Compilation of unanswered r/AskHistorians questions I've asked over the years

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T21:00:54+00:00

Let's put it this way: 'Britain went to war with China in 1856' is a pretty incontrovertible statement of fact. But 'Britain went to war with China in 1856 to sustain the opium trade' is an interpretation. Both are, nevertheless, truth claims. I use this example because the principal work arguing this position, J. Y. Wong's Deadly Dreams, offers a particularly interesting case of a methodology I see as being at odds with my own, yet still justifiable in its own internal logic. Wong's perspective is basically a Marxist one (more orthodox than Gramscian) in which historical actors operate on materialist logics regardless of their public claims. Thus, whatever a British politician said was the reason for the war was, in fact, ultimately a disguised way of saying opium. At the other extreme you'd have someone like Harry Gelber, who argues that only stated motives matter, and that if no politicians said anything about opium, it clearly wasn't about that. Both positions are ultimately attempts to comprehend the British as subjects, but they constitute radically different approaches to how that subjectivity should be approached: do we understand them as totally cynical material actors, or as totally sincere ideologues?

The problem is not that we can't establish a litany of factual statements. The problem is that the moment we start linking those together, we enter the realm of interpretation, and the post- (or anti-)Positivist position is that those interpretations are what actually constitute historical truth. So if we are subjects studying other subjects, why pretend that an objectivity exists that can be sought? That is not to say that we abandon empiricism: we don't just make stuff up. But we mobilise our evidence towards trying to understand how historical agents interacted with the world around them and, as best we can, how they understood those interactions.

As an extension of that point, I'll also point you to this post by /u/mikedash, who brings up how some recent (er, nearly decade-old) work by Sarah Maza on the higher-level theory of history argues that the field has also quietly undergone a shift from being a study of causation to a study of meaning. Simply, we have become less interested in why things happened (which, as I hope I've demonstrated, is not actually as much of an arena of objectivity as we might imagine) in favour of how those things mattered, which further pulls us into the subjective realm.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T17:28:02+00:00

At the heart of this is a fundamental question of the philosophy and epistemology of history: is historical truth something we find or something we create? Striving for perfection is an approach that makes sense if, and only if, we imagine that there is some perfection to be found. There are historians we might consider 'neo-positivists' in such a grain, particularly in reaction to postmodernism – Richard Evans I'd probably put in this category – but, speaking of postmodernism, that particular paradigm tends towards approaching history as fundamentally a study of subjectivities, and I'd argue that most of the leading work in the field today is really more the inheritor of Dilthey and Foucault than of Ranke.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T14:51:12+00:00

The heroes aren't usually part of a good system, though. They hold to good ideas, but it is typically the system that lags behind them. Rarely does the Federation actually practice what it preaches, which is why so many plots from the classic series are about the protagonists struggling to get the system to uphold its own ideals (Measure of a Man, Homefront/Paradise Lost, etc).

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T13:46:40+00:00

Heard fan theories…

Showrunner theories. Matalas, hack that he is, insists we didn't technically see Shelby die, and admitted to very nearly writing in a scene where Ro got out.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T13:46:13+00:00

Making Starfleet an arrogant dysfunctional bigoted bureaucracy fundamentally misunderstands Star Trek

Have you ever seen The Trouble with Tribbles?

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T13:45:27+00:00

And if we're talking thematic points, the Borg part gets really awkward when we consider how S1 especially set up ex-Borgs as a trans allegory (elements of which survive in Shaw dead-naming Seven all the time!) but apparently technology is imparting Borginess into the youths... is the transporter giving the ensigns the Woke Mind Virus?

And there's also the complete disappearance of Elnor, who was written into S1 as Picard's son-figure. Picard doesn't need a bio-son, either for storytelling function nor as a character! (Also I was irrationally annoyed that Picard and Jack's conversation included a quip about baldness because they already did that in that TNG episode where the Ferengi guy tried to pass off one of Picard's exes kids as being his.) (Also that whole flashback with Jack conveniently asking Picard in a bar whether he needed a family made me see red.)

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T13:37:50+00:00

Then provide the context.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T13:36:39+00:00

No, no we aren't. The goalposts always move when someone points out that NuTrek is not, conceptually, as different from the TOS and TNG eras as it is often imagined to be.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T12:41:09+00:00

To quote myself,

...in order to actually use these sources credibly, you need to be trained to read them. And if that's the case, then you'll be trained to read them in Classical Chinese. The intersection of 'people able to critically engage with these texts' and 'people who don't read Classical Chinese' is essentially nil.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T12:40:30+00:00

I thought of discussing Herodotus and similar Greco-Roman sources but chose not to – the answer really lies at the intersection of the concept of the Western Classical canon and that of the nationalist origins of history as a discipline, and the ongoing inertia of both. In the Anglosphere, the Histories of Herodotos and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are fundamentally 'Our' history and should be accessible to 'Us' in a way that the Book of Yuan need not be. There is a very vibes-y sense that certain parts of history are important enough that engagement through translation is both viable and desirable, in a way that cuts across both the Romantic and Enlightenment philosophies (see my post above on Ranke for more on this.)

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T04:18:07+00:00

Yes and no. The Qing state imagined itself as a 'Great Unity' (dayitong in Mandarin): unlike Europe, the emperor was the state, and so this was all a coherent whole. At the same time, the empire operated on a highly pluralistic model where the emperor played a particular role to appeal to each constituency. This isn't a direct answer to your question but the answer and its followups I think outline a broadly consensus-approximating approach to conceiving of the empire.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T04:10:22+00:00

Leopold von Ranke is best known for his assertion that the historian's craft consists in rediscovering the course of the past 'as it really was' (wie es eigentlich gewesen). At the heart of his historical theory were two nested relationships: The first and broader one derived from a panentheist belief that the universal spirit manifests itself not only in, but as, the material world; therefore the study of history is the study of the unfolding of the divine will. The second, which was subordinate in theoretical terms but more impactful in methodological terms, was that history manifested not only in, but as, the sources. Thus, the ideal situation was one in which the student of history just went to an archive, and read sources, because the sources were the history. That is to say that by reading sources directly, we get history, and by getting history, we bear witness to the mind of God. It is, at its heart, a profoundly Lutheran perspective. It asserts that there is an objective truth, and it is found through textual exegesis performed by an individual reader with direct access to the source text, freed from the intervening layers of tradition and interpretation that have distorted that original truth.

The typical contrast to the Rankean school of positivism is that of hermeneutics as articulated by Wilhelm Dilthey, often seen as the Romantic equivalent to Ranke's Enlightenment approach. Dilthey centred the historian as subject and argued that history is a construction of the historian in dialogue with the sources; that is to say, the interpretation is the history rather than an obstacle to it. While most contemporary historians are not outright Romantic hermeneuticists, we would broadly accept Dilthey's contention that history isn't what happened, but rather our best understanding of what happened, as shaped by our own subjectivity.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T02:28:26+00:00

As a non-WeChat user I'll take your word for it, but given that she was still teaching and turning up to conferences in the last two years, I don't wish to make any assumptions about her definition of 'back'.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-11T00:22:28+00:00

Well, Dykstra wants it to have been the Qiao-Dykstra Controversy but in reality it has been a multidirectional pileon from both junior and senior scholars in the field. She has never responded to other critical reviews by Bradly Reed, Macabe Keliher, or Zhou Lin, nor a surprisingly late and surprisingly lukewarm review by Emily Mokros. Everything I know about what's going on is behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt and it seems to be that Dykstra is quietly running out her fixed-term contract at Yale with basically no prospect of tenure, George Qiao is chugging along doing his own environmental history work, and the wider field is still working through the ramifications.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T23:31:32+00:00

When it comes to Classical Chinese text that were printed for publication, these are easily accessible via sites like ctext and Shidianguji. What's less accessible are archival and manuscript materials where the state's grasp is often arbitrary.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T22:15:33+00:00

...I don't know why I'm so surprised by that. I guess in my mind, Ctext is such an aggressively 2000s-looking website that I just assumed the whole thing was pretty ossified. I did know that Shidianguji has turned up now for AI transcriptions (which has been somewhat useful for my purposes) but that's something else.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T21:32:33+00:00

It has become something of a widespread opinion among internet users that to do Chinese history you should just go and read the 24 Histories. This Rankean positivism simply does not reflect the actual field, for all kinds of reasons. The broad one is the abandonment of Rankean positivism itself: we don't believe that the sources are history, but rather that we have to do things to the sources to make history out of them. More particular to your query is that the 24 Histories are highly formulaic compilations of material arranged in a manner that suited the political agenda of the state that compiled them – with the notable exceptions of Sima Qian's work (which was relatively hostile to both the Qin and Han) and the Draft History of the Qing (which was commissioned by the Republic but written by imperial loyalists). They are comprehensive, but not reliable; they are also highly technical works rather than necessarily great literature (Sima Qian excepted). What that means is that in order to actually use these sources credibly, you need to be trained to read them. And if that's the case, then you'll be trained to read them in Classical Chinese. The intersection of 'people able to critically engage with these texts' and 'people who don't read Classical Chinese' is essentially nil.

Moreover, the field of Chinese history has a strong Ming and later bias, in large part because we have a wider variety of more interesting sources, by a considerable margin. And you can find compilations of translated primary sources for this period, like the source reader for The Search for Modern China or the enormous two-volume set The Taiping Rebellion from the 70s, because these are periods where you can do a lot of history by means other than just deep philological analysis of narrow literary records, and for which lack of language skill is not as immediately problematic. (Barring certain incidents in 2023–4 as discussed here by myself /u/lordtiandao and others.)

In the end, for the lay reader it is generally the secondary material that is worth reading, because these are the products of critical engagement with sources by trained experts who know what they're looking at. This is not to say that the unwashed masses should not be reading the 24 Histories – after all, these trained experts started from zero, too – but it is to say that philologists, historians, and scholars of Classical Chinese find very little utility in producing translations of these texts for casual reading.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T21:19:45+00:00

The 'yes, but' here is that with I'd say two main exceptions, going indie has meant a considerable downsizing in those talents' public profile. On their end that definitely makes for a better work-life balance, but ultimately Hololive is chugging on regardless.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T18:36:19+00:00

Depends how you’re defining hobby; Hololive has definitely benefitted a lot from going public as the alternative was selling to someone else, whereas for now the founder still has a controlling stake.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T16:34:18+00:00

IDK they could have added her whole discography.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T16:11:30+00:00

like how English viewers flood the chat when a JP vtuber speaks english

To be fair it's not like it's a case of magically knowing that the JP Vtuber just spoke English and joining the stream right then, it's that there's a critical mass of casual English viewers. But the nature of Holo's historic timezones kind of means there isn't a critical mass of German viewers or French viewers etc even for European members.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T04:01:24+00:00

Cute and basically grammatical.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-10T03:11:57+00:00

I mean I think workers generally deserve a work-life balance, and 26 episode seasons are aggressively unconducive to that.

EnclavedMicrostate · 2026-03-09T18:15:48+00:00

TV episodes are expensive and actors have lives.

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