I wonder if there is any kind of debate about to what extent history should be an empathetic enterprise? I'm also just interested in how historians contextualize the human side of historical events. I have noticed that, at least in popular history, it is often a very different tone taken about, say, the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, than about the Black Death or the Sacking of Rome. Not that I mean to compare who should get more sympathy, my question is more about why certain events, especially those pre-modernity, seem to elicit less empathy from both historians and the general public (or do they?)

It seems to me as a layman that the greater the amount of time since the event, the less a human tragedy seems to elicit a decidedly empathetic response. Do you think this is the case?

In a discussion yesterday on Brown's Ordinary Men our professor brought up a really interesting point that I had never given any thought to before.

We tend to get so focused on analyzing history, understanding the big picture, the context, even the minutiae; that we forget history is a lived experience. To what degree does a man's father being a silversmith in Hamburg, or that a soldier spent the summer of 1936 in Vienna, play into his thought process when faced with the first order to execute a civilian in Poland in 1942?

Of course our experiences shape who we are, and in turn shape how we react when faced with making a rapid decision, but even more important are the factors at play at any given moment when that decision is made.

Just some food for thought.