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Recently, I saw a thesis adviser mark points off a history student's thesis for including a 19th c 2ndary source in bibliography. So while one needs to be careful w/ 19th c. histories, here's a brief thread w/ 2 reasons y I also love them. Fellow #twitterstorians please add more!
Reason 1) 19th c. historians are incredibly thorough. There are plenty of things they're wrong about or don't know yet, but the breadth of random facts is often far wider than 20th c. histories. This is because of the periods' different habits of scholarly competition (2/?)
Nowadays we praise historians' for judicious selection of facts & information, elegantly choosing & including the details that help make the point w/o cluttering the book with reams of facts that don't actually connect to the central thesis. Not so 19th century historians (3/?)
In 19th c. historical competition you wanted THE MOST FACTS! An Oxbridge historian would cram in every random detail possible, because if a historian from the other half of Oxbridge comes back with, "Ah, but the learned gentleman didn't know X!" then YOU LOSE!! (4/?)
As a result 19th c books sometimes include stuff earlier 20th century books cut, not just random stuff, even identity/erasure stuff which gets in some ways worse, not better, as we pass 1900. Great example in bios of Duke Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_I_d%27Este,_Duke_of_Ferrara (4/?)
Bios of Alfonso from the early to middle 20th c will tell you his first wife Anna Sforza (1476-1497) was betrothed to him age 1, married him in 1491, and died in childbirth 6 years later. Then they will turn promptly back to politics, or wife #2 Lucrezia Borgia (5/?)
It's the 19th century books about Alfonso that tell you Anna Sforza was a lesbian, dressed exclusively in men's clothes, spent her time exclusively with women, & slept at night with an African slave girl lover. (6/?)
They say it awkwardly, embarrassedly in a footnote, with a condescending hobic tone, but they *say* it, because if they don't say it that guy from the other half of Oxbridge will GOTCHA! them. 20th century histories just leave it out & get praised for the judicious erasure. (7/?)
So while you always need to double check, and update, and grain of salt 19th century historians, many of them have pointed me to some of the strangest, most uncomfortable, most invaluable biographical information which gets filtered out in later stuff. Super useful. (8/?)
As for reason #2 that I love 19th century historians: usually, when they're wrong, they're REALLY REALLY WRONG and it's REALLY easy to tell! Histories are full of bias, the perspective of the author, & the closer they are to the present the better they tend to hide it (9/?)
Pick up a recent book which mentions, say, Pope Leo X (Rich, culture-loving Medici who was pope in 1917, so often used as antagonist figure in histories of the Reformation), and there are a lot of subtle anti-Leo biases that can be at work under the surface, hard to spot (10/?)
Pick up Herbert M. Vaughan’s 1908, "The Medici Popes, Leo X and Clement VII" (close enough that I count it as effectively 19th c) & he states as fact that if Leo had read the Psalms instead of Ovid when he was *five years old* the Reformation wouldn't have happened. (11/?)
Vaughn also states as fact that the reason the sack of Rome happened in 1527 was that Pope Clement was born out of wedlock, bringing a bastard's curse upon Rome. (12/?)
This is *perfect* for a history student, who can spot such errors and say, "Hey, this historian is super biased!" leaning how to read historians critically starting w/ the GLARING HIGHLIGHTER YELLOW WARNING WARNING WRONG errors, which clue the student to watch for others (13/?)
It's *much* harder to learn to spot bias in a more polished, more recent history whose prejudices & assumptions are closer to our own, & whose historical/literary style tends more toward aiming to seem objective than aiming (as earlier ones did) to pass a moral judgment (14/?)
So those are two reasons I love old, biased histories & think all students should have them in their bibliographies (plus, of course, many topics haven't had more recent treatments). Fellow #twitterstorians please add your own! (15/15)
Also (a touch of horror for your morning) the truly scary part of this story is that Amazon lists a CreateSpace reprint of Vaughn's incredibly biased Medici popes book with the release date of 2014 making it look new! That's the REALLY bad trap 4 students: https://www.amazon.com/Medici-Popes-Leo-Clement-VII/dp/1505382874
