Delete comment from: Boston 1775
J. L. Bell said...
I agree that marketing (of all sorts—to publishers, to the news media, to the public, to tenure committees) requires historians to highlight what’s new or, even better, groundbreaking and revolutionary in their work. Even the most conservative, traditional writers claim that they’re rescuing untold stories from obscurity.
As for separating out one’s biases, I think the best anyone can do is examine and acknowledge those. I try to operate with two perspectives: my modern tastes and values, and my understanding of how the people of the past viewed their world. The biggest difficulty is spotting the biases that we don’t even know we have, mostly because our society shares them so widely.
Jun 9, 2011, 1:02:32 PM