Writing history is really hard. I'm trying to write this chapter in which I have a certain analytic "core," a focal point of my sources, a particular theoretical and methodological frame, and the conclusions that I've gotten from those two things. And yet, for some reason, when I sat down to write this chapter, I decided that I needed to write this long history of everything that has anything to do with this topic, and so it's only after fifteen thousand words and two months of writing that I'm finally getting to that analytic core of the chapter. I can't help but feel that I'm totally over-writing this piece, that I should have started with the analytic core and then built around it.

Anyone else run into this?

Hey guys, I'm hoping this feature is right for my questions.

So, in the recent AMA I saw a post that asserts that Central Europe is an understudied area of medieval history. I don't know enough about that to say for certain, but is it really? I'm Czech, but not a historian and generally unqualified to post here, but I'm pretty sure that large amounts of research and archaeological work have been done by our historians, especially concerning the Hussite wars mentioned in that post. I would imagine that not much of it has been published in English, particularly before 1989.

Is there then such a thing as "global academia", or does anyone even claim so? It is my understanding from reading this (heavily Anglophone) subreddit that a specialization usually entails learning the languages required for working with the primary sources. Does this also lead to coordination and cooperation with that area's contemporary and past historians, or is there a certain duplicity of effort? Or another way, are things often re-discovered or re-interpreted (with perhaps vastly differing conclusions) by the circles of historians in different nations (and I mean general trends beyond simply the personal approach of individuals)? Does this greatly depend on the area in question? It seems to me that international conferences could be common in France, but less so in China, Russia, India.

Another thing, do you think that indigenous historians have a distinct advantage in terms of access to sources and perhaps a sense of cultural heritage? And is for example the work of a Chinese historian about British troops on the Western Front in the First World War taken as seriously as that of a British historian? I know you'll probably say that it should only be judged by its merits as a work of history, but is that truly the case in reality?

And lastly, something that might be out of this feature's scope. This subreddit has a decent distribution of flairs, but I'd wager most of the flaired users are American or British. Does this cause bias towards certain viewpoints?

I'm definitely not here to call anyone out or anything, I just don't know much about how all this works, so perhaps you'll help me.