My biggest recommendation is to look for references that cite their sources. Plenty of accessible writing references more academic texts and even if you have difficulty parsing them, the fact that they're actually basing their information off of real scholasticism is a good (although not sure-fire) sign.

Second, I recommend trying to read widely. Confirm what you've read. If somebody makes a claim that doesn't "feel" right, track it down. Find out what other people say. This is good practice anyway, because even people who aren't trying to peddle bigotry and nonsense are often wrong because of perfectly normal biases that aren't, like, awful. Just the other day I found several references online to something (I honestly don't even remember what I was looking up) being invented in 4,000 BCE when it was actually invented in 400 BCE because somebody along the way made a typo and all of the other SEO-bait websites were just copying the error. It didn't feel right, so I dug and dug and dug until I figured out what had happened.

Third, pay attention to who created the source. Google them. Are they a professor at a respected institution? Are they at the center of any Twitter controversies? What does their "About" page say? What does their purpose for writing seem to be? Do they come across as someone who loves a particular time period, or do they seem to be really interested in making a point (which doesn't automatically mean they're wrong, but it is a factor to consider). For example, if a particular article is deadset on talking about Vikings in a particular way... is that person writing a whole bunch of articles making the same point, and really hyper focused on that point, or are the rest of their articles looking at other facets of Viking life that don't make that point?

Who agrees with them? Are the people agreeing with them engaging in something that feels academically rigorous, or are they just happy to have "someone who sounds smart" agreeing with their pre-existing biases?

EDIT: Typo.

So the comments so far have been basically recommending "don't read casually, read academic articles". This is, to some extent, good advice, but it doesn't really help sort through the mountain of stuff that is online.

So, here are a few general tips to help out. unfortunately, these are not foolproof - things that are actually reliable and fine won't look like it, and things that pass these checks will actually have big problems. I'll give an example of one of those later.

1. Check the "about" page of the site! That should give some sort of introduction to either the organization or the person. If they're talking about how they're getting out the things mainstream academia won't talk about, that's pretty suspicious. If theyre a professional with a degree, they're probably a bit more trustworthy. This gets a shocking number of things out of the way quickly - a group like Norskk outright says "toxic masculinity is a good thing" which ought to be a sign that the things they claim were true of the Viking mindset are.. not.

2. obvious misconceptions. For something like "feudalism" or "the Church was oppressive and anti-science", where there are so many easily accessible and popular debunkings of the very basic strict hierarchy online, if a site is repeating the incredibly simplistic version, that suggests they aren't doing research, they're just writing what they think they know. So keep an eye on your knowledge base. There's plenty you have no reason to know, so you won't be able to detect a lot of these, but if you do see something that makes you go "that doesn't sound right..." Look around, see if there's a comment here or somewhere else you generally trust about it, and if the safe ground says that it's wrong, be suspicious of everything else the site says.

3. broad language. Internet sources necessarily have to simplify a lot for the sake of readability, but if they're talking about centuries of time or hundreds of miles as some kind of single unified entity, or an idea as being applicable for that, it's worth questioning that. This will often happen with the Vikings, and honestly with medieval political history broadly. A similar thing is true with something like religion: if they're framing religious groups as unified entities, even when it isn't totally inaccurate it's so simplified as to be generally unhelpful.

4. citations. Generally speaking, having more diverse and more recent citations is a sign that it's more reliable! Now, not every book is good, so this isn't a guarantee, but it at least indicates that they're trying, and if they have some sort of credential, it's often suggestive.

5. ask! If you genuinely aren't sure after those checks, ask other people! There are plenty of networks and creator fan communities with genuine experts, and talk to them to see if something is legitimate. Knowing the historiography of a field, and what scholars are discredited, what the current consensus is, etc. is not something casual readers should expect to know! For instance - "Norse Mythology for Smart People's" entry on Týr seems legit: while the site is a bit.. arrogant, the author is non-academic but did a lot of research, he only sometimes goes into "Viking Values" and other eyebrow-raising stuff, and he block-quotes academics with full citations! So it looks legit. But, on that page, the two scholars he cites to call Týr a god of Justice are Jan de Vries and Georges Dumezil. At least de Vries, and probably Dumezil too, were literal Nazis - de Vries was a registered member and Dumezil worked in the Vichy government and may have published Nazi stuff under a pseudonym. So, when de Vries says that there was no difference between war and justice in the Norse world, it hits a bit differently with that context (for the record, while he's not entirely wrong - the society resolved legal conflict through feuds and "viga", or battles, which Týr is a god of, justice also has an expect of mediation and settlement, which Forseti and Baldr are said to be better at in the same source).

It's a super good question to ask, and I wish there was an easier answer, but good luck and I hope this helps!

This is a simple answer, but look at the source and the sources they cite.

These are some things I ask my students to look out for:

- Is it trying to make an argument about the state of today's world in a very heavy-handed way? It is one thing to say, like "medieval cruelty does not manifest so much different from the current world" BUT a lot of WS site will say things like "The descendants of the powerful Flanders have that blood rushing through them today and are of higher intellect and talent just like their forefathers." While it doesn't technically say anything about whiteness/WS, it is inferring a genetic link to greatness. I lot of what you will come across might be 'encoded' so that it doesn't seem blatant.

- Is it suggesting that previous coverage of history is false or "hiding the truth?" It is good to be skeptical of historians and historical texts-- lots of historians have had a secret MO when doing work. But anything that suggests that there is hidden information that is secret and a conspiracy has been made to hide it, is generally incorrect, what is it is actually doing is trying to stop you from fact-checking.

- Do you have to be a paying member of a society/group to access it? While yes, library systems linked to academia make you pay for access, this is a bit different. There is some sort of membership that you must pay to get, and you usually have to be loyal to the group. This is distinct from like a subscription to a news site-- you aren't paying to fund the research/writing, you are paying to belong to the group. There are some exceptions to this, but like, those are few and far between.

- Google the authors/citations. If it is all the same people, citing one another, it is probably a bit 'intellectually incestuous' by choice. These are people writing to one another and keep the ideas internal and unchallenged. You might also find links online to their work elsewhere, or possibly even their CV, affiliations, etc. This will help give you a better sense of their intentions and credintials. If they've been speaking at places like "Identity Evropa" conventions or on particular podcasts, they might have ulterior motives.

- Does it make you feel "good?" I mean like, learning history is always exciting to me, but it also often is terrifying. Good history books should not be affectually neutral, but they shouldn't be feel good stories. Often, types of WS literature are designed to make the person feel pride and superiority. That is what hooks a lot of people in, and makes them easier to convince of the less factual information.

- Who is the publisher? Often, if it is a book from a major press or a university press, it is fairly well-vetted. If it is coming from a smaller press, it does not automatically mean it's bad (in fact, some small publishers have incredible works on them), but you'll have to research the press itself. Watch out for anything self-published or printed from Amazon. These are typically not vetted whatsoever, and you can say just about anything in them.

This is my very basic advice, but it is usually quite helpful. Always be suspicious, always double-check.

There are a few different things you can do to try to engage critically with pop medieval sources you read online. The first thing to do is to look at the website hosting the article you're reading. Sometimes the leaning of a website will be pretty obvious. For example, the front page of The Public Medievalist has several articles confronting white supremacy in medievalism. So if you are getting an article from there, chances are that it's not going to be promoting white supremacist distortions of history. I'd actually highly recommend you peruse their Race, Racism and the Middle Ages series to get a feel for what sorts of things to look out for. Their website frequently engages head-on with the misappropriation of medieval imagery by white supremacists and the history of white supremacists' love affair with the Middle Ages.

As far as specific "tells" to look for, there are some obvious ones. Anything that lionizes the Crusaders, particularly with the phrase "Deus Vult", is something to watch out for. That phrase has been taken up as a banner by Christian white supremacists who see the Crusaders as models to emulate, usually because of Islamophobia. Another one to watch out for is anyone who describes the white English as "Indigenous" to England. Besides the fact that this is simply false, given that the English came to an already-inhabited island in the early medieval period, it's often a dog whistle for anti-immigrant English nationalists. Insistence on England as belonging to the "Anglo-Saxon race" is a huge dog whistle too. British Empire apologia also makes its way into medievalism; if you see, for example, someone writing off British imperialism with the excuse that "England got invaded all the time in the Middle Ages", that's a sign that the author has rejected any engagement with postcolonialism and could be sympathetic to white supremacist ideology.

However, it's not always easy to diagnose an article as suffering from white supremacy outright. Paul B. Sturtevant, again of The Public Medievalist, addressed this in his article "Schrödinger's Medievalisms". As an example of how it can be difficult to correctly spot white supremacist medievalism in the wild, he writes about the so-called Vinnland flag. This flag was designed by the metal band Type O Negative in the 1990s. It looks a lot like Nordic national flags with its Nordic Cross design but is not actually linked to any real country. It has since been appropriated as a white supremacist symbol. When Sturtevant saw the flag flying next to real Norse flags, he was faced with a dilemma: Is this someone who thinks this is a real Nordic cross flag? Or is it a white supremacist? Without context, it's not always easy to tell. That's why looking around further at the website you're getting your information from is really important to try to determine the wider context in which this article has been written.

To show you how why it's hard to just give a laundry list of things to watch out for, I'm going to go through the example of the phrase "Anglo-Saxon. The use of the phrase "Anglo-Saxon" to describe the early medieval English has come under heavy criticism in recent years. This is because the term has been weaponized for centuries against Black and Indigenous people, particularly in former British colonies, as the name of the racial caste to which they can never belong. 18th century scientific racism created an image of the Anglo-Saxon as the superior race, which originally also excluded other white European groups such as the Celts. All of these were imagined as biologically codified identities which carried with them different intellectual temperaments, with Black people being put at the bottom of the list. You can see an example of the violent weaponization of the term "Anglo-Saxon" against Black people in the 19th century on this AskHistorians post by u/jschooltiger about the coup in Wilmington, NC. In keeping with this long tradition, white supremacists, particularly Americans and English nationalists, have been increasingly embracing the term "Anglo-Saxon" to stand in for their myths of a pure-white medieval England.

Mary Rambaran-Olm, a specialist in Old English literature, has been one of the most vocal scholars calling for the phasing out of the term "Anglo-Saxon" from medieval studies. Her most popular essay about the topic is probably "Anglo-Saxon Studies [Early English Studies], Academia, and White Supremacy". Another good read is "Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting “Anglo-Saxon” Studies". The backlash against Rambaran-Olm's work has been fierce, leading to doxxing and death threats against her. She resigned from the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, after which several other resignations followed.

While the Medievalists of Color organization issued a statement in support of her, others in the field and beyond have closed ranks against her. This 2019 blogpost by author Fenek Solère, "The Death of Anglo-Saxon England", calls Rambaran-Olm and other scholars of colour "cohorts of orc look-a-likes". Commenters on the article refer to Dr. MRO and her allies as architects of "white genocide" against "poor disintegrating white people" and say that they have "Anglo-Saxon blood to protect". The one who offers the latter comments suggests that restricting membership of ISAS to white people only would be a "great first step" in addressing the threat that Dr. MRO poses to medieval studies. Another commenter who identifies himself as an Anglo-Saxonist says that Dr. MRO and her allies are "neurotic women from non-white backgrounds" who are "despised" by many in the field. Other critics have not hid behind anonymity, such as Guy Halsall, who has openly mocked and harrassed Dr. MRO and her allies on Twitter. Due to all of this controversy, there have been recent institutional movements towards phasing out "Anglo-Saxon", such as the ISAS vote to change its name and the omission of the phrase from (most) materials relating to the 2020 International Medieval Congress at Leeds.

So with all of this context, you might think to yourself, "Is the use of the term Anglo-Saxon a dog whistle?" Within medieval studies, it is starting to become one. It is hard to overlook the links between criticisms of Dr. MRO and other non-white scholars of medieval English lit (such as Adam Miyashiro and Dorothy Kim) and the white supremacist fervor you saw in the comments on the above blog post. And yet, knowledge of this debate has been slow to trickle down to the general public. Although newspapers, particularly in England, have reported on the controversy, many journalists who use the phrase probably have no idea how controversial the term has become among medievalists. So it's not necessarily a reliable litmus test for white supremacist leanings. To this day our very own r/AskHistorians uses the phrase with no qualifiers, such as in this recent AMA. The term is still the standard used in English school curricula and by heritage bodies such as English Heritage. This is, perhaps, another case of a Schrödinger's Medievalism. When an online article you're reading uses the term "Anglo-Saxon", they may be doing so without any knowledge of the term's long racist history and the current controversies surrounding it today. That is, again, why context is so important in trying to evaluate the material you come across online.

Apologies for my ignorance but why is medical European history a hotbed for white surpremacist propaganda?

I’ve seen a couple of the other commenters link to articles and papers that argue that the term ‘Anglo Saxon’ is racist because it excludes, and has been used to do so, black and indigenous people. Is this an example of what is meant by propaganda?

No one's mentioned source evaluation, so let me add that to the list as well.

In general, based on your casual reading of your topic choice, you're probably going to be reading secondary or tertiary sources. As such, some incredibly important questions become:

• Who authored this, what was their goal?

If it was someone who works for a university, then this is probably a good sign (or at least not inherently a bad one). If it's some random person whose credentials are lack luster or not applicable, such as someone writing about early Christianity with a journalism background, then be skeptical and make sure to double check their sources. If you can't readily identify the author, I'd generally argue it's junk and should be ignored.

• Who published or hosted this? Why?

Similar deal, obviously if something's hosted on some known propaganda site, you should be very critical if you're to accept the source as a part of a serious discussion.

• Did they include citations?

Just as in debating, the burden of proof lies on the author. They back up their proof with citations that you can double check. If they don't have citations at all, that's a red flag. If they do, consider doing at least a skim of them, or reading the relevant sections in depth. Apply these same questions to the citations.

• How does this fit into the broader historical context and other work you've read?

/u/old-wise-wizard talks of this as well in their comment too, but after you've read for a bit, you ideally should be able to place the new item you're reading into a context somewhere around what you've already read. Does it make sense? Does it fit? If it doesn't, that doesn't inherently mean it's a bad source, but you should identify why it doesn't- are you missing information or have you read contradictory information?

On this point as well, tertiary sources often have some other red flags, such as an inappropriate use of anachronistic terms. If we're applying some modern societal concept to some other time, there's some due diligence here in making sure we're not just filtering to our world view and misapplying a term.

I came up with a list to sort out reliable information with my students.

Ask yourself who's the author: a content creator/entertainer (+0), a journalist (+0.5), an expert (historian with a PhD or a masters degree) (+1 or +2)? Does he/she subscribe to a political ideology or is he/she partial (-1)? Any author who cares to publish reliable information usually shares that kind of things publicly.

Can the webpage be modified at any moment by anyone (-1)? Does it have a DOI (meaning what's written can't be changed or edited once published)? Is it published on a well-known scientific review (+2)? or on a vulgarization online magazine (+1)?

To access scientific reviews or scientific books online I would recommend sci-hub or libgen.

If you go through those steps you can really weed out a lot of garbage.

On AskHistorians, most authors/contributors remain anonymous, however flaired user end up having a profile page where you can check their background and level of expertise (here is mine), then and foremost, all contributions and post are thouroughly checked through what could be considered an editorial process based on peer review (read the rules). That's why you can find reliable information here :-)

Any publication which doesn't at least try to give you the means to assess its reliability should be discarded by default, for it means someone tries to cloud your access to information. What for? Usually it's for the wrong reasons (or because of sheer lazyness--which is a wrong reason).

Gonna go in against the general tone of this thread and say: you probably can't.

Most of the focus here has been on the more obvious examples of propaganda. This comes down to how you define white supremacy, and who practices it. If you talk about white supremacy, you'd be forgiven if the first images which pop into your head are klansmen, alt-right chuds, or Edward Norton in American History X. That last example works well - in the movie you'll see several instances of the type of narrative you can expect from these people. From slur-based rants to more coherent ideological tales.

If you follow much of the advice given in this thread, narratives like these are fairly easily weeded out. Aiming for academic rigour will be enough. These texts tend to eschew more neutral language as they aim to drive home their point. They rarely cite sources, and when they do they inevitably lead to incredibly shady publications. An article in the Magazine for Totally Legitimate Criticism of Established History or a speech given at the Totally Innocuous Conference For Talking About Race might be a dead giveaway.

But the weak point of this approach is that academic history is rife with white supremacy - both historically and to this day. History is a field that has slowly built up its theoretical foundations - but therein lies part of the rub. Much of what a lot of historical writing is based upon is in and of itself rooted in a very eurocentric, if not white supremacist theory of yore. The impact of postmodernism and postcolonialism has done a lot to expose a lot of these biases, but this is very much a work in progress.

And add to that the fact that a lot of history tends to be - and this is endlessly frustrating to me - somewhat selective in its usage of theory. There isn't a single, unified theory of history so you have to de facto pick and choose. That includes from a lot of theories of history which should've been binned decades ago. But what I've encountered with many academic historians isn't so much that they consciously choose outdated theories - it's that they don't really put enough thought into making this choice at all. Even if all academic papers will have a methodology section, much of this will often still be devoted to source selection. The idea that being a good historian comes down to finding the right sources, differentiating them from the bad ones, and then writing down your findings is still rife withing the field. At least that's what it comes down to. What this ignores is the biggest factor in all of this: the historian and their beliefs. Even a first hand account, signed and notarised by everyone involved, will still be worth critiquing based on the way the historian involved interprets it.

And let's not get started on the argument about what The Right Way of interpreting sources is - as it simply does not exist.

All that to lead to the second group of writings which will push an inherently white supremacist agenda. The academic type. There's a sort of hubris involved in assuming that the historical method will protect us from white supremacy, as if white supremacists aren't clever enough to don the mantle of the academic. As if our club house is exclusive enough to prevent this. But here's the perfect example of the contrary: Niall Ferguson. As an academic historian, the man has all the right credentials. Here's a list of the instutions he's involved with:

Harvard University
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Christ's College, Cambridge
Peterhouse, Cambridge
Jesus College, Oxford
London School of Economics
New York University
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
Tsinghua University

Are you going to disagree with someone with these credentials? And for what it's worth, he defintitely isn't necessarily a bad historian - in the sense that he genuinely knows how to do research, how to write, is actually quite good at the whole thing. Especially his early work in financial history supposedly does have its merits. Basically, put him in a line-up of historians and he'll be difficult to pick out.

However. Aside from that, and more evident with each book he publishes, he's also a dyed in the wool white supremacist. An out-spoken conservative, cheerleader for American empire, fanboy of ghouls like Henry Kissinger, he's also always been a big defender of the British empire, a proponent of Western (read: white) supremacy, a pusher of fears of "Eurabia", and so much more. His most hideously influential books in this regard have been "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World" and more recently "Civilisation." In Civilisation, he shines his light on the great question: why has the West come to dominate in the past 500 years? (a question which in and of itself is worth scrutinising) The answer to Ferguson comes down to a more academic version of "Because we're better, innit?" The book also inspired a very fun interaction between Pankaj Mishra and the man himself in the London Review of Books - which started with a ruthless takedown of the book and ended in threats of libel lawsuits. Read it here.

Let me be clear: I fucking despise Niall Ferguson. But he's far, far from the only fairly respected academic historian out there pushing the same white supremacist agenda. They all look respectable, play by the rules. They lead you to the water, but will never make you drink it - they're clever like that. In that sense they're more insidious than outright fascist propagandists. Will Harvard break ties with Ferguson because Pankaj Mishra utterly merked him? No, that's academic debate. We can't censor this. Will the BBC stop interviewing leading pre-eminent and Harvard associated British historian Nial Ferguson? No, of course not. Will he not be invited by the British government to help rewrite British curricula? Hah! (Though IIRC that project was binned in the end after fairly heavy backlash)

And more importantly: can you, as someone who may not be versed in these academic struggles, nor in the field of history, identify the white supremacist ideology of the Fergusons of the world? No, of course not. Can people who are versed in such matters do this infallibly? No, there's simply no way to know every author's work to such a degree that you can critique them in this way. Tall trees like Ferguson will occassionally get cut down in academic circles (to the extent that the people who care about such things know he's a wanker, not that it'll impact his career in any way), but there's thousands of other Fergusons out there that there's no way of spotting and countering them all.

So, to answer your question: no, you can't. The most realistic solution would come from a radical shift within academia (which isn't exactly known for its radical shifts) to counter this and to promote more correct (??) usage of historical theories, as well as political mobilisation and pressure from outside of academia. But we're far from that point at the moment.

EDIT: I must apologise for the disorganisation in my answer, I will try to edit it altogether as soon as I can. I hope my answer can hopefully offer a case study of looking at the specific issue of ethnography/geography in relation to challenging false assumptions that are taken advantage of by those seeing to use medieval history for white-supremacist goals - the overall issue of source criticism has been wonderfully answered by so many comments on this thread!

My answer is probably going to be a bit all over the place but I hope that it might be helpful and offer some starting points not only in identifying material which may have white supremacist or far-right motivations, but also in examining some potential issues and challenging some assumptions which may contribute to sympathy toward such positions.

Ensuring that the documentary record hasn’t been tampered with is also of exceptional importance. When individual words can construe a text’s overall meaning, it’s vital that both the original text has been transcribed as accurately as possible and translated in good faith. When it comes to dealing with the likes of white supremacy and other far-right groups, it’s important to distinguish between an alternative interpretation and outright lies. Naturally, especially with certain archaic languages where the volume of the surviving corpus of work is quite low, it would be expected that translations and disagreements over meaning may arise. However, there’s often blatant and outright attempts to misconstrue the meaning of texts and its important to be able to consult the source material. The 1996-2000 case of David Irving V. Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books highlighted the extreme danger that was posed by pseudo-academic works percolating, in very sublte ways, far-right conspiracies such as Holocaust denial through the deliberate mistranslation and distortion of texts. Off of the top of my head, the popular television series Ancient Aliens is notorious for its ridiculous interpretation of texts that I’d argue has white supremacist undertones.

There’s been a considerable push in recent decades to implement critical theory in medieval studies; I’d argue that it would be more productive to only refer to any ethnographic or geographic terminology if it is in the context of understanding such terms as phenomenological artefacts of a given time. There’s often a tendency to refer to ethnic groups such as the “Anglo-Saxons” or the “Germanic tribes” as though that these are tangible entities and that the ethnic signifier represents some sort of objective cultural entity. /u/Kelpie-Cat/ ‘s answer is a fantastic read regarding the issue with the term “Anglo-Saxon”, and I think it should encourage criticism of how we engage with constructed terms in every aspect. I’d highly recommend reading Patrick J. Geary’s The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe for an insight into this []; it provides a concise summary of how issues of identity and extreme ideologies emerging from the far-right have interacted with medieval history, and offers a helpful insight into how constructed myths and perceptions of medieval history were established, notably in the 19th century. I’d also highly recommend Geary’s paper on Ethnic identities as situational constructs; here’s a useful quote from his concluding statements:

A man might speak a Romance language, dress as a Frank, and claim Burgundian law. How he perceived his ethnic identity, and how he was in turn perceived by others, if in fact anyone thought of his ethnicity at all, is impossible to determine as an objective category25a). The only alternative is to look at specific instances in which individuals or collectivities ar.e given ethnic identifications, and attempt to discover the reasons for these labelings.

I distinctly remember during a survey module on Viking history that we distinctly refrained from using maps, but rather used satellite imagery to help us situate our studies geographically. The old adage – that the map (a graphic representation) is not the territory (actual thing that is the subject of such representation) – is incredibly important here. You’ll often see popular YouTube channels or even popular map related subreddits utilising maps as if they represent some sort of inherently objective perspective.

I think it might be helpful to consider looking at some medieval maps for a moment here to help us deconstruct our present assumptions about maps, and I’ll explain in a moment why this is relevant to the original topic. Medieval maps have long been criticised for their inaccuracy in depicting the physical world, but a massive increase in scholarship beginning in the 1970s has begun to unravel this criticism. The maps really should be seen as artefacts of a perspective of the world, and it provides us a fascinating insight into how medieval peoples perceived so many concepts from space and time, religious and cosmographical beliefs, and ethnography and geography. The same can and should be in mind when considering modern day maps, and that applies just as much to modern-day maps claiming to be. I’ve often been a bit concerned about how maps have this sort of authority – look at the popular grand strategy games produced by Paradox Interactive which are fixated on the perspective of maps, and interaction with the world is entirely through the lens of a map – I’m not entirely surprised either that these games have fostered a vehement problem with far-right ideology.

Fundamental assumptions regarding ideas of ethnicity and geography have to be challenged, and understanding that the highly subjective nature of them as constructs I think will help to challenge solidified ideas of a mythic past. Being critical of how the past is used to – talk of mythic “nations” in the past and the use of maps may be for various ends including irredentism and the like. However, /u/Kelpie-Cat ‘s discussion of Schrödinger's Medievalisms" does raise an important issue in trying to establish whether any instances of using terms, or drawing up a map of a perceived past are necessarily for white-supremacist ends. Whether it is the intended goal or not, it is important to be vigilant and critical of the material you engage with, especially when conspiracy material often works in subtle ways by attaching itself to material that may only be moderately controversial to construct an apparent image of repute.

NOTES Geary, Patrick J., 2002. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Geary, Patrick J., 1983. “Ethnic identity as a situational construct in the early middle ages” in * Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien*, vol. 113, pp. 15-26.