How do you learn real history?

[Honest Fan Soni-chan]

So much of human history is lost for various reasons. What is known outside of academia is more like an interlocking web of often conflicting narratives. The timeline commonly accepted in the US, for instance, is more like a series of stereotypical snapshots: cavemen lived in some tundra or jungle, then the Greeks started thinking, the Romans built an empire, it collapsed for no reason and Europe became a kingdom, and the 13 Colonies declared independence and built the greatest nation on Earth with the help of their black and Indian friends. If it goes any further it might include the Civil War where the mean old Southerners enslaved blacks and the Yankees won the war, or the WWII where the Nazis killed ten million Jews for no reason so the Yankees had to sail to Europe to save them, or more recently Civil Rights when we stopped being mean to blacks and defeated the Soviets by winning the space race. Boomer shit, in other words.

I understand that the average person doesn't know much more than that because they don't care. They don't see the connection between past and present so it doesn't matter to them. The outdated propaganda they learned in school was enough to answer any questions they might have. and sportsball and porn are more interesting. Maybe Biden, whatever war he's about to start next, and/or tranny shit could fit in there too. It doesn't help that outside of academia, which has its own, slightly less retarded but just as controlled mandatory narratives, you can't make money off this stuff. You can't get hired at some company to translate Etruscan or know about the Aryan migrations. No one will donate to your Patreon for knowing the difference between Hattic and Gutian.

Say that PowerPoint of half truths and propaganda isn't enough, though. Say you want to understand the real past, and you're willing to invest the time and overlook the derision and inexplicable anger of Joe Blowjob to do it. You want the real story of where humans came from, how we got where we are now, why things are happening in the world and who's causing them. You want to know what really happened in WWII and where the engineers who worked on Haunebus tech went. You want to know the relation between Minoan and Eteocypriot. You more than anything want to know if Out of Africa is even true.

To what sources do you turn? Teachers? Speakers? Books? How do you know they're legitimate?

 

[Leaf Wage Slave]

History classes in most schooling is fairly useless - goes double in Canada, where nothing interesting happened until WW1 with the exception of The War of 1812 being a meme. Hell, I've learned more about World War 2 from listening to Sabaton then I did in high school.

Hilariously, most of what I've learned as far as World History has been from having various Youtube videos playing in the background, until with the exception of Simon Whistler they went and made their own site because Fuck Youtube's Algorithm, getting me interested in actually going to look shit up for myself.

 

[Immortal Technique]

I think once you bypass archaeologists and their educated guess and enter written down history it's jaded with half truths, secrecy, and propaganda. It's written by the victors and by people that don't want to get killed by the powers that be, if they write someone in a negative light.

As in, was Julius Caesar as terrible as he's made out to be in history books? Or, was it because the senate, that just assassinated a dictator, controlled the narrative that would be written?

 

[Bland Crumbs]

I think once you bypass archaeologists and their educated guess and enter written down history it's jaded with half truths, secrecy, and propaganda. It's written by the victors and by people that don't want to get killed by the powers that be, if they write someone in a negative light.

As in, was Julius Caesar as terrible as he's made out to be in history books? Or, was it because the senate, that just assassinated a dictator, controlled the narrative that would be written?

Where transcripts are absent the truth must be triangulated if there are not enough points of reference assume inaccuracy in reference to that subject.

 

[No Exit]

All sources of history are fine if you cross reference them and just pay mind to inconsistencies and conflicts. Just be aware of human nature and how they tend to under or overexaggerate and fill in with some of their biases so you can read between the lines or form your own conclusions.
We will never 100% know everything about a situation, especially ones that can span years or decades, so the best thing to do is gather information and try your best to come to the most logical and neutral opinion.

 

[Alexander Thaut]

History classes in most schooling is fairly useless - goes double in Canada, where nothing interesting happened until WW1 with the exception of The War of 1812 being a meme. Hell, I've learned more about World War 2 from listening to Sabaton then I did in high school.

Hilariously, most of what I've learned as far as World History has been from having various Youtube videos playing in the background, until with the exception of Simon Whistler they went and made their own site because Fuck Youtube's Algorithm, getting me interested in actually going to look shit up for myself.

magellan tv huh?

 

[Big Bad Wart]

It's written by the victors and by people that don't want to get killed by the powers that be, if they write someone in a negative light.

Sometimes you are lucky enough to find a source of a person involved or managed to view it that managed to survive. The victors set the narrative most of the time but they are not always successful in stomping out contrary viewpoints and evidence from surviving.

To get closer to "real" history I say make it a habit to split tangible evidence from narrative and not to put too much faith on any one historian. In history because a lot of things can't stand the test of time you will be dealing with a lot of conjecture. You'll have to be very flexible and come to the accept that things you know to be true and fundamental could be flipped because they decided to excavate some place a little more. You'll have to accept there is unrecoverable history, blank slates that we will not know but the most general facts, because of past book burnings, wars, natural disasters, and/or bad practice by early archeologist. Either history is a fun endeavor where you get to learn a lot about humans and the systems we see around us today.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Actually i'm always biased of learning history; remember, the books are always written by the winners, the losers can never get a chance to explain why, because they're dead.
I probably can explain more but i don't have time now.

 

[Jarolleon]

Actually i'm always biased of learning history; remember, the books are always written by the winners, the losers can never get a chance to explain why, because they're dead.
I probably can explain more but i don't have time now.

I think even that is a boomer meme. The losers aren't dead unless the victor is a Stalin-tier monster (and even then some remnants escape his clutches) or you're talking about an era so ancient that you needed the patronage of a lord to afford literacy. Both historians and pop-culture glorified the South in the Civil War up until around 1950, and Wehraboo narratives survive to the present day for example (granted the latter was useful to the Allies in a "Look how strong our enemies were, and we still beat 'em!" way). Plus white guilt has completely inverted this saying as far as the colonial period is concerned, where the writing outside of elementary school textbooks is about as slanted against the victors as you can get.

But if you mean the victors in a cultural rather than military sense then it becomes a tautology. Colonial-era whites are demonised because modern (i.e. mid 20th century because that's how long it takes for academic shit to filter into the public consciousness) history is written by elbow-patch wearing academics who despise men of action and are jealous when people less educated than themselves are more successful. The "Hitler fixed the economy" myth is propagated because academia is crawling with Keynesians who think that state-meddlers advised by people like themselves can solve all of a society's ills, and the Lost Cause is probably because late 19th century academia was full of Romanticists or something.

IMO the way to counter this effect is to use primary sources where-ever possible, and gauge the biases of secondary sources by contrasting their descriptions of the same event. That said, this channel has the true history of Rhodesia and no Wikipedia sperg or "academic" from the university of Harare can tell me otherwise.

 

[Jewthulhu]

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, but here's my suggestion of the most thorough possible way of approaching history.

• Read primary sources. Failing at that, read sources written as close to the event you're interested in as possible. They often knew what was happening more than any modern historian.
• Don't limit yourself to traditional "books." Journals from a lay soldier, letters from a general, or the correspondences of a king can be infinitely more informative that any history class.
• Read from a variety of viewpoints. This should be obvious. Even if they're being as objective as possible they don't know what's going on in the other camp.
• Try to read with an open mind. One of the biggest pitfalls one can fall into is interpreting history through an ideological or modern lens. Instead, try to "take on" the same point of view as the source, especially if that source is primary. In other words, instead of looking for how the author is wrong, assume that he is right on everything, at least while you're reading. When you finished, then go back in retrospect (hopefully with the aid of some opposing sources) and decide where the author erred.

IMO shit like college classes and secondary sources (YouTube, modern history books, essays from well-read people) are good crutches, but they should be seen as just that, crutches. In other words, it should be a way to be informed before looking into shit yourself, and not a substitute for doing your own research.

 

[Kitten Kalamity]

What we call history could be seen as an attempt to determine a best approximation of what occurred in the past. The sad fact is that over the millennia a lot of knowledge has been irretrievably lost, corrupted, or even just never recorded in the first place. Almost all that we know of the past is provisional and subject to change upon discovery of new information. The best that you can do is to gather what is available, analyze it, and then try to connect the dots. That's as close as you're going to get to finding out the truth of the past. If you really want to learn history you have two main avenues

Firstly, you can study the historical method (maybe also some philosophy of epistemology and logic) and then look at the primary sources yourself. From there you can try and make up your own mind on events unfiltered. There are some obvious problems with this though. Primarily availability. This isn't too big a problem for ancient history. Classic sources like The Gallic Wars or the Lives of the Caesars you can probably find as a free pdf online or order the book from amazon. There are usually very few surviving sources for each event historical event in that time period so won't have to break the bank or give up a lot of time to read them all. That said, if you really want to get the most out of a text you might need to either learn a dead language or 2 or more conveniently just get a good Latin or Ancient Greek dictionary.

For more modern history (especially anything in the last century) you may need to narrow your scope a little. There are just too many sources to sift through, fact check, and analyze. You can't read them all. You need to a bit more strategic in selecting sources. Like @Jewthulhu mentioned, you should aim to read a variety of viewpoints. For instance, you could read the memoirs of a General and then read the journals of a couple of soldiers under their command in order to get a view from the top and the bottom. If you want something other than personal accounts however (like say official records) you could have dedicate a lot of time and possibly money. There are metric tons of resources available that are scattered across the globe in various archives. They are often unorganized and gathering dust meaning you would have to do a lot of sifting yourself. Also, there is almost always an application/vetting process to get into an archive. Some of them are fairly forgiving like the Berlin archives while somewhere like the Vatican Secret Archive needs you to have a 5 year university degree in a relevant field or someone who has one to vouch for you. Honestly, I wouldn't bother with archives unless you have one close to you or are going on a holiday near one. Most of them are undergoing a process of digitization which means their information will probably be far easier to access within a few years. Also, unless its a niche topic, then some Historian has probably trudged through the documents before you and mined out anything interesting. Speaking of which...

The second option is to read or listen to secondary sources like books or lectures. This is probably the easiest and most convenient option especially for modern subjects. There are some basic things to keep in mind. Notably, you should always try and read widely on any subject you're interested in. Historians are far from infallible and as the OP mentioned there are often narratives being pushed either consciously or subconsciously based on presuppositions and/or the writer's personal beliefs. Being able to sample a lot of different opinions helps you spot biases as well as highlighting the crucial disagreements between arguments. Checking cited sources is also important in order to see how much an academic is actually drawing from the source and how much is their personal inference. Also, I'd advise reading into topics ancillary to your main point of interest. An expert in one area of history may makes mistakes in another area and end up skewing their analysis. Its especially common to see historians misstate or misunderstand political and religious beliefs unless they are directly related to their main topic of study.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Just a nice recommendation for you fine cultured gentlemen and distuingished ladies:

Voices from the past is a youtube channel that reads interesting primary sources. The actors reading them are pretty good, the visuals and ambiance is pleasant.

They don't editorialize, so at best it is colored by the interpretation of the way it is voiced.

It's no substitute to reading books, which have far more content than a letter or two. Yet there is something uniquely tantalizing about people writing about culture clashes when the first japanese landed in america or the romans wrote about their thoughts on china.

It's just fascinating imagining these japanese getting in a carriage as asked and being surprised when it starts moving.

---

As for the more epistological question: try to read some sources that come from outside the scope of what you can find in bookstores. Use libsyn or IRC to download ebooks by Carroll Quigley. It's quite possibly one of the most important historians you can read.

It's important to use at least some sources that predate our current tightly controlled worldviews.

I also think that the most censored are likely to have interesting things to say. I would have read traumnovella if I lived in nazi germany. But I live in the postpostmodern west, so I read Eustace Mullins and David Irving.

 

[Cheerlead-in-Chief]

Enroll in history courses, fail them and you keep reading the texts.

 

[Maurice Caine]

 

[mold]

1. Learn another language well enough to read history in it

2. Pick at least two crankpot occultists with whacko historical theories - Rudolf Steiner or Julius Evola for example - and read them and their debunkers closely. Any ideologues work really, like feminists or Marxists, but occultists are way funner

3. Read recent history of an event you were part of and take careful note of the bullshit

4. Read very very very widely all the time

5. Accept that knowing what really happened is frequently impossible

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Read interviews/recorded accounts of people talking, but be aware that the interviewers often steer it.

When it comes to slavery and the American Indian experience, there were large amounts of interviews written in the 1930s by Works Project Administration writers. I've read two volumes of the slave interviews. They show a much more interesting, nuanced, and varied portrayal of the subject than you'll get out of any mass market books or pop culture representations of it.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Go here. Learn what the man is suppressing.
Real history

 

[Maxxicus Callahan]

Go here. Learn what the man is suppressing.
Real history

This website is not a threat to the status quo lol

Thats it for the page of websites blocking the truth