History is bunk

Professional historians are far from perfect, yet when it comes to popular history it's definitely mote and beam time. I don't post nearly enough on popular historical misconceptions, but long-discredited notions often remain current in high school and undergraduate curricula for years and even decades after dropping off specialists' radar, living on for decades more as part of the worldview of ordinary people who "learned" their history in school and paid it little attention thereafter.

A classic example is the notion of a sharp division between the benighted savagery of the middle ages and the enlightenment of the Renaissance, about which see more here; an even more deeply entrenched myth surrounds the Spanish Inquisition.

Then there's the lunatic fringe stuff, pseudohistory that nonetheless manages to get treated seriously by major news outlets and -- perhaps worse -- incorporated into popular historical fiction claiming to rest on exhaustive research. Early Christianity has long been fertile ground for such crackpottery (strange, in a way, in that mainstream specialists' picture of the period is already so fascinatingly at odds with popular conceptions); a particularly widespread belief is that much of Christianity was adopted directly from pagan precedents, which in its more extreme form is nicely debunked here (thanks to Palaeojudaica, always a useful haunt for historical bunk-busters).

Posted by David on June 27, 2004 8:53 PM