History forum general discussion

Fratton Fred

MarchDub wrote: »

Not without documentation it isn't - it's just undocumented and unsupported opinion.

Documentation is the historian's statistics, it can prove anything you like.

CDfm

MarchDub wrote: »

Not without documentation it isn't - it's just undocumented and unsupported opinion.

Fratton Fred wrote: »

Documentation is the historian's statistics, it can prove anything you like.

They didn't get the hugs :eek:

MarchDub

Fratton Fred wrote: »

Documentation is the historian's statistics, it can prove anything you like.

Fred - documentation has NOTHING to do with statistics, it is the written record of events. Not a fantasy of what might or what ifs...

MarchDub

CDfm wrote: »

They didn't get the hugs :eek:

I was about to post the same on Fred's first offensive - but declined.

CDfm

MarchDub wrote: »

Fred - documentation has NOTHING to do with statistics, it is the written record of events. Not a fantasy of what might or what ifs...

I agree documentation is persuasive for history and usually here & it is usually the controvercial unsupported stuff that causes the arguments .

I suppose it is like why we criticise Ruth Dudley Edwards because she does not let the facts get in the way of her opinions.

Fratton Fred

CDfm wrote: »

They didn't get the hugs :eek:

Posting from a phone means no smilies I'm afraid.

My comments were only tongue in cheek.

HellsAngel

Fratton Fred wrote: »

I suppose the question then is what is this forum?

Is it somewhere for people to discuss history, offering different views and opinions, or is it somewhere for people to simply post up articles they have found?

My personal opinion is that the more serious history buffs would be better suited to a private forum where they can invite only those with a similar interest in history and get rid of those they don't like.

That way they don't have to listen to those whose opinions they don't like.

Fratton Fred wrote: »

To use your football analogy (an area I am more comfortable with), the facts are pretty boring, because they don't tell the whole story.

To use a football analogy. Some lads are playing Gaelic on a GAA pitch. Some brat comes along and says he wants to play soccer on the soccer pitch. The lads tell him no, sorry, we're playing Gaelic. So the brat doesn't like it, he gets the ball and kicks it over onto the soccer pitch and says, I want soccer and that's it.

The ball is retrived, the brat is told it's a Gaelic match not a soccer match, the brat of course doesn't like it and repeats his actions. And so on and so on - until he's given a kick up the ar$e and sent on his way until he decides to have a bit of respect and stay away or else play the game like the rest of the other lads.

Simples.

jonniebgood1

Can they not just use both pitches and get on together in harmony?

Fratton Fred

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Can they not just use both pitches and get on together in harmony?

That sounds like a great idea, I am sure we are all sportsmen and at the end of the day it's a game of two halves so we should take it a game at a time and not be as sick as a parrot. (Can't think of anymore cliches, sorry).

We appear to have a problem with hooliganism though.........

HellsAngel

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Can they not just use both pitches and get on together in harmony?

Fine, if the brat wants to start a game of soccer or rugby or American football on the other pitch fine. But if the lads who started a Gaelic match and want to play this Gaelic match - brat has no right to try and keep disrupting it to get what he wants.

HellsAngel

MarchDub wrote: »

TBH I don't think that the problem is an issue between amateur or professional - both are interested in doing research and discovering truth.

The problem that we've had is IMO - for whatever reasons - posts that just taunt and insult and attempt to derail anything on the record that is not palatable.

Fratton Fred wrote: »

One man's derailment is another's injection of an alternative point of view ;-))

Funny thing about Fred is, this problem of derailing threads etc wasn't an issue with him until BraintheBard stopped moderating a few weeks ago

Fratton Fred

The names change, but the trolling stays the same.

HellsAngel

Fratton Fred wrote: »

The names change, but the trolling stays the same.

Now how long before Getz comes along........:D But tell us Fred, how come the this problem of derailing threads, insulting and taunting people ( MarchDub in particuliar) wasn't an issue with you on the H & H forum until BraintheBard left ??

CDfm

HellsAngel wrote: »

Funny thing about Fred is, this problem of derailing threads etc wasn't an issue with him until BraintheBard stopped moderating a few weeks ago

HellsAngel wrote: »

Fine, if the brat wants to start a game of soccer or rugby or American football on the other pitch fine. But if the lads who started a Gaelic match and want to play this Gaelic match - brat has no right to try and keep disrupting it to get what he wants.

But it ain't a gaelic match or a soccer match.

The point of the thread is to uncover facts about events in another time and the challenge is the facts and not which side you are on or where your sympathies lie.

On some threads I started , it was because I heard them as facts from the actual participants. Some good & some bad. And sometimes revisionist history does not say it as it was.

Take Angela McCourts appraisal of her sons' work

Even Angela McCourt had challenged her son's recollections before her death in 1981. Frank and his brother Malachy had persuaded her to attend A Couple of Blackguards, their stand-up memoirs, in a Manhattan theatre. Angela interrupted the tearful renditions of their childhood, standing up and shouting at the stage: "It didn't happen that way. It's all a pack of lies."



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/5867097/Frank-McCourt.html

No one benefits when a thread is derailed and we get people leaving and not posting because they do not want to hear the same stuff over and over.

When you think about it -the person doing the trolling/derailing does worst out of it because no one reads their stuff and when they do have well sourced and decent material no one gets to see or doubts it.

jonniebgood1

HellsAngel wrote: »

Funny thing about Fred is, this problem of derailing threads etc wasn't an issue with him until BraintheBard stopped moderating a few weeks ago

Warning for targetting individual. This is against charter. Please heed.

MarchDub

Fratton Fred wrote: »

Posting from a phone means no smilies I'm afraid.

My comments were only tongue in cheek.

Oh that explains it then - maybe you're not aware that posting from your phone it all comes across as just cheek...;)

MarchDub

CDfm wrote: »

No one benefits when a thread is derailed and we get people leaving and not posting because they do not want to hear the same stuff over and over.

.

Ain't that the truth...

CDfm

Lots of people love history.

So really if we are not being nice to one another it puts newbies and lurkers off posting. An etiquette thing really .

Bannasidhe

I am one of those professional historians CDfm referred to and I must admit I have recently restricted myself to 'lurking' rather than posting - due mainly to the amount of, quite frankly, utter nonsense being posted as historical 'fact' - usually with no supporting evidence whatsoever - and in the few cases where such evidence is presented it is from a highly suspect secondary source.
I am also amused at the levels of mistrust aimed at so called revisionists (BTW - apparently we are now at the Neo-Revisionist stage of historical writing). ALL historians are by their very nature 'revisionists' - they reassess/revise what has been written in the accepted historiography according to new information/interpretations. The opposite of this revisionist approach would be the Regurgitators!

So - what exactly is the role of the historian?
We sift through the available information and attempt to determine what happened according to the evidence. I tell my students that the closest analogy would be CSI - we look at the evidence (documents, architecture, art, artefacts and facts) and construct a scenario based on this evidence. Primary source documents etc are really simply witness statements - and witnesses often lie or omit that which shows them in a poor light. As for 'facts - it a term, I for one, would be wary of as there are actually precious few - and usually they are dates - e.g - Elizabeth I died in 1603 =FACT. England defeated the Spanish Armada = an interpretation. Indeed the evidence would suggest the weather plus Phillip II's micro managing and downright snobbery had more to do with the Armadas destruction that any action taken by Elizabeth = also an interpretation.

Of course, as human beings, we all have deep seated cultural prejudices which impact on our interpretations - sometimes unconsciously sometimes not. This is why it is essential for the historian to cite their sources - some (as in the controversy surrounding the work of the late Peter Hart) fail/refuse to do this. This makes his work more akin to reportage than historiography - historians cannot and must not protect their sources and must be prepared to defend their interpretation of the evidence against those who would differ.

Nor is it the role of the historian to judge - we must strive to be as objective as possible. It is not our job to say Hitler was a bad man - it is our job to uncover and illuminate what he did, how he did it - and attempt to work out why he did it - using the evidence as our guide, not personal opinion.

At the moment there is a small but growing movement within Irish, Scottish and Welsh historiography which is challenging the accepted national histories in particular its treatment of their respective indigenous cultures.

In the case of Irish historiography UCC is at the forefront with the work of Ken Nicholls, Dave Edwards and Denise Murray - other important scholars would include Katherine Simms (TCD), Bernie Cunningham (RIA), Gillian Kenny (UCD) and Chris Maginnis (Fordham) - all of these scholars are using Gaelic primary sources to challenge what they perceive as an Anglocentric bias in Irish historiography which portrays Gaelic culture as 'uncivilised' and therefore lesser. Murray, in particular, is aiming at an Gaelo-centric interpretation which examines the Tudor expansion from the perspective of those being threatened with cultural extinction rather then from the perspective of those doing the threatening as is currently the norm. However, this work is intended to sit alongside the current work as an alternative viewpoint - not replace it as an orthodoxy.

For a work of historiography to be worthy of the name it must firmly based on evidence, make its sources verifiable, be open to challenge, and seen to be objective.
It must also avoid theorising beyond what the evidence can support - so while one may conjecture to an extent - any such conjecture must be clearly stated and never stray too far from that all important evidence.


For example -
We know that Gaelic Ireland was aware of homosexuality and can conjecture that as a society it had little issue with it - the evidence is that the only extant mention of male homosexuality in the Brehon legal texts (see Fergus Kelly's Guide to Early Irish Law) states that a woman may divorce her husband if he is unable to sexually satisfy her due to being homosexual - if he knew of his homosexuality prior to the marriage and failed to declare it there were serious financial penalties. There appears to be no other 'law' dealing with homosexuality so we can conjecture there was no societal disapproval - however, that is according to available evidence.
However, to extrapolate from this and theorise that Gaelic Ireland was devoid of homophobia or, indeed, that lesbianism was non-existent (as it is not specifically mentioned) would be stretching the evidence too far.

Finally a word on secondary sources - these are other people's interpretations of the evidence available to them - that is all.

Fratton Fred

Bannasidhe, thanks for your informative post. It always amazes me what information historians sift through and the lengths they go to locate credible sources.

It is difficult though for someone with an interest in history, but not a passion for, to go to those lengths to prove a point.

There is a tendancy on here take a lot of what we read on the internet as gospel which is probably a big mistake, do you have any advice on how to sort the wheat from the chaff fairly easy? Are there any pointers as to what is made up and what is fact based?

slowburner

Perhaps Bannasidhe's post should be stickied in the forum charter?
Here's a couple of questions.
What do historians do when no primary sources are available? Are secondary sources (treated with due diligence) acceptable?
How is the role of hypothesis perceived in historiography?

MarchDub

Just to add something on the term ‘Revisionism’ which is actually a widespread – and controversial - term in Irish historiography. Diarmaid Ferriter calls himself a 'post-revisionist'. I have personally heard Ferriter refer to himself in this way. In a review in History Today of Ferriter’s work The Transformation of Ireland it also is used:


http://www.historytoday.com/alvin-jackson/transformation-ireland-1900-2000

This is an astonishingly accomplished performance from one of Ireland’s most prodigiously gifted young historians. Ferriter has set out to create a diverse and inclusive history of twentieth-century Ireland, investigating the histories of the hitherto marginalised or excluded alongside political-historical themes of a more conventional type. He has also set out to create what he calls a ‘post-revisionist’ work, liberated from the infatuations of earlier scholarship with the sectarian and national arena. His ambition and assurance are devastating, and they come close to being vindicated by his achievement.

There are many other comments written on the subject -here is Christine Kinealy writing in History Ireland on the matter as regards Famine studies:

http://www.historyireland.com/volumes/volume3/issue4/features/?id=113108

Beyond Revisionism: reassessing the Great Irish Famine...

In the 1960s, the study of history in many European countries was transformed as historians increasingly began to employ the methodologies of other disciplines and to develop new theoretical approaches. In Ireland, however, the dominant approach continued to be based on revising and destroying the traditional nationalist view of history. This approach became known as ‘revisionism’. As the IRA campaign intensified, revisionism gained a new prominence, in the battle for Irish hearts and minds, and challenging nationalist mythology became an important ideological preoccupation of a new generation of historians. A number of leading academics justified this construction on the grounds that IRA violence was linked directly with nationalist myths, although empirical evidence has been less forthcoming.

But did this new representation of Irish history really represent a new reality about Ireland’s past, particularly in relation to the Famine? The revisionist approach contained a number of inherent contradictions and limitations. From its origins, although revisionist history claimed to be value-free and objective, it had its own agenda or set of values, which varied over time and in degrees of intensity. A key objective of Irish revisionism was to exorcise the ghost of nationalism from historical discourse and to replace it with historical narratives that persistently played down the separateness and the trauma, and derided the heroes and villains of Irish history. However, this declared determination of revisionism to destroy the ‘myths and untruths’ of populist historical consciousness has also limited the ability of revisionists to construct an alternative view of Irish history. Also, as Seamus Deane, the literary critic and poet has observed, in Ireland, there exists ‘the felt need for mythologies, heroic lineages and dreams of continuity’. Such myths and dreams need to be explained and deconstructed, not denied, destroyed or omitted, to suit a present convenience.

In its modern usage it first came up back in the late 70s as a pejorative term for ASAIK the work of Ruth Dudley Edwards. But the contemporary narrative 'that all historians are revisionists' was popularised by Prof Brendan Bradshaw of Cambridge who pointed this out in what some saw as an attack on Roy Foster's self described 'revisionism' at a Conference back in the 1990s.

CDfm

A great article by Christine Kinealy (the other link to the Ferriter review needed a subscription) and quite reminiscent of the late Richard Feynmann's (the US Nobel laureate) criticism of "ologies".

I had stopped reading Irish history as I often found gaps (huge holes) and plain untruth's on information I knew from elsewhere.

Now it might be that the word "faminist" caught my imagination. It is a delicious word.

So is "revisionist" a pejorative term or what and can we expect a "faminist" faction to emerge here ?

Bannasidhe

Fratton Fred wrote: »

It is difficult though for someone with an interest in history, but not a passion for, to go to those lengths to prove a point.

There is a tendancy on here take a lot of what we read on the internet as gospel which is probably a big mistake, do you have any advice on how to sort the wheat from the chaff fairly easy? Are there any pointers as to what is made up and what is fact based?

There is a problem with much history writing - some of the 'popular' histories ( a prime example I have oft ranted about being Anne Chambers work on Gráinne Ní Mháille) simply do not bare up to scrutiny yet are often used as source material by academics who really should know better (Chambers work was used as the main source on Ní Mháille in the recently publish Irish version of the National Biographies). This laziness on the part of academics does not help.

Then there is academic writing which is often so dull and dry that it sucks the life out of the subject. Efforts are being made to try and achieve a compromise - the best example in Ireland being History Ireland - originally founded by UCC's Hiram Morgan as an academically credible but popularly accessible alternative to specialised journals such as Irish Historical Studies. Although History Ireland doesn't have footnotes - all the work is subject to scrutiny and any 'mistake' is quickly pointed out ( as I learned to my cost years ago when the editor removed the word 'possibly' from one of my sentences turning a conjecture into a definitive statement - with in days I received a letter from the then head of The Heritage Council asking for my evidence of this statement!). There is a huge thirst for knowledge out there which academics are simply not meeting -this void is being filled by the internet.

On the internet there is Wheat and Chaff in abundance and it can be difficult for even a professional to sort it out - generally the rule of thumb is what site is it on and who is the author. Wikipedia is a real problem as the authors are anonymous and there is no system of peer review - yet it does contain genuinely accurate information alongside the absolute dross.
Any university site is a good source - but the best advice I can offer is always question the authorship - who wrote it? What are their sources? Does the evidence they present convince you? Have a look at some of that evidence? Does it seem legitimate? - I once had a student cite a neo-Nazi site...

Slowburner -
'History' as a discipline cannot exist without primary sources. History and literacy go hand in hand so without primary source material there is no 'history'.

Generally we break the study of the past into 3 categories:

1) Pre-History : The preserve of the archaeologists and folklorists - this refers to the study of a culture/people before they were literate i.e they produced no written records = no primary sources.
2) Proto-History : When written references are made to a particular people by literate 'foreigners' -( in the case of Ireland these are usually Greek and Roman sources) - but there are no indigenous written records. These 'foreign' records are usually not the result of actual experience - so are more 'hearsay'.
3) History : The arrival of literacy results in a society producing documents which relate to itself. In Ireland Proto - History and History overlap slightly. Irish History proper is generally deemed to begin with the arrival of Christianity, specifically two documents ascribed to St Patrick - Confessions and Letters as they were written in Ireland. However, Prospero of Tiro wrote of Palladius being despatched in 431 to minister to the Christians living in Ireland. This is prior to the arrival of Patrick so there may have been documents which failed to survive.

Long winded reply - to summarise: History as a discipline can only exist where there are primary sources. Without Primary sources there can be no secondary sources as these are essentially interpretations of the evidence contained in the Primary sources.

MarchDub

CDfm wrote: »

(the other link to the Ferriter review needed a subscription)

Yes - I knew that but you could still see the paragraph I quoted from - yes?

CDfm wrote: »

So is "revisionist" a pejorative term or what and can we expect a "faminist" faction to emerge here ?

It is certainly a controversial term. Here is a very interesting interview of Prof Brendan Bradshaw on the subject of Irish historical studies, revisionism and how he sees the 'wrong' turning it took:

http://www.historyireland.com/volumes/volume1/issue1/features/?id=108

I believe that Irish historiography took a wrong turn in the 1930s. At that point, it assimilated a view of history as a science, with the historian akin to the natural scientist peering down his microscope at a range of data about the natural world, simply viewing it in a detached way. It was a perception of history that was very strongly established in England at this time and also in the United States of America. In Ireland it began with three young historians, all very able people at the time, Robin Dudley Edwards, T.W. Moody and David Quinn, being trained in the Institute of Historical Research in London. On their return to Ireland, they attempted to establish the practice of history here on the same basis. Part of this tradition was the notion of ‘revisionism’; that history up to that point had been going along a wrong track and that the whole record needed to be re-written in a detached, objective way. The result was the de-bunking not only of the history which had been written up to then, in its distortions, but the de-bunking of the reality behind it. And so you got this very austere scholarly approach to the Irish historical record, draining it of its emotional and moral content. This creates a very flat sort of history which you get, for example, in Dudley Edwards’ Church and State in Tudor Ireland and in the articles of David Quinn and T.W. Moody. It is concerned with the administrative nuts and bolts and with the records of institutions told in a very dry sort of way.

That tradition increasingly came to dominate Irish history writing and Irish history teaching in the universities in the ‘40s and into the ‘50s. It was the tradition that I experienced when I went to UCD in the 1960s. You got this de-bunking of great heroic figures and the famine was played down, for example. In the late ‘60s, a number of things exacerbated the mood of revisionism, and its cynical approach to Irish history. First of all came the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1916 Rising. At that point, it hit the Irish intelligentsia how disillusioning the experience of political freedom had been. Added to the mood of disillusionment about what had been achieved was the more flourishing secular liberalism of the ‘60s which had the effect of melting the attachment to a sense of tradition.

And then the final thing was the recrudescence of violence in the North. After the eulogistic and euphoric times of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a mood of shock set in as the IRA took up the cause of nationalism and you got these horrendous atrocities. Consequently there has been the feeling that the Irish had been fed a nationalist myth which has stoked the fires of militant nationalism and that the best antidote was an increasingly strident anti-nationalism. This feeling was expressed by a whole series of writers. You get it cautiously in the deep pessimism of F.S.L. Lyons’ last book, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, and then represented much more stridently and unapologetically by a younger generation - Roy Foster, David Fitzpatrick, Ronan Fanning. They began to write in a very militant, aggressive, anti-traditionalist style.

I do not think it is a conspiracy theory; in fact it is a consensus theory. The young Irish scholars who went to London in the 1930s assimilated a view of history that was then fashionable and took this to be orthodoxy as if there was no other possibility. One of the dangers of universities is that we think they are places making people think for themselves but, in fact, often what they do is simply feed students with the latest intellectual orthodoxy. That consensus was then fostered in Irish academe and that is where we are at present. So there is not a conspiracy with some sort of mafia putting people in the right jobs or whatever, but rather an assumption that all right-minded people think in this way.

It is a fact that most of the major courses in Irish universities at present are taught by people who are, if not militantly revisionist themselves, generally sympathetic to that point of view.

CDfm

Oh yes MD, you were quite the revisionist in your attitude to John Jinks. I have not forgotten

@Bannasidhe & MarchDub - Wow & huge thanks - it is reassuring that I am not the only one to feel that way about Irish history.

MarchDub

CDfm wrote: »

Oh yes MD, you were quite the revisionist in your attitude to John Jinks. I have not forgotten

No CD - you were the revisionist. I was trying to stand still - :pac:

CDfm

Bannasidhe while we have you on a roll what are your thoughts on Irish Historiography.

Theory import is a bit of a pet hate especially when the theory obscures the facts.

jonniebgood1

Very helpful descriptions above. Thanks to contributors.
There is a good description of primary and secondary sources here:

Primary Sources

People use original, first-hand accounts as building blocks to create stories from the past. These accounts are called primary sources, because they are the first evidence of something happening, or being thought or said.

Primary sources are created at the time of an event, or very soon after something has happened. These sources are often rare or one-of-a-kind. However, some primary sources can also exist in many copies, if they were popular and widely available at the time that they were created.

All of the following can be primary sources:

Diaries
Letters
Photographs
Art
Maps
Video and film
Sound recordings
Interviews
Newspapers
Magazines
Published first-hand accounts, or stories

Secondary Sources

Second-hand, published accounts are called secondary sources. They are called secondary sources because they are created after primary sources and they often use or talk about primary sources. Secondary sources can give additional opinions (sometimes called bias) on a past event or on a primary source. Secondary sources often have many copies, found in libraries, schools or homes.

All of the following can be secondary sources, if they tell of an event that happened a while ago:

History textbooks
Biographies
Published stories
Movies of historical events
Art
Music recordings
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/education/008-3010-e.html

CDfm

MarchDub wrote: »

No CD - you were the revisionist. I was trying to stand still - :pac:

Stuckist and proud of it.

http://www.stuckism.com/

The idea of getting the basics right also raised its head in the art world. Stickism was a movement instigated by the artist Billy Childish whose former girlfriend Tracey Emin accussed him of being "Stuck, stuck,stuck".