I saw that and had a good laugh.

Also, I am not sure why you put "historians" in quotes.

Anyways, I recently answered a bunch of questions about what it actually is that historians do and how they engage with history, see here for different methodological approaches (what social and cultural history actually are), here on narratives and how we evaluate historical claims, here on engaging critically or affirmative with historical narratives, and here another one on how to evaluate claims with an especially pertinent answer by /u/restricteddata.

The thing is that the fundamental difference between a person with an interest in history who will watch a couple of youtube videos, play a few games, read one or two pop history book and so forth is that trained historians (self-trained as well as university-trained) will in fact spend years upon years to acquire a certain training and read thousands upon thousands of pages of books in order to gain a working knowledge of history, historiography, and theoretical and methodological foundations that enables us to do our work. A lot of this work goes towards to enable someone trained in this profession to be able to critically evaluate claims and works of other historians for in other to produce knowledge, it is very much necessary to first acquire knowledge.

That's why f.ex. a university system requires people to acquire a BA and an MA – a process that takes 5+ years – before someone will be regarded as able to produce a PhD thesis, which is the first piece of truly original writing you will do. A PhD thesis by designs requires for the person to write it to do truly original research, meaning to answer a question about history that hasn't been asked and answered before and that is justified by truly expanding the wealth of human knowledge about the world. That isn't to say that people could do that beforehand but there is a reason most of us only start to attempt this after several years of training that forces you to truly read up upon history in an extensively in-depth way. In one of the linked posts /u/kieslowskifan mentioned that people often don't realize just how much we have to read. Take f.ex. this prelim reading list on Modern Germany. This is what the University of Wisconsin thinks that you have to absolutely know and read when studying Modern German History. And those are 8 pages densely packed with books of several hundred pages.

As I wrote above, most of this is intended for us to be able to critically evaluate historical claims by drawing from the knowledge we acquire as part of our training. This is not something that pop-history usually does for they deal very little with methodological and theoretical problems or with how they arrive at certain interpretations of history. Can Darlin's Hardcore History is, I am sure, fun to listen to but it does not exactly help to learn how to engage with historical material in terms of further evaluation.

That's a problem in as far as the commonly encounter views on reddit that this posts sums up – military history being the only interesting part of history; the point of history being the mere accumulation of facts and anecdotes; Europe and the US being the only places with an actual history; history as a linear process; idolization of warrior culture – are not just harmless misconceptions about history and the study of history. They are things after all that inform the worldview of those who hold and thus will influence their behavior.

Canadian historian Margarete Macmillan wrote a book called The Uses and Abuses of History and right in the introduction she writes that history is a major factor of how we make sense of the world. History defines who we are, both collectively as well as individually, and remains one of our major reference points in determining where we are going, both collectively and individually. "History", she writes, "has shaped humans' values, their fears, their aspirations, their loves, and their hatreds. When we start to realize that, we begin to understand something of the power of the past."

How we understand history in this sense, can be both a powerful tool of emancipation as well as oppression. And the fact that it is that and that there are currently groups existing who attempt to use history in the cause of the latter really makes the reductionist understanding of history that is summed up in some of the attitudes here a problem. Consider the following slew of articles on medieval history and the alt-right here from the New Republic, here from the Pacific Standard, here from the Huffington Post, and here from Salon.

What they show is that, as one of the authors puts it,

The appropriation of faux-medieval culture by modern racists happens everywhere. The Nazis did it when they used medieval-obsessed German Romanticism of the nineteenth century (Wagner, fairytale castles) as a template for a new national identity that was founded on the extermination of minority groups. White nationalists do it in Britain and France when they want to claim that the country “belongs” somehow to white people, looking back to an imaginary time of long-lost racial purity (a time that never existed, as Mary Beard patiently explained recently). White supremacist American murderers love Vikings.

The harsh truth is that an uncritical view of history that reduces it to a bunch of facts, anecdotes, and battles that happened in Europe and the US makes an individual more likely to believe the racists' version of the Middle Ages or any other time period that they use to sell their ideology and build their identity around. That's in part because such an individual does not have the knowledge and context to critically evaluate these claims but also because the believe in knowing about something tends to foster certain ideas about the "authenticity" of certain versions of the past.

Take f.ex. the frequent discussions about having representation of People of Color in video games inspired by medieval Europe where in a game that has mana and magic, a black person becomes a problem for some because it is not "authentic" (or in the way they'd word it "accurate"). Consider also that the incredibly strong eurocentric version of history that most pop-history has to offer leads to an easier time believing in the (neo-)colonial narrative of Africa as a continent without history and thus being "inferior". Consider how a pop-culture that valorizes Nazi Germany as this military machine and Hitler as the ultimate decider of all things has not only helped keeping alive the Clean Wehrmacht but has distorted the image of Fascism to such a degree that it seems somehow attractive for people yet will by way of reduction to the historical figure of Hitler not be recognized when it rears its ugly head these days.

Note that this is far from saying that this will happen to all "average Joe history nerds" or even to most of them but when these phenomena reach a certain critical mass, it happens to enough people to indeed become problematic. If reddit is any indication, the critical mass among white dudes between 16-25 has indeed been reached. I have also encountered some of these problems teaching the history of the Third Reich, the Holocaust and World War 2 where I have had students who were disappointed with my class because it wasn't military history and – in the worst case – I have had people writing what essentially boiled down to papers glorifying the Wehrmacht and citing statistics from World of Tanks as their evidence.

In the end, what's really f*cking important and the point to take away form this post is that being interested in milhist, playing video games, listening to Dan Carling and what have you are all fun things and can be enjoyed with the awareness in mind that those are not pieces of media that will teach you to critically evaluate history and/or understand history in a rather crucial sense. For that it is necessary to seek out more, read more, and be more informed. And that can be an immensely fun process too if one enjoys history. It's not gatekeeping to say this but rather is intended to serve to set people on a journey where they can and will discovered entirely new and even more fascinating aspects of history, expand their horizon, and pick up the crucial skill of thinking critically about history is presented and narrated to us. It's fun, educational and can contribute to becoming a better citizens and human in general.

I'm not really sure how to answer this with source-citations, so hopefully the mods will forgive a personal anecdote in this situation? If not, just feel free to move to a different (META) section, or even delete: I won't take it amiss.

First off, I don't recognize some of the 'memes' in this 'starter pack' (and don't really follow the whole 'starter-pack' fad), because memes are transitory, endlessly self-referential verbal/visual play that pretty much just suck up time without offering much in return... and ain't no professor got time for that. ;-)

But it was amusing, and inspired me to offer two tidbits: one about interest vis-a-vis video games, the other about discourse. The first upbeat, the second more pessimistic.

First, there's nothing wrong with getting interested in history from video games! In fact, I've talked with other history professors about the idea of teaching a course through a game... There's a LOT of historical "content" in those games--the developers do have professional historians on retainer, after all--and this expertise can show up in interesting and even subtle ways.

As one tiny example: in the Civ IV Beyond the Sword expansion, the Dutch East India Trader naval unit actually distilled a fair amount of "history" into the gameplay: the unit is a merchant ship that has the strength of a small warship. In fact, the Dutch in the 17th century did arm their merchant ships in innovative ways; this did result in an unusual but highly-profitable fusion of commerce with warfare (that will be reflected in the way that the unit's strengths steer the game-player toward a symbiotic trade-war strategy); and (as naval technology progressed) these hybrid pressed-into-miltary-service merchantmen of the VOC did ultimately prove little match for the later dedicated, task-built warships of the various monarchies' navies... just like in the game. Given all this, one can actually learn something useful about the rise and decline of the Dutch through something so simple as the design of a unit in a video game--and learn about it in a dynamic way.

So, how cool would it be to build a course around Civ game or Assassins Creed or whatever... and use the game as springboard, to get students to think more broadly about history??! The students would be tightly-engaged, and you could then pick apart the game--it's assumptions, its western bias; its implicit line-of-argumentation-about-causation; the way it shows (or doesn't show) the evidence it is based on. You could "deconstruct" the game, and thereby learn quite a bit about why history is different (and more intellectually challenging) than the linearity presented in video games. It would be pretty cool, I think. The problem (as I've discussed with other interested history profs) is that the games change too rapidly to use in teaching. For me to draw up a class, and build assignments (readings, writing assignments, game-play, whatever) takes a year, minimum. And any class built around a game will be obsolete in a year. I doubt any of my students even remember Civ IV... what are they on, Civ 6 now? Anyway, video games are too transitory, I feel, to integrate into class design--because class design is an inherently slow and deliberative process.

Secondly, the "I know a lot about history because I play video games and took a military history class once" meme here is really getting at something deeper, which is how one shows (or tries to show) expertise and thereby lay claims to authority in an anonymous internet forum like Reddit. There's no real solution, I fear. I am, in this, a pessimist. Most forums are popular free-for-alls, engagement is brief and fleeting (and often nasty) and things which sound good are upvoted or otherwise receive attention--in other words, those things which "zing" the most, or possess a 'truthiness' that reflects the opinions and/or biases of the internet crowd. Most internet-users do not have the expertise to distinguish, for instance, between what a historian of Nazi Germany might write about National Socialist antisemitic laws of 1935-38, and someone who pulls a scripted talking-point from an NRA-facilitated website about how "the Nazis were gun-controllers, and that's why the Holocaust happened." The latter just sounds right to people who know very little about German history, but who are anti-gun-control. It's not just that the latter is fake history (it is); it's that most people--even those who support the opposite political position--don't have the tools (time, patience, education) to understand the difference between professional history and surfing-wikipedia-to-cherry-pick-facts. Indeed, most of my freshmen don't understand the difference...! And it takes a lot of patient teaching, firm-and-repetitive guidance, and C-minuses dropping like bombs on their cowering heads to get students to understand that there is, in fact, a difference between history and internet cherry-picking.

Here's a bit of opinion (which, again, I beg forgiveness for in advance), I fear that internet forums, overall, are just not the place for real history--because real history is nuanced, source-based, and has focused argumentation, and (in the best of worlds) good writing as well... and the millions upon millions of forum-surfers are looking for a quick fix, not a lengthy discourse. Think of the Reddit slogan: TL/DR, or "Too Long/Didn't Read". That sums up the problem quite succinctly. But even if people did have the time to read... how would they know what to trust?

There's no real gatekeeper in most forums, other than popular opinion itself. And popular opinion, in America and throughout the world, is pretty damn'd ignorant.

A forum like askhistorians is quite unusual--I don't know of anything else like it-- and it requires dedicated mods (who are themselves professionals, trained in History graduate programs) to volunteer tons of time. Most other forums, in contrast, involve a virtual free-for-all where millions of people fling opinions around like monkeys flinging feces... and in such an environment, "real" history cannot possible compete. TL/DR, as they say.

I've had horrible experiences posting outside of askhistorians... often, I myself have been provoked into behaving poorly. It's the nature of the place. Indeed, most of Reddit, outside of a few specialist groups is an exercise in reifying the worldview of a very narrow group. (that group tends to be white, American, male, young, and heavily skewed towards computer science).

In the classroom, however--and this might be what your question was asking as well--it is quite different. There are none of these problems. (Or at least, I have not personally experienced them.) The face-to-face interaction, the fact that it is a sustained conversation (over a semester) between student and professor, the fact that students are there (ostensibly) because they want to learn, not argue their own viewpoint--these all make for a profoundly different experience. While an anti-gun-control student in my Intro to Western Civ class might raise the issue of the Nazi gun control laws, I can take a few minutes to sketch out the context of 1936-38 legal restrictions, but also show how anachronous and ahistorical (and thereby ridiculous) the question is in the first place. And he'll accept it, because he's seen me wax eloquently and/or tediously on many different issues, and knows that I "know my stuff".

Meanwhile, in my History of National Socialism class, none of my students would even ask that question, because by mid-semester, they already know so much about Germany, the rise of the Nazis, and the looming of the Holocaust, that they easily see for themselves why the issue of gun control is entirely moot... entirely a reflection of current American politics, with little relevance to Germany in the 1930s. And that point is the beginning of true historical understanding: that all of history is the meeting place between where we are now--present-day culture and concerns--and the historical record of the past--the "encounter" with which can (and should) actually change our understanding of ourselves.

I'll answer with regards to the bit about students only caring about military history. I think this is, in a roundabout way, damaging to serious military history. The meme implies that interest in military history is somehow invalid or basic. And I think this is a serious denigration of a nowadays dynamic and rigorous methodology.

From my American context, I grew up obsessed with World War II and really military history in general. When I got to university, I found it almost impossible to engage with my interest on a serious level. I went to a huge liberal arts state school with a massive range of history courses, and not once found a specific military history course or even a course dedicated to "military" events (American Civil War, First World War, French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, etc). When I went to apply to graduate school, I found that among the top programs in European history (my "main" field) only two had respectable military history programs (my main methodology).

I think students who begin to engage seriously with history (say, taking history courses beyond the 300 level) are introduced to the "Great Men of history" methodology, and taught that it's bad, or at least damaging. Military history gets wrapped up in that "old school" method of doing history, which is really unfortunate because a lot of the best social history I've read has been done on armies and officer corps.

I don't think there's anything malicious in this. Military history was for a long time one of the dominant themes in professional history (along with political and diplomatic) and it's only natural that graduate students in past decades gravitated toward the newer methodologies. So today's professors by and large aren't super interested in military history as a primary methodological skill.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the meme is implying that it's a bad thing that a lot of beginning historians gravitate toward military themes. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing or a sign of lower intellect. War is dramatic and intense and therefore interesting in a very immediate way. I wish undergraduates in Intro to Historiography-type classes weren't implicitly taught that military history isn't worthy of serious study. There's a ton of cultural, social, gender, and environmental research to be done in military history.

I would like to add one thing to the very good answer provided by /u/commiespaceinvader. There’s a big gap between the way that history is taught as a school subject and the way that history works as a discipline. Because schools need material to grade on and multiple choice is easier than, say, essays, history is treated like a topic about rote memorization, about learning names and dates, rather than understanding. Names and dates are much easier to grasp than social conditions, easier than conceptualizing the huge paradigm shifts brought about by intellectual, technological, cultural (et cetera) changes. This is hugely problematic and gives amateurs a very skewed view of what is valuable about history (and I think contributes to the negative view that history is a worthless discipline). History is not actually a ‘what’ discipline, it’s a ‘why’ discipline, it’s about conversation and method and approach and theory.

I would say that even this sub, for all that I like the idea of it, often promotes this kind of textbook history approach. Especially in that often very one-sided, single secondary source-based answers get promoted. As an academic discipline, history is about being part of a conversation, not about shutting down discourse.

I think the most significant difference is use and knowledge of sources. You don’t have to have a degree in History to be knowledgeable but you have to do the reading and background work. You need to do more research and learn about different sides to an issue so your answer can be even keeled. You also have to read well-researched sources- which is part of the problem.

People who haven’t backed themselves up with information and research don’t have a full grasp on a subject. This is not to say I personally have a complete grasp on any subject, but i have a good idea and i know how to find the information I’m looking for properly.

There are too main things i encounter with people fairly frequently:

I get a lot of people who try to explain things to me, and tell me about the article they read which totally refutes my scholarly work. I think this is especially because i am a female historian, which adds another layer.

People often try to over simply events and people. They try to put them in easy boxes which is really never the case.

My initial reaction to the OP's source was "oh geez, is that me? Do I do this?" After some soul-searching (and a quick look through the titles in my library) I think I'm doing better than the hypothetical guy in that meme starter pack, but it's clear from answers like /u/commiespaceinvader 's here that there is a lot of areas I could improve on.

I find myself reanalyzing my reading lists and practices--do I focus to much on military history? Are there other aspects of a topic I should pursue? Am I engaging with a book critically or am I simply reading it? Frankly I really don't know. But I do see the need to expand the focus of my studies and my reading.

Two questions I find myself having as I review this thread and the source:

1. What's is wrong with being primarily interested in American and European History?
2. What is wrong with admiring, if not idolizing, warriors and warrior cultures?

I'll write this very formally to avoid the glib comment police, but the number of soldier-, military- or conflict-related questions posted on AskHistorians to me is indicative of the strong interest that many amateur historians have in military history compared to other types of history.