Several weeks ago, someone asked in the comments whether I thought a particular history book I'd read was a good book. I realized that's something of a complicated question.
One approach to history I really appreciated is found in Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August", about the first month of World War I. In the book's introduction she has a small rant against the kind of history writing which fabricates incidental details, such as "upon first seeing Elba, Napoleon must have thought that . . . " etc., where the narrator describes things that would be impossible to know. In her book Tuchman says she has documentary evidence for everything; if she writes that it was raining on a particular day, she has a weather report to back up her assertion.
Very nice essay. A point I hadn't really considered before is how one book can be very valuable to one person and dreck to another just because of how much background information they have when they read it. Of course vibrant writing is a good thing no matter how much you know, but the main point of history is to learn stuff you didn't know previously.
One approach to history I really appreciated is found in Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August", about the first month of World War I. In the book's introduction she has a small rant against the kind of history writing which fabricates incidental details, such as "upon first seeing Elba, Napoleon must have thought that . . . " etc., where the narrator describes things that would be impossible to know. In her book Tuchman says she has documentary evidence for everything; if she writes that it was raining on a particular day, she has a weather report to back up her assertion.
Very nice essay. A point I hadn't really considered before is how one book can be very valuable to one person and dreck to another just because of how much background information they have when they read it. Of course vibrant writing is a good thing no matter how much you know, but the main point of history is to learn stuff you didn't know previously.