this brings up an interesting point about transparency/ opacity in sources. brief thread 1/ #twitterstorians https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1292091005924253698

first, of course a couple sentences in an obituary don't do justice to a scholar's career, so take what it says with a grain of salt. 2/

but the point that it's weird that Bailyn took what the colonists said "seriously" is important because it REALLY glosses over a problem historians deal with when reading their sources. do we believe they are windows directly into the authors' minds or were they obfuscating? 3/

a #medievaltwitter example. almost all Latin sources for what we call "First Crusade" emphasize that Europe/ Christians was under threat & expedition was to "save" Christendom. this led A LOT of scholars to characterize the crusades as "defensive." some still say that 4/

that's taking the sources as transparent. maybe some of the authors even deeply believed that to be true. just like some conservatives may deeply believe the US is being "overrun" by immigrants. 5/

but historians aren't transcribers. we need to understand the past USING the sources but interrogating them. 6/

so in the case of the "1st Crusade" we need to read those sources in the light of Just War theory, theological conceptions of sacred history, political considerations of the papacy, and the context in which the source were written (by whom, when, where, etc.). 7/

if we do that, a more problematic picture emerges - one in which monastic authors were trying to tell a THEOLOGICAL narrative, rather than a HISTORICAL one (though those categories are blurry in the medieval world). that severely limited HOW they could write. 8/

so the arguments in the historiography are oftentimes about interpretation, but also about expanding the sourcebase, looking at the elephant with another set of hands and putting everything together to get a bigger picture. 9/

all historians (at least serious ones) look at sources. but what's considered a valid source, and how we read them is where the debate really is. that's why the 1619 Project is ultimately good history. 10/

people can quibble about interpretations but the project ultimately pushes us to think about expanding our sources, allowing that people other than rich white dudes were part of the American experiment from the beginning. we should pay attention to what they thought too 11/11