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“Historical hear me out” and I nine times out of ten it’s either the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon or Simón Bolivar. That’s not a hear me out, that’s common knowledge, show us something rare!

#Hear me out is either obscure or non-hegemonic or incomprehensible to the human mind #Like surprise me #Hear me out #history crushes #History fandom

this is only dubiously related to amrev and honestly applies to every history fandom, but i’ve seen some debates lately and i just want to remind people about a little thing called “source literacy,” at least in the space i’m in. so, you know how whenever you read anything historical—like, anything at all—you really need to stop and ask yourself a few questions first?

does the writer of this source have an agenda, either for or against the person they’re writing about? maybe they were friends, maybe they were rivals, maybe someone paid them to hype the person up or totally trash their reputation. sometimes the whole thing is just a super dramatic diary entry or a spicy take meant to get attention. there’s a lot of propaganda and personal beef mixed in with “history.”

then there’s how much should we actually trust them? just because something got written down doesn’t mean it’s automatically true. people lie, people exaggerate, people forget, or just hear something from a friend of a friend. sometimes an entire legend or reputation is based on one petty letter, or on a rumor that snowballed for decades until everyone started treating it like gospel.

there’s also the huge question of how biased is this account, really? who gets to tell the story? who gets left out? whose voices got erased because they weren’t rich, powerful, or the “right” kind of person? it’s not just about what the sources say, it’s about what’s missing—and why it’s missing.and on top of all that, memoirs are their own special brand of unreliable. some people love to treat memoirs as if they’re these perfect, first-hand “recordings” of the past, but honestly? memoirs are just memories, and memory is unreliable as hell. someone can be truthful in the sense that they’re describing what they remember or what they believed at the time—but “truthful” doesn’t automatically mean “factual.” truth is not the same as fact. two people can write about the same event and have completely different stories, not because one’s lying (necessarily), but because memory does its own editing over time. you can have multiple “truths” existing side by side in memoirs, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got the actual, objective facts. facts are slippery, and history rarely gives us the full set.

so honestly, how much should we really rely on these sources to draw any real conclusions about who this historical person actually was? probably not as much as we want to! it’s tough enough to know what people are really like now, even with social media and video and a million receipts. with history, we’re sometimes working off a few angry letters, maybe some over-exaggerated accounts and a portrait that probably doesn’t even look like the person irl. that’s not exactly a 4k documentary.

so, idk, next time someone pops up with “did you know this historical figure was literally evil incarnate?” or “this historical figure was a flawless icon,” just pause and ask: who wrote this? what was their deal? what did they want me to believe?

because, at the end of the day, history is just a story—a story told by a bunch of unreliable narrators, all trying to get you on their side.

reposting on main

#alexander hamilton #hamilton fandom #amrev #frev #napoleonic era #history fandom #source literacy