How do you determine whether a historian is lying?

by hercpanda

While their contributions are invaluable, let's be honest, many historians are notorious for fabricating some of the craziest things. Yet many of these lies nonetheless come through and end up as established facts. So here are some questions i believe would be crucial:

  1. What are your methods to determine if a historian has lied?
  2. How do you identify false flags in history?
  3. How do you determine a historian's biases? What most people do is counter with their own biases (lol), which can't be good enough. Eespecially if the historian is dead?
  4. Let's say you, as a historian, wanted to lie and pass it as truth, what are the some of the best ways you can think of for that?
GrouchoAmigo

Historians rely on primary and secondary sources to form their arguments. Careful, critical readers "consider the source" and check to make sure there is some credible evidence to back up the author's claims.

In your post, you make several unfounded assertions, the main one being, "many historians are notorious for fabricating some of the craziest things" (source: your post.) This is an unfounded assertion because you give no examples or references that can be checked. If you were an historian, that would be called "not doing it right" and you would be duly ridiculed by your peers.

On the other hand, your post itself could be treated as an historical document (a primary source, in this case) by someone working on a thesis about, say, the level of critical discourse on Reddit, circa 2017.