This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
This might be "coming soon" rather than "new," but I thought it fit the theme closely enough. If the moderators disagree please feel free to delete this.
Pope Francis recently did an interview with "La Vanguardia." Here is the full text in english can be found. The 'what's new' part of that interview is this:
Interviewer: One of your projects is to open the Vatican archives on the Holocaust.
Francis: They will bring a lot of light.
The Vatican generally waits 75 years to release documents on a given issue or pontiff. That 75 year wait would now theoretically allow documents from 1939--the year Pius XII was elected and obviously the beginning of WWII in Europe. Now, after The Deputy began the controversy about Pius XII in 1963 the Vatican broke its own rules and got four scholars to go through the archives and release some documents early. The result was the Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War (this collection is also called the ADSS). This is an eleven volume set of primary documents (with a bit of analysis at the beginning of each book) that outline much of what we currently know about Pius XII during WWII. There have been allegations that the documents released were not complete enough and hid evidence, particularly about Croatia.
But there hasn't been much chatter about the documents not including all of the evidence that is positive about Pius XII.
Has Francis seen an early version of what's going to be released? "A lot of light"? He certainly doesn't seem too worried about the idea; he seems eager to get the documents out. I guess we'll find out what he means soon, but the ADSS is the basic foundation of the understanding of Pius XII during WWII. Personally, I have thought that there wouldn't be much revealed when the archives on Pius XII were fully opened. Obviously Francis has a different opinion.
The only guarantee so far seems to be that whatever is revealed will change the historiography of Pius XII, if only because Francis has heightened the anticipation of that day.
This may be off topic, but I don't think it's worthy of its own thread so I'll post the question here. Please let me know if this is not the right place.
How do historians treat accounts of historical events written by famous historical figures, if there's no counter or correlating evidence? For example, if George Washington or Adam Smith writes about an event in the 1600s, would historians treat it as fact? And for that matter, does the reputation of the writer matter?