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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

There's a bit of a generic problem here. "Pop-history" books generally need to be based around some sort of narrative - it's what primarily distinguishes them from their "purely academic" cousins. But the problem that the academic world often has with them is not the facts they contain, but the fact that they try to spin a narrative that the academic world doesn't yet feel "full" consensus on.

Consequently, if you're an author seeking to be absolutely fidelious to the known facts about some period of history somewhere, but nevertheless desire to spin a narrative from them, then frequently no matter what that narrative might be, you're crossing a line that many in academia don't think you should cross.

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Is it true, though, that academic works don't spin a narrative? That's a large part of what historians do: attempt to reconstruct a consistent version of events, what caused them to occur as they did, and what their effects were — in short, construct a coherent narrative. There might be a difference in emphasis on the average, with pop history focusing more on the narrative and less on facts that might be inconvenient to it, but some of the best and most influential rigorous historical works are those that present an interpretation of historical events that requires reevaluation of the narrative of preceding work.

I think the academic tone is closer to:

"Event A happened. Event B happened. Event C happened. In that order. Perhaps that means X"

The pop-history tone is closer to:

"Historical character M had plans to N, inspired by O. This is supported by the evidence we have for events A, B and C."

Academic works almost always advance arguments. "X is correct because we can see A, B, and people would have understood that in light of C. Critics will point out Y, which is addressed by D, E, and F".

There's no firm line between scholarly and pop history other than the reputation and credibility of the work, which often isn't obvious to lay readers.

> "Event A happened. Event B happened. Event C happened. In that order. Perhaps that means X"

That's both academic and pop-history, where a better representation would be "A gazillion different events happened but let's talk about events A, B, and C." It's impossible to talk about all the events that happened, so everyone needs to select the "important" ones. Of course when selecting what's "important" the bias is employed. It's not uncommon to reach different conclusions when looking at certain events (while disregarding others).

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