UnSubRocky wrote on Mar 25
th, 2017 at 10:58pm:
Brian Ross wrote on Mar 25
th, 2017 at 9:32pm:
UnSubRocky wrote on Mar 25
th, 2017 at 5:30am:
Brian Ross wrote on Mar 25
th, 2017 at 1:10am:
When studying history, you need to learn to look both at the minutia and the big picture items, simultaneously.
Is that not what reading from a whole bunch of sources essentially does? To have various perspectives of what happened and to make your own decision.
How many laypeople do that, UnSub? In reality, they tend to latch onto one or at most two accounts and accept them as being representative of the events they wish to learn about. Any good historian uses primary sources, not secondary ones. Most laypeople use and rely upon secondary or tertiary sources.
Save for some privileged access to exclusive libraries that you probably could not afford visiting, you would most certainly be using secondary and tertiary sources for your historical information gathering. For someone to be using primary sources, you would have to be talking to the person in question, or looking at the artifacts themselves, or even being at the site, perhaps even living the historical moment.
I have about 3 sources on the American War of Independence, the History of America, the history of the world, several Australian history books, dvds on British history (20 hours worth of viewing -- Simon Scharmer), 3 books on British history, 2 on Chinese History, Roman history, and then various books ranging from Fitzsimons' Antarctica to a bunch of Nazi books or biographies on Hitler. If I find that there is a discrepancy on on book, I will find out in the other 2 books.
It is quite common for Australian people to read up on various things as a hobby to working at the bottle shops or at the meatworks. Don't try and get condescending to us because you wasted time getting a Masters in some degree for whatever reason. We don't have to pay for a place at university to educate ourselves.
I am not trying to be condescending towards you or others for the most part. What annoys me is that too many here simply refuse to do any research at all, even using the World Wide Web before positing their opinions. Invariably they are wrong, simply displaying their prejudice and their hatred for people different to themselves rather than any real understanding or knowledge.
As for "wasting time", I disagree. Education is always useful. It taught me many useful skills, skills which I put to daily use in my career. I don't work as a historian but I apply a historians rigour to nearly everything I do, considering both the minutia and the bigger picture as well. Without that discipline, I wouldn't know how to search and analyse the results of those searches in libraries and of course, the World Wide Web to the debates and arguments I get into in this and other fora.
So, you have a few books and a few DVDs on historical matters and you feel that qualifies you sufficiently to comment about complex events of the past? I'm sorry but that is just the beginnings - good beginnings but still only the beginnings. Secondary and Tertiary sources lose their currency, they are superseded by new works, new thinking, new research, and new viewpoints. I've contributed to the total of world knowledge in a small, minor way but in ten, twenty, thirty years, some student may dig my work out and use it to further their own knowledge, to either refute what I've said or to complement it. That is the way of the world. Pursue your hobby by all means but recognise it's still only a hobby. Be flexible in your beliefs and your attitudes 'cause what you learn today will be fish wrappings tomorrow.
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