste. I've read one book on Napoleon (Napoleon and his Men). It consumed a lot of time, as the book is over a century old, but it's an excellent source of history. It's written like a novel, instead of bombarding you with a plethora of facts. [ Wednesday, May 23, 2007 15:39: Message edited by: Excalibur ] -------------------- WWJD? Posts: 1384 \| Registered: Tuesday, February 6 2007 08:00
Micawber Agent Member # 2759	written Friday, May 25 2007 09:44 Profile Homepage #6 It is rather difficult to prove non-existence. Edit: At least, empirically. [ Friday, May 25, 2007 09:45: Message edited by: Micawber ] -------------------- "I can't read this thread with that image. But then, that's not a complaint." -Scorpius Geneforge 4 stuff. Also, everything I know about Avernum \| Avernum 2 \| Avernum 3 \| Avernum 4 Posts: 1104 \| Registered: Monday, March 10 2003 08:00
I'll Steal Your Toast Agent Member # 2210	written Friday, May 25 2007 09:54 Profile #7 This is a kind of funny post, almost every good history book lists the main primary sources for a book. These are usually readily avaialable. That is the meaning of primary source. To say an obscure archival source is of primary nature is misleading at best. T hen stating that the author you are listing is a fraud and is using non-existent secondary sources is a pretty clear indicator you should be looking for that author as a reliable source of entertainment not facts. The truth is boring most of the time. -------------------- Wasting your time and mine looking for a good laugh. Star Bright, Star Light, Oh I Wish I May, I Wish Might, Wish For One Star Tonight. Posts: 1084 \| Registered: Thursday, November 7 2002 08:00
Drew By Committee Member # 4233	written Friday, May 25 2007 11:02 Profile #8 Caveat lector. [flame]You know, I found the same thing to be true about another book - the Bible.[/flame] Posts: 2242 \| Registered: Saturday, April 10 2004 07:00
saunders La Canaliste Member # 5563	written Friday, May 25 2007 13:33 Profile #9 Nobody would think it a good idea to rise to this post of Drew's would they? Good... In that case there will be no need for editing, deletion, locking and all that kind of unpleasantness that so fills my life with joy and light... -------------------- I am a mater of time and how . Deep down, you know you should have voted for Alcritas! Posts: 387 \| Registered: Tuesday, March 1 2005 08:00
Tyranicus Law Bringer Member # 6489	written Friday, May 25 2007 18:13 Profile Homepage #10 quote: Originally written by I'll Steal Your Toast: This is a kind of funny post, almost every good history book lists the main primary sources for a book. These are usually readily avaialable. That is the meaning of primary source. To say an obscure archival source is of primary nature is misleading at best. T hen stating that the author you are listing is a fraud and is using non-existent secondary sources is a pretty clear indicator you should be looking for that author as a reliable source of entertainment not facts. The truth is boring most of the time. So are you saying that writer should not use obscure books as their primary sources? Just because it's obscure doesn't mean it's bad. -------------------- "You're drinking liquor because you're thirsty? How nasty is your freaking water?" —Lazarus Spiderweb Chat Room Avernum RP • Summaries • OoC • Roster Shadow Vale - My site, home of the Spiderweb Chat Database, BoA Scenario Database, & the A1 Quest List, among other things. Posts: 1556 \| Registered: Sunday, November 20 2005 08:00
Sss-Chah Apprentice Member # 8406	written Friday, May 25 2007 19:26 Profile #11 quote: Originally written by Drew: Caveat lector. [flame]You know, I found the same thing to be true about another book - the Bible.[/flame] womp womp. Posts: 47 \| Registered: Thursday, March 29 2007 07:00
Student of Trinity Electric Sheep One Member # 3431	written Friday, May 25 2007 23:53 Profile #12 quote: Originally written by I'll Steal Your Toast: These are usually readily avaialable. That is the meaning of primary source. No! A secondary source is something some other writer like you wrote, on your topic. A primary source is a direct piece of evidence. So a letter written by a Civil War private to his mother is a primary source. The History Channel website is a secondary source. Primary sources are essential in history. Without them, all you have is people making stuff up about the past. But most primary sources are obscure and hard to find, which is a big reason why we need secondary sources. The other reason is that primary sources rarely make any effort to reach any kind of big-picture understanding of what was going on. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 \| Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Student of Trinity Electric Sheep One Member # 3431	written Saturday, May 26 2007 00:06 Profile #13 quote: Originally written by Drew: You know, I found the same thing to be true about ... the Bible.[/flame] The whole literal inerrancy thing, which is really a small minority view, is a terrible lens through which to view the Bible. It's an ancient book, and while it's remarkable in that there aren't many books of its age, nothing in its composition seems supernatural. It's a product of its times. Considered as such, rather than as a miraculously inerrant text, it's an amazing document. To me it seems profound and subtle enough that I can buy it as divine revelation. Even if you don't want to go that far, though, you miss a lot of deep ideas by miscasting it as an inerrant history text, whether false or true. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 \| Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Drew By Committee Member # 4233	written Monday, May 28 2007 05:24 Profile #14 Hence the implied sarcasm. That said, I find there are many other texts either contemporaneous or pre-dating the Bible that are markedly more cogent, coherent, and evolved in philosophical thought. Granted, being coherent or cogent probably wasn't ever the point of it. It does, however, leave many, many events out that were readily available to provide context. [ Monday, May 28, 2007 05:25: Message edited by: Drew ] Posts: 2242 \| Registered: Saturday, April 10 2004 07:00
Student of Trinity Electric Sheep One Member # 3431	written Tuesday, May 29 2007 11:41 Profile #15 No, the Bible is not really big on being coherent. It is, after all, a pastiche, with most if not all of the traditionally identified books being multiply edited compilations of earlier books. (In Genesis, in particular, you can identify the stitching points quite distinctly, because the different sources consistently use different names for God.) But very little of the discernible editing seems to have been in the cause of presenting a single coherent story. One of the very funny things about the Bible, in fact, is its consistent preference for offering alternative versions in parallel, instead of harmonizing them into single, unified accounts. Even in the most overt sense of parallelism, there are two creation stories, two versions of the ten commandments, two versions of the David saga, and no less than four gospels. And in subtler ways, a lot of divergent passages on similar themes are included, without having been hammered into a single clear party line. The Bible is a pervasively polyoptic scripture. I'm not really sure what to make of this, though. And I'm not terribly up on many other ancient documents. What ones are they that seem more coherent than the Bible? Are they perhaps simply much shorter? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 \| Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Kelandon Off With Their Heads Member # 4045	written Tuesday, May 29 2007 11:46 Profile Homepage #16 Depends on what you're including in the discussion, presumably. Plato is an obvious philosopher from very roughly the same time period. His aims are rather different from those of the writers of the Bible, though. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 \| Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
Drew By Committee Member # 4233	written Tuesday, May 29 2007 13:29 Profile #17 I would offer up any of the great Greek philosophers (Plato and Aristotle immediately spring to mind), as well as the historians of the era as well (Thuc, Herodotus, etc.). My biggest gripe is a lack of context. Again, I reckon that it's deliberate, because when you bring the wider context of the Mediterranean world into the Judeo-Christian picture, it starts to chip away at the all-encompassing nature of what's presented in the Bible. When you go to Rome and see the depiction of the sacking of the Temple of Jerusalem on the side of the Arch of Titus, you know other factors were involved. Beyond purely political considerations, accounts of historical natural disasters become suspect as well. The Flood Narrative is particularly suspect - it is pretty much improbable that all the world was covered in a great flood, after all, and just who was this Noah/Atrahasis guy, anyway? By comparison, accounts of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius are fairly well detailed, even by today's standards. (I guess for me, I'd have an easier time with religion if it were a little more willing to rely on reason.) Posts: 2242 \| Registered: Saturday, April 10 2004 07:00
Student of Trinity Electric Sheep One Member # 3431	written Wednesday, May 30 2007 02:42 Profile #18 Well, whenever the various Bible stories got written down in its current form, their sources are clearly a lot older than Pliny and Plato. The Noah tale, for instance, is a prehistoric myth represented in at least two other cultures that I know of. There may very well have been some actual ur-Noah somewhere, sometime, who salvaged a bunch of people and animals from some big flood. Or maybe not: a lot of ancient cultures dealt regularly with floods, and the story of an ark could plausibly have been invented as fiction in such a society. It's a profound story even today, though, because it is so often true that an essential kernel can be preserved through calamity, if precautions are taken early enough to seem absurd at the time. Somehow hearing and heeding divine warnings to take those absurd precautions is an example of how spirituality can sometimes be better than reason. That, after all, is the real crux of the flood story: that Noah built an ark far inland because he heard God say so. The Noah story is of course full of too many extraneous details to be an ideal allegory for this principle of timely irrational precaution through inspiration; but those details make it stick in your mind better, and make it more real. In other words, it's not an allegory but a parable. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 \| Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
upon mars Canned Member # 7704	written Monday, June 4 2007 10:40 Profile #19 It's not history it's winners trying to look good and back up their own arguments. It's not the whole truth : As a fact history dosen't record the truth. No one talks about the millions of people supporting hitler in america or the millions of dead tortured nazis by russians. No one talk about russians in the second world war that supported all of the war effort when the allies where smoking. No one talks about the REAL high criminals behind wars do they? -------------------- You can jump off a bridge, fire a gun in your mouth, drink poison,or going in to the tiger's pit but you will still end up dead it's a mater of time and how . Posts: 312 \| Registered: Sunday, November 26 2006 08:00
Kelandon Off With Their Heads Member # 4045	written Monday, June 4 2007 10:46 Profile Homepage #20 If no one talks about them, how do you know about them? Were you there? -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 \| Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
Ceylon Warrior Member # 4638	written Monday, June 4 2007 11:36 Profile #21 quote: It's not history it's winners trying to look good and back up their own arguments. It's not the whole truth : As a fact history dosen't record the truth. No one talks about the millions of people supporting hitler in america or the millions of dead tortured nazis by russians. No one talk about russians in the second world war that supported all of the war effort when the allies where smoking. No one talks about the REAL high criminals behind wars do they? I am intrigued. Who are the "Real high criminals" then? Who are the good guys? From your statement, it seems that it isn't America, because we supported Hitler and were "smoking." (Good stuff from CA I hope.) I think you mean the Russians were heroes, however your statement about "millions of dead tortured nazis by russians", makes me think the Russians weren’t' good guys either. So, I am unclear. I guess you could just say everyone is a "Real high criminal." That seems like a copout though. I would point out that I think both Russian and the US are considered "winners" in WWII, in that they both defeated Germany, and gained influence in the region, either through reconstruction or the direct control of territory. [ Monday, June 04, 2007 11:38: Message edited by: Ceylon ] -------------------- You are asleep. Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be. So it goes. Posts: 93 \| Registered: Tuesday, June 29 2004 07:00
Jumpin Salmon ? Man, ? Amazing Member # 5755	written Monday, June 4 2007 11:46 Profile #22 He's talking about France. They are the ones that aided the upstart colonists during the Revolutionary war and then aided the Nazi regime. Otherwise, all they did was subjugate and terrorise African nations under the guise of colonialism. Stellar performances. No wonder there is so much suspicion of their motives. -------------------- WWtNSD? Posts: 4114 \| Registered: Monday, April 25 2005 07:00
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Monday, June 4 2007 12:21 Profile Homepage #23 By now I rather favor the idea that he's a conspiracy theorist who's in it for the conspiracy theories. They're harmless because they don't have a real agenda, and in fact they're as likely to go after the moon landing as the JFK assassination or the holocaust. But you can't convince them of the falsehood of a conspiracy theory because without conspiracy theories the world is dreary and boring. There has to be something big that we're not being told about. I know this from cough personal experience. (Well, these days I'm still cynical, and I sometimes speculate on whether 9/11 was a set-up, but I'm more curious about what is really true than I want the truth to be cool or earth-shattering. :P ) [ Monday, June 04, 2007 12:22: Message edited by: Dr. Johann Georg Faust ] -------------------- Encyclopaedia • Archives • Members • RSS [Topic / Forum] • Blog • Polaris • NaNoWriMo Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. I have a love of woodwind instruments. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Dintiradan Guardian Member # 6670	written Monday, June 4 2007 13:00 Profile Homepage #24 By Aran: quote: Well, these days I'm still cynical, and I sometimes speculate on whether 9/11 was a set-up, but I'm more curious about what is really true than I want the truth to be cool or earth-shattering. The United States government has a long history of killing in cold blood. Freezing blood, actually. Seriously, what is it that makes 2001/09/11 so hard for some people to accept? Just the sheer magnitude? -------------------- Beware the cheekbone eating Frisbee! Posts: 1509 \| Registered: Tuesday, January 10 2006 08:00