Historiography Thread

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>>1998224
Basically this.

>>1998230
>normative statements and values-based judgments
So it got worse in every conceivable way?

>>1998254
Ding ding ding
Pre-colonial history is, however, a lot better if you ignore commentary and look at the sheer archeological evidence.

>>1998230
>>1998254
But pre-1960 world history was nothing but WE WUZism by every interested party.

It's archaeology, not history, but there's been a pretty dramatic leap in our understanding of prehistoric violence. As late as the 90s many anthropologists and archaeologists believed that prehistoric hunter-gatherers almost never practiced warfare (as in: they might've murdered each other occasionally, but never fought what we'd recognize as wars), and that warfare came about after the agricultural revolution. They had some some decent evidence, too, it wasn't all noble savage bullshit. Eventually new evidence came to light and although there are still dissenting voices the current thinking is that even Paleolithic humans were violent as fuck and that, believe it or not, as they've "civilized," people by and large have become less warlike over time.

Similarly there are a couple of societies that most people thought were largely nonviolent. The Hopi and the Maya come to mind. Shockingly enough, they fought just as much as the next guys. Deciphering the Maya writing system helped a lot with that. That was a major development -- it opened up a whole area of history that used to be pretty opaque.

>>1998224
We've uncovered more documents and moved beyond the more nationalist historiography of the early to mid 20th century which helps keeps things "as they essentially were" historically speaking. OTOH, post-modernist revisionism is fucking ruining history and the humanities and sociologyfags need to fuck off back to their containment department instead of flooding historiography with irrelevant social history bullshit. I know I'm gonna get put on blast for stating social history so I'm gonna clarify: there's a huge difference between the social history of peasants vs kulaks during the last Tsarist period and "study of gay women nobles in medieval Turkmenistan"-type bullshit