Back in 2011, the field of psychology went into crisis. Some of the most famous and widely-cited experimental results could not be replicated by others. These were findings published in the field’s most prestigious academic journals, and going back for decades. Since then, more and more scientific fields have turned out to have been the victims of replication crises. But what is the problem even worse in history?
"What I simply cannot fathom, now that I’ve read her sources thanks to Jelf’s transcriptions, is how Bulstrode arrived at her narrative at all." She probably started with the narrative and then fit the facts.
History is often distorted by honest mistakes like the one about the canning competition and these mistakes are very hard to spot due to their random nature. Your proposals would do wonders against this type of mistakes.
History has always also been subjected to deliberate distortions and falsehoods made to push various narratives that serve political goals. Everyone interested in history should aim to become savvy in spotting the most spread narratives and be ready to dismiss papers that fit a narrative really well. I'm afraid that for certain politicized historical topics the usual academic safeguards are not strong enough to ensure probity.
"Just as in the sciences it is considered good practice to make one’s data available, in history it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online." I believe what you're proposing here is an 'Open History' initiative Anton, much like many funders and fields in science are now committed to 'Open Science' eg
Yes, I am very much thinking in terms of an Open History movement. Even if I didn't care about the inaccuracies, it would do so much in amassing that treasure trove!
This would be great. For more recent history, however, simply subscribing to Newspapers.com can provide some useful checks. That’s how I wound up correcting the record on “artificial ice.” First I read Steven Johnson’s account. Then I read his source’s writings on refrigeration. I also tried to find his source for an interview, without results, and decided he probably didn’t have first-hand knowledge anyway. So I went into the newspaper archives. The result was the opposite of the story in Johnson’s book and TV show: https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/notes-on-progress-artificial-flavoring
I have been reading this book entitled “writing Gaia : the scientific correspondence of James lovelock and Lynn margulis” in one letter to Lynn margulis lovelock writes “geology in all its aspects is an expertise and you cannot argue with experts on their own ground. Also it is not very sensible to try to prove a man is alive by examining his grandfather’s bones. The best arguments in the favor of Gaia come from the contemporary scene and it is on these I am concentrating. HISTORY IS A MESS at least to me it is. I prefer systems which can be prodded probed and tested here and now.” Makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?
Sadly, the spoils (and the narrative) go to the victors. I find history fascinating, yet extracting the truth is squishy business.
Fact - Rome fell
Why - Thousands of pages written by Gibbon and others with multiple theories, fifty plus plausible causes, yet a definitive answer is inconclusive.
It appears from this article that modern history writers have "crossed the Rubicon" from citing facts to embellishing faction for the sake of a desired narrative. That certainly seems the case with "The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story."
The 1619 project, whatever its faults, is much closer to the truth than the versions of US history it is seeking to displace, in which slavery is invisible, except for a decade or two around the Civil War. That's without mentioning the Dunning School of Confederate apologists, who were dominant well past the middle of C20.
Nonsense. It is entirely fiction, ascribing motives that are completely at odds with everything known about people and which make no sense in any historical context. Slavery was invisible because it was simply the way of the entire world at that time. Very few people gave it a second thought. And I have no doubt that had you been born in say 1750, you wouldn't have given it a second thought either.
Do you think that slaves thought about it that way at any time? Their repeated revolts, going back to Spartacus, suggest otherwise.
And if I had been born in 1750, I would have been in my 20s when Somersett's case was decided in the UK, and when most of the Northern states moved to end slavery. So, I imagine, I might have given it a second thought. Of course, since lots or people today (present company included) don't want to give it a first thought, let alone a second, I might not have.
Slavery was anything but invisible in Europe. Anti-slavery arguments were both loud and common well before 1750. Spurred by Bartolome de las Casas, Spain had a decades-long debate about slavery, banning it completely for Indigenous people in the 1542 New Laws, and edging toward banning the African slave trade but never quite doing it. France abolished slavery in France in 1318--that's why Sally Hemings, Jefferson's slave, had some leverage over him when he became ambassador to France (this is all covered by Annette Gordon-Reed's work on the case). In England, anti-slavery sentiment was common enough in the early 18th c., especially within the Church of England, that Nevis clergyman Robert Robertson felt obliged to publish 3 tracts defending slavery and attacking its critics in the 1730s and 1740s. Ultimately, the awful trade continued, but it faced continual opposition and was regarded as shameful and embarrassing even within many of the rich traders who most profited from it.
A reminder that Eric Foner's first book was published in 1971, and his book on Reconstruction, which forms a basis for contemporary beliefs about the aftermath of formal slavery, was published in 1988. That's a very long time before 2019!
(Here I'll point out that Foner has never hidden his political beliefs, so if one were to "Fisk" his work, as has been done here in miniature, which would be more surprising: We can replicate his findings, or massive errors of fact?)
"“Disunion” was, in many ways, the ideal collaboration of journalism and scholarship. Many of the leading historians of the Civil War era, reflecting a variety of different approaches, were given substantial space in the nation’s premier newspaper. The series, as a whole, was refreshingly undogmatic. “We wanted a multiplicity of perspectives,” the editors at the Times noted, adding that they never “expected to cover the entirety of the war.”1 By 2015, when the 150th anniversary of the war ended and the series concluded, the most demanding scholars could not help but be impressed by the range and quality of the essays."
"As the NHC matures, it might embrace the enduring strengths of traditional historical scholarship, including citing sources correctly, conducting close (and accurate) readings, drawing inferences that are actually supported by the evidence, and integrating its findings into the broader historiography. It should also stop making stuff up."
So US History had done just fine replacing the Dunning School well before The 1619 Project, who's mess it will take decades to clean up. Great job!
This reminds me of something Dom Cummings said in his podcast with Steve Hsu. Talking about Bismarck, he said that many sources got timings and dates wrong, and therefore, misattributed causality to events where none existed, because they happened before!
Thanks Anton. I read Oliver's paper and it is quite a rebuttal, but when I tried to find out more about him on the internet there were no great leads. His ORCID profile has no information on him. He has quoted your previous piece on this and I guess you know him? Can you enlighten us more please.
As I mention in the piece, he simply emailed me out of the blue about it following my piece. I've never met him or had any contact outside of our email exchange about his paper. He gave me some personal details when I asked about him, but I won't impinge on his privacy other than to say that he is not a professional academic, and he said it was okay for me to mention that he is about to submit an MA thesis (but I don't know where). I can ask him if he'd be okay with me putting you in touch, if you like.
I remember being taught the story of Galileo of Galileo asserting, "and yet, it still moves," which is quite likely another myth. It was conveyed as an example of the dawning of reason, but my takeaway was to wonder what we are being taught today that is untrue. Sadly, it appears quite a bit.
Great post, Anton... You may have come across the book "A new history of management" by Cummings et al. Does a great job investigating the history of many mythologies in the field of management science to understand what actually happened and in the process debunks many taken for granted assumptions
"This lack of effective institutions or incentives was really brought home to me recently by the publication of a paper in the prestigious journal History & Technology by Jenny Bulstrode of UCL, in which she claimed that the inventor Henry Cort had stolen his famous 1783 iron-rolling process from Reeder’s iron mill in Jamaica, where it had been developed by 76 black metallurgists by passing iron through grooved sugar rollers. It was a widely-publicised paper, receiving 22,756 views — eleven times as many views as the journal’s next most most read paper, and frankly unheard of for most academic papers — along with a huge amount of press coverage."
There are papers with random mistakes, but this is not one of them. We are in an environment filled with what Bryan Caplan calls "social desirability bias." Get a result that appeals to progressive politics, and your paper will be easily published and the popular press will amplify it. Go in the other direction, and your paper will get denounced and retraction demanded, if it gets published at all.
Dr. Kling, as I was reading Howes's piece, it brought to mind your adage to the effect that American government policy in competitive markets is often to subsidize demand and restrict supply (causing shortages, inflation, corruption). Howes's piece seems an illustration of the opposite circumstance. In academia (or any other controlled exchange such as USPS, some aspects of Healthcare, etc.) government policy seems to be to subsidize supply while restricting demand (example, most academic papers have zero to fewer than five citations). Probably not a sufficiently defined inverse, but I found it a provocative prompt.
I may be misremembering your arguments, but it was what popped into my mind.
This book seems relevant to the point - it was a shocking read, it seems like progressives (probably people in general, but especially progressive academics) are happy to just make stuff up, especially when they think no one will read the footnotes.
This is also an issue with idioms/phrase origins - I had a college professor tell me the old saw about the "rule of thumb" coming from a (never specified) law that let men beat women with rods as thick as their thumb. Never happened, but makes for a great story about the perfidy of the wicked past!
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Anton Howes
"I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone systematically looking at the same sources as another historian and seeing if they’d reach the same conclusions."
Here is a review of the middle volume of Nigel Hamilton's FDR trilogy that shows Hamilton systematically misrepresented his sources:
"This work contains numerous examples of poor scholarship. Hamilton repeatedly misrepresents his sources. He fails to quote sources fully, leaving out words that entirely change the meaning of the quoted sentence. He quotes selectively, including sentences from his sources that support his case but ignoring other important sentences that contradict his case. He brackets his own conjectures between quotes from his sources, leaving the false impression that the source supports his conjectures. He invents conversations and emotional reactions for the historical figures in the book. Finally, he fails to provide any source at all for some of his major arguments."
Great piece! I love your idea about requiring primary sources being digitized and posted to internet. Transparency is a very powerful tool to stop bad behavior, plus it helps future research.
Some other commenters mentioned it, but ideological bias is probably more of a problem than fraud or honest mistakes. In general, if a new historical “fact” suddenly pops up that closely fits an ideological narrative, one should be very skeptical. A few historians that are willing to dig into the primary sources to validate those claims may provide just the negative publicity needed to stop historians rewriting history to fit an ideological narrative.
Dan Rather would be pleased.
"What I simply cannot fathom, now that I’ve read her sources thanks to Jelf’s transcriptions, is how Bulstrode arrived at her narrative at all." She probably started with the narrative and then fit the facts.
History is often distorted by honest mistakes like the one about the canning competition and these mistakes are very hard to spot due to their random nature. Your proposals would do wonders against this type of mistakes.
History has always also been subjected to deliberate distortions and falsehoods made to push various narratives that serve political goals. Everyone interested in history should aim to become savvy in spotting the most spread narratives and be ready to dismiss papers that fit a narrative really well. I'm afraid that for certain politicized historical topics the usual academic safeguards are not strong enough to ensure probity.
"Just as in the sciences it is considered good practice to make one’s data available, in history it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online." I believe what you're proposing here is an 'Open History' initiative Anton, much like many funders and fields in science are now committed to 'Open Science' eg
https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/open-science_en
https://science.nasa.gov/open-science-overview
https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science
Not only would this help correct the historical record, it would be a potential treasure trove for other historians and writers...
Yes, I am very much thinking in terms of an Open History movement. Even if I didn't care about the inaccuracies, it would do so much in amassing that treasure trove!
This would be great. For more recent history, however, simply subscribing to Newspapers.com can provide some useful checks. That’s how I wound up correcting the record on “artificial ice.” First I read Steven Johnson’s account. Then I read his source’s writings on refrigeration. I also tried to find his source for an interview, without results, and decided he probably didn’t have first-hand knowledge anyway. So I went into the newspaper archives. The result was the opposite of the story in Johnson’s book and TV show: https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/notes-on-progress-artificial-flavoring
I have been reading this book entitled “writing Gaia : the scientific correspondence of James lovelock and Lynn margulis” in one letter to Lynn margulis lovelock writes “geology in all its aspects is an expertise and you cannot argue with experts on their own ground. Also it is not very sensible to try to prove a man is alive by examining his grandfather’s bones. The best arguments in the favor of Gaia come from the contemporary scene and it is on these I am concentrating. HISTORY IS A MESS at least to me it is. I prefer systems which can be prodded probed and tested here and now.” Makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?
Very interesting points raised.
Sadly, the spoils (and the narrative) go to the victors. I find history fascinating, yet extracting the truth is squishy business.
Fact - Rome fell
Why - Thousands of pages written by Gibbon and others with multiple theories, fifty plus plausible causes, yet a definitive answer is inconclusive.
It appears from this article that modern history writers have "crossed the Rubicon" from citing facts to embellishing faction for the sake of a desired narrative. That certainly seems the case with "The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story."
The 1619 project, whatever its faults, is much closer to the truth than the versions of US history it is seeking to displace, in which slavery is invisible, except for a decade or two around the Civil War. That's without mentioning the Dunning School of Confederate apologists, who were dominant well past the middle of C20.
Nonsense. It is entirely fiction, ascribing motives that are completely at odds with everything known about people and which make no sense in any historical context. Slavery was invisible because it was simply the way of the entire world at that time. Very few people gave it a second thought. And I have no doubt that had you been born in say 1750, you wouldn't have given it a second thought either.
Do you think that slaves thought about it that way at any time? Their repeated revolts, going back to Spartacus, suggest otherwise.
And if I had been born in 1750, I would have been in my 20s when Somersett's case was decided in the UK, and when most of the Northern states moved to end slavery. So, I imagine, I might have given it a second thought. Of course, since lots or people today (present company included) don't want to give it a first thought, let alone a second, I might not have.
Slavery was anything but invisible in Europe. Anti-slavery arguments were both loud and common well before 1750. Spurred by Bartolome de las Casas, Spain had a decades-long debate about slavery, banning it completely for Indigenous people in the 1542 New Laws, and edging toward banning the African slave trade but never quite doing it. France abolished slavery in France in 1318--that's why Sally Hemings, Jefferson's slave, had some leverage over him when he became ambassador to France (this is all covered by Annette Gordon-Reed's work on the case). In England, anti-slavery sentiment was common enough in the early 18th c., especially within the Church of England, that Nevis clergyman Robert Robertson felt obliged to publish 3 tracts defending slavery and attacking its critics in the 1730s and 1740s. Ultimately, the awful trade continued, but it faced continual opposition and was regarded as shameful and embarrassing even within many of the rich traders who most profited from it.
A reminder that Eric Foner's first book was published in 1971, and his book on Reconstruction, which forms a basis for contemporary beliefs about the aftermath of formal slavery, was published in 1988. That's a very long time before 2019!
(Here I'll point out that Foner has never hidden his political beliefs, so if one were to "Fisk" his work, as has been done here in miniature, which would be more surprising: We can replicate his findings, or massive errors of fact?)
We even have evidence from the very same paper, starting in 2011, that history had moved far from the Dunning School, before the quickened impulse to tell the "truth" of 1619: https://catalyst-journal.com/2021/12/what-the-1619-project-got-wrong
"“Disunion” was, in many ways, the ideal collaboration of journalism and scholarship. Many of the leading historians of the Civil War era, reflecting a variety of different approaches, were given substantial space in the nation’s premier newspaper. The series, as a whole, was refreshingly undogmatic. “We wanted a multiplicity of perspectives,” the editors at the Times noted, adding that they never “expected to cover the entirety of the war.”1 By 2015, when the 150th anniversary of the war ended and the series concluded, the most demanding scholars could not help but be impressed by the range and quality of the essays."
We also know that some of the work that was used to bolster the 1619 project (Edward Baptist's "The Half Has Never Been Told") has been contested by some of the academics who unearthed the source material in the first place: https://web-stage.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/law-economics-studies/olmstead_-_cotton_slavery_and_history_of_new_capitalism_131_nhc_28_sept_2016.pdf
"As the NHC matures, it might embrace the enduring strengths of traditional historical scholarship, including citing sources correctly, conducting close (and accurate) readings, drawing inferences that are actually supported by the evidence, and integrating its findings into the broader historiography. It should also stop making stuff up."
So US History had done just fine replacing the Dunning School well before The 1619 Project, who's mess it will take decades to clean up. Great job!
Is there a point here?
Yes, that you're wrong.
Well, you could have just said that, and not wasted so many words.
If it’s that obvious that you’re wrong, why did *you* waste so many words?
This reminds me of something Dom Cummings said in his podcast with Steve Hsu. Talking about Bismarck, he said that many sources got timings and dates wrong, and therefore, misattributed causality to events where none existed, because they happened before!
Thanks Anton. I read Oliver's paper and it is quite a rebuttal, but when I tried to find out more about him on the internet there were no great leads. His ORCID profile has no information on him. He has quoted your previous piece on this and I guess you know him? Can you enlighten us more please.
As I mention in the piece, he simply emailed me out of the blue about it following my piece. I've never met him or had any contact outside of our email exchange about his paper. He gave me some personal details when I asked about him, but I won't impinge on his privacy other than to say that he is not a professional academic, and he said it was okay for me to mention that he is about to submit an MA thesis (but I don't know where). I can ask him if he'd be okay with me putting you in touch, if you like.
I don't mind if you wish. At any rate you are the identified person representing his paper. Interesting to see how the debate progresses!
Probably because the MA student doesn't exist, and it was instead ghost written by someone else. Occam's razor.
Ha! Having already put my own name to a critique of the paper, I don’t see what I’d have gained through making up a person!
I remember being taught the story of Galileo of Galileo asserting, "and yet, it still moves," which is quite likely another myth. It was conveyed as an example of the dawning of reason, but my takeaway was to wonder what we are being taught today that is untrue. Sadly, it appears quite a bit.
Great post, Anton... You may have come across the book "A new history of management" by Cummings et al. Does a great job investigating the history of many mythologies in the field of management science to understand what actually happened and in the process debunks many taken for granted assumptions
"This lack of effective institutions or incentives was really brought home to me recently by the publication of a paper in the prestigious journal History & Technology by Jenny Bulstrode of UCL, in which she claimed that the inventor Henry Cort had stolen his famous 1783 iron-rolling process from Reeder’s iron mill in Jamaica, where it had been developed by 76 black metallurgists by passing iron through grooved sugar rollers. It was a widely-publicised paper, receiving 22,756 views — eleven times as many views as the journal’s next most most read paper, and frankly unheard of for most academic papers — along with a huge amount of press coverage."
There are papers with random mistakes, but this is not one of them. We are in an environment filled with what Bryan Caplan calls "social desirability bias." Get a result that appeals to progressive politics, and your paper will be easily published and the popular press will amplify it. Go in the other direction, and your paper will get denounced and retraction demanded, if it gets published at all.
Dr. Kling, as I was reading Howes's piece, it brought to mind your adage to the effect that American government policy in competitive markets is often to subsidize demand and restrict supply (causing shortages, inflation, corruption). Howes's piece seems an illustration of the opposite circumstance. In academia (or any other controlled exchange such as USPS, some aspects of Healthcare, etc.) government policy seems to be to subsidize supply while restricting demand (example, most academic papers have zero to fewer than five citations). Probably not a sufficiently defined inverse, but I found it a provocative prompt.
I may be misremembering your arguments, but it was what popped into my mind.
Got it in one!
You could also include 'Elizabeth I expelled black people from England' which turns out to be a highly involved story about official signing off of someone's mad get-rich-quick scheme http://www.mirandakaufmann.com/blog/elizabeth-i-and-the-blackamoors-the-deportation-that-never-was
Thank you - great case. I've often been impressed by Miranda Kaufmann's commitment to historical accuracy.
This book seems relevant to the point - it was a shocking read, it seems like progressives (probably people in general, but especially progressive academics) are happy to just make stuff up, especially when they think no one will read the footnotes.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691645575/the-new-left-and-the-origins-of-the-cold-war
As a tenet, they believe truth does not exist or is unknowable. The rest follows.
This is also an issue with idioms/phrase origins - I had a college professor tell me the old saw about the "rule of thumb" coming from a (never specified) law that let men beat women with rods as thick as their thumb. Never happened, but makes for a great story about the perfidy of the wicked past!
"I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone systematically looking at the same sources as another historian and seeing if they’d reach the same conclusions."
Here is a review of the middle volume of Nigel Hamilton's FDR trilogy that shows Hamilton systematically misrepresented his sources:
https://studyofstrategyandpolitics.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/jsp-7-perry-book-review-commander_in_chief.pdf
"This work contains numerous examples of poor scholarship. Hamilton repeatedly misrepresents his sources. He fails to quote sources fully, leaving out words that entirely change the meaning of the quoted sentence. He quotes selectively, including sentences from his sources that support his case but ignoring other important sentences that contradict his case. He brackets his own conjectures between quotes from his sources, leaving the false impression that the source supports his conjectures. He invents conversations and emotional reactions for the historical figures in the book. Finally, he fails to provide any source at all for some of his major arguments."
Great piece! I love your idea about requiring primary sources being digitized and posted to internet. Transparency is a very powerful tool to stop bad behavior, plus it helps future research.
Some other commenters mentioned it, but ideological bias is probably more of a problem than fraud or honest mistakes. In general, if a new historical “fact” suddenly pops up that closely fits an ideological narrative, one should be very skeptical. A few historians that are willing to dig into the primary sources to validate those claims may provide just the negative publicity needed to stop historians rewriting history to fit an ideological narrative.