We have no formal definition - nor does anyone really - of who is or is not a historian. All that matters from our end is that you have the knowledge and ability to answer questions in line with our standards regarding depth, comprehensiveness and clarity. Beyond that, we don't particularly care who you are or how you were (or weren't) trained.
That said, what I suspect you're really asking is a matter of methodology, and our expectations surrounding it. Speaking very broadly, people's expectations surrounding historical methodology (insofar as they have any) tend to revolve around empiricism - that is, it's the job of a historian to find out 'what really happened' by examining source material from the period in question (that is, primary sources). This expectation has its roots in the nineteenth century, and is particularly associated with one of the founding figures of academic history in Germany, Leopold von Ranke. The historian's job, in this estimation, is to be the neutral arbiter of the past, utilising their detached, critical distance from events to ascertain the truth.
Empiricism still lives on in various forms, not least in the aspiration towards accuracy and truthfulness, and the underlying assumption (that historical knowledge is built on historical evidence) is still something that informs just about all historical scholarship. What has changed is the intellectual toolkit that historians use to unpack historical evidence, including what you allude to here as 'critical theory' or 'postmodernism'. Source criticism has always been built into the historical method, but as the discipline has evolved, historians have thought more about systemic ways in which sources should be viewed. The point of these different analytical lenses is not to impose answers on the past, but to ask new questions and think about the best way of shedding light on them. This, naturally enough, has often involved challenging and reassessing what was already known, not because facts stopped mattering, but because we know more about it, thanks to the new perspectives and sources that these lenses have helped us unlock.
Along the way, historians have grown more accepting of subjectivity in our work - that is, the nature of the historical record means that constructing single, definitive narratives isn't really possible. This makes plenty of sense when you think about it - primary sources provide us with scattered, incomplete and indeed often contradictory impressions of the past, and putting these together into an explanation or narrative requires creative input on the part of the historian. This means in turn that a perfectly reasonable other historian might do it differently and therefore come to different conclusions. This means that historians are now very skeptical of claims to neutrality - we ourselves are hardly neutral in the present, and our subject interest in past events is what drove us to study them. Von Ranke is himself an excellent example of this - he was a German nationalist, and this didn't just affect what he wrote, it informed his starting assumptions about what 'mattered' in historical terms (ie, the nation, where it came from and who shaped it).
In accepting that historical knowledge is subjective, most historians do not understand this as 'the truth doesn't matter, we can just say what we like in line with our worldview'. Rather, our burden becomes to convince - not just to lay claim to be telling a singular, correct narrative interpretation, but rather to show the reader the basis of our conclusions, and how we have found and used the available evidence to derive them. This has led to perhaps the biggest shift in history writing over the last century - not only are historians now much more concerned with laying out their methods and evidence to the reader, they are also much more careful and precise about how their narrative builds on or challenges existing knowledge. In that sense, contemporary history writing is far more concerned with evidence than previous generations of historians, whose argumentation often falls back on an appeal to authority, of the reader trusting that the esteemed author has synthesised the source material and come to the correct conclusion.
Where does this leave our forum? We don't expect, as one might in an essay, for users to explicitly deal with historiography or methodology in their posts here - if nothing else, the way that questions get framed here often really don't lend themselves to it. We also don't have any methodological litmus tests regarding which approaches or lenses someone chooses to employ in their work. What we would generally expect, particularly of flaired users, is an understanding of these broader methodological issues and how they relate to the decisions they make in presenting their knowledge. This isn't arcane knowledge - most undergraduate (and certainly postgraduate) history degrees would include some training in how history writing has evolved over time, and how the theory of history has shaped the way it gets written. There are any number of useful books that cover similar ground for specialist or more general audiences. If a user comes on here and directly or indirectly espouses a historical method grounded in an archaic understanding of what history writing should look like, then we would indeed have questions - not because we're trying to bury the 'facts' and assert a standard, politicised interpretation of the past, but rather because it is an indication that they do not have sufficient knowledge of current scholarship on the topic, which is a requirement for answers here. They're welcome to reject that scholarship, if they wish - but the burden is on them to demonstrate that they are doing so in knowledge of what that scholarship claims and able to show the basis of their alternative interpretation.
So I've read your comments u/Culebraveneno, and I have some thoughts.
As has been explained to you a dozen times, you have no familiarity with the basics of epistemology. It seems you want your version of history to be nothing but lists of dates and names, without realising that even that wouldn't actually satisfy your expectations of what history ought to be. /r/badhistory would have a fun day with you. You are also seemingly incapable of interpreting written words in good faith, because with every sentence you construct an absurd strawman. It's so absurd that even r/AntiWoke thinks you're being ridiculous (deleting the post when they didn't offer validation was a nice touch).
So let's try and explain it in a very simple list.
It really is that straightforward. No agenda, no tricks, no 'woke' (whatever that actually means). Only a recognition of humanity.
Your world-view seems to be one in which something is either objective or a fairytale, with nothing in between. That is obviously a false dichotomy, but you seem oblivious to the obvious. Historians cannot offer objective truth for the extremely simple reasons that have been explained to you (that you have completely ignored), but we can offer an approximation of truth. We cannot truly know with 100% certainty why Alexander the Great was such a successful conqueror, but we can list factors, like the military reforms of his father, and weigh them up according to what we think - and argue in academic journals - were the most important factors. Putting objectivity on a pedestal this high is genuinely a bit sad. Most things done or dreamt of by any human ever will fail your test of objectivity. You fail your test of objectivity, relentlessly and obliviously. Even a dull list of dates and names will fail, because a human decided which dates and names were important enough to go on the list.
As someone currently writing a translation of a historical text, I find your idea that these are somehow objective to be hilarious given that translation requires creativity. Words from one language don't always map neatly onto those of another, and therein lies... [suspenseful music]... subjectivity. O arbiter of the objective truth, should I translate "captus est" as "was captured", as would be literally correct, or as "was trapped", as would be contextually accurate? It matters. Imagine a translated text that discussed gender or sexuality - the choices the translator had to make about pronouns! And of course, the way you interpret those sources will, going by your comments, be intensely subjective. The mere fact of you reading it will subjectivity your "objective" source, because you will decide for yourself what it means. The things you tout as sources of objective history are up to their necks in human choices, and are therefore not objective. We try to minimise it, of course, but it will never be gone entirely.
Your issue with this subreddit sounds more like an issue with the humanity of humans. If your posts have revealed anything, it is that you are fundamentally incurious. You have sat down to tell us that you don't actually want to know why things happen, and that this is our fault. Many have tried earnestly to educate you on the epistemology of history, but among your responses to them are some of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent responses were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this interaction is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God your crusade for objectivity have mercy on your soul.
I'm curious as to the 'specific lens' you think a post-modern approach 'deliberately interprets' history through, and what you feel the role of a 'normal' historian is by contrast.
As an Early Medievalist, a "traditional" reading of many sources produces a history quite at odds with what archaeological, numismatic, genealogical or even foreign textual sources present, and the structures, hierarchies and political motivations behind why and how a work was produced and disseminated, how it survived and often how it was later translated, appropriated and often used in the construction of national mythos js just as if not more important than the contents of the works themselves.
It's for historians in the sense of people who are trained, credentialed experts in the field of history and have experience doing actual historical research and applying correct historical and historiographical methodologies to interpret and synthesize source material.
I'd be curious to hear you give an actual definition of critical theory and postmodernism and explain how they apply to history, or how you think they're applied to history anyway, and what you think "normal" history is by contrast. I suspect those answers would be quite revealing.
I gotta ask... You've asked one question on this subreddit, just prior to this post, which was simply about pre-modern methods of dealing with wasps. What exactly were you concerned about with an answer to that question!? Were you worried someone would write an answer like:
To answer this question we really need to pick apart the premise! First what is a building? Lets spend a few paragraphs looking at how the meaning of structures differed in the past and how we can't really think about this in the same terms they did then. So then, as for 'dealt with', what we mean by 'dealt with' is influenced by that perception of the building, so we need to consider that 'dealt with' exists in an entirely different frame of reference in the past. And of course, we haven't even gotten into defining what a wasp even is and whether people in the past thought of them in the same way we did".
Let's ignore everything else that people have (rightfully) pointed out in this thread, or the multiple strawmen you have built up, or how you are conflating the theoretical existence of an objective truth with the ability for you to know with certainty what it is. Everyone else is handling that just fine. ALL I want to know is what were you so concerned about when you asked that question that made you also ask this one? I'm doubtful anyone in this thread will manage to make a dent on your worldview here, but ... that is really what is baffling me the most. You didn't ask a question steeped in racial history, or gender history where... OK, whatever, sure... but what would an, ahem, 'woke' answer about killing wasps even look like in your mind?!
I am going to chime in on the topic that you have been discussing with some others. I hope that it is helpful.
You have been expressing history (the study of the past) as having an objective/subjective or fact/bias framework. I will be upfront in stating that I don’t find either approach helpful, but I’d like to talk about why.
First, as others have pointed out, there is no such thing as a fact that can be separated from its context or the context of the viewer. Think of historical pieces of evidence in the same way that physicists might view particles. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us that the more precision one has of the location of a particle the less able they are able to determine the momentum of that particle, and vice versa. Note, the question asked by the physicist—momentum or location—determines what possible determinations they can find. This is not to say that sources can’t surprise researchers and offer new insights, but it does mean that questions determine what people look for when they are sorting through large quantities of evidence.
The Uncertainty Principle also gives us another insight into studying the past—namely, that a single point of evidence is fairly worthless on its own. It needs to be placed into context. No particle, in itself, tells us about the matter it is a part of. It can’t even tell us both where it is and where it’s going on it’s own. Only in the context of a lot of other particles, the way they behave, etc, does that particle help us understand things. Similarly, pieces of historical evidence, bereft of other data are not particularly useful. They must be placed alongside other pieces of the past to make sense of them. These helpful data points can be about the same person at a different time/location or a different person with a similar circumstance or same time/location.
So what does all this mean? It tells us that a “fact” (I prefer the term evidence) can only be understood within the context of a host of other such pieces of evidence. But it’s still a fact in comparison to narrative, right? Not really. Here’s why. No one can have for themselves or depict for others all the contexts which provide understanding of that piece of evidence. What’s more, even if they could, there would still be pieces missing or lost to us. So the meaning and understanding of that evidence is limited by what the person viewing it can connect to it.
This means that the person viewing any source is providing the meaningful connections that make it useful or comprehensible. The evidence (object) only gains historical meaning through the connections made by the viewer (subject). This is why history is ALWAYS subjective. Because all life is.
So what do historians do? We gather, we organize, and then we interpret. All of this is subjective. We gather based on what is available, but also on what question we have. In my research I wanted to know how past educators taught the Holocaust so I gathered, among other things, textbook depictions of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. My question determined what sources I would bring together. Once the data is gathered historians organize it. They let the data itself determine the organization as best possible, but this has limits and will still include assumptions of the historian. For example, I created categories of depictions of Nazi atrocities based on what the textbooks themselves said, but even here I was connecting two or more books that stated things similarly but still differently. Finally, we analyze. We look at the patterns and determine what it suggests about the time we are studying. My research suggested that educators of the 1940s saw Nazi ideology as a threat to religion and the assault on the Jews as a consequence of Nazi anti-religion.
In other words, a much better way of thinking about the study of history is in thinking of it as contextualized or disassociated. You might say, dissassociated is what I want! Then I am free of those false associations others foist upon me. But in truth, you are making your own associations immediately upon encountering a piece of historical data. And if you are only making your own associations, you aren’t truly learning, just reinforcing.
So why trust historians? Because we spend a whole lot of time learning possible points of association, training ourselves in seeing likely and reasonable connections, and in organizing data in ways that help us see how others lived and thought. We also have pretty intricate methods of critiquing and challenging ourselves as a profession.
One final critique. You view history as if the first written source on a topic is correct or “fact”. Your example of a summary of Alexander the Great is, in addition to being factually problematic, in reality just a summary of the information about Alexander which were pertinent to the studies and purposes of the first authors on Alexander. In other words, your definition of “normal” in “normal history” really only means “political/diplomatic.” Yet humans don’t just live political lives. They live lives of interaction with their environments, work lives, and romantic lives. They understand the world though cultural connections, experiences as part of racial, ethnic, or gender groups, and through social positions.
So when they find a new statue of Alexander the Great in a location outside of where he was known to have conquered, you might see it as evidence of a longer expedition. Someone else though, might see the clothing he wears in the statue and connect it to changing fashion norms and ideas of decency. Another may note the new method in marble working that were exhibited in it and see connections of artists from x to y locations. None of these are more wrong or right. They may be better or worse connected to other sources. They may be less convincingly organized alongside other sources.
So when you decry particular history as “woke,” what you are really saying is that you don’t think people should make those connections. People shouldn’t connect Alexander to gender, or class, or power. You aren’t judging if the connections, patterns, and arguments are convincing. You are a priori declaring that those organizational principles—race, gender, class, etc—are categories that do and have never influenced how people acted. Which is, frankly, absurd.
I have read some of your replies u/culebraveneno and in those you say that if historians can't present something 100% objective it is the same as a fairytale. That is a very black and white viewpoint on something that is on a scale. Things can be more or less correct and true. It is about approaching truths. That doesn't make it as pointless as fairytales.
Isaac Asimov wrote a good essay about the relative truth of natural sciences. I think it applies here also. Which is kind of ironic, since in some sense he replies to someone that seems to have the world view that you claim that historians have.
"la_gubna:
DanKensington has a great comment on the myth of objectivity, where he also links answers by georgy_k_zhukov, mikedash, and itsallfolklore. To quote the important bit - "We don't do 'truth' or 'objectivity' in this business. Give that quest up now."
I'd like to say one final thing before I never use this sub again: The idea that history can never be objective, nor true, fuels lunatics like holocaust deniers, and the like. It also makes it impossible to refute such people, as, from this ridiculous perspective, they aren't wrong, because there is no objectively true history to hold up their absurd ideas to, in order to refute them. This, of course is unacceptable, and completely ludicrous. There is plenty of true, objective history that makes it undeniable that the holocaust happened, and only people that play games with truth and objectivity could possibly say otherwise. On the other hand, only people who accept that there is truth and objectivity in history can successfully refute people who manufacture their own version of history like this. No one should listen to history from anyone who claims that objectivity and truth do not exist in history, as they may well just be making it up as they go, and changing the facts to fit their narrative.
Not to mention, it is self refuting to say that what one is saying is history is neither true nor objective. It would only escape this dilemma if one were to call it fiction, rather than history. Since history that is neither true nor objective has no distinguishable differences from fiction, this may be an appropriate solution for those who feel this way. Thus, it is both incoherent, and morally dubious to say that history is not objective, nor true.