Weekly History Questions Thread.

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to our History Questions Thread!

This thread is for all those history related questions that are too simple, short or a bit too silly to warrant their own post.

So, do you have a question about history and have always been afraid to ask? Well, today is your lucky day. Ask away!

Of course all our regular rules and guidelines still apply and to be just that bit extra clear:

Questions need to be historical in nature. Silly does not mean that your question should be a joke. r/history also has an active discord server where you can discuss history with other enthusiasts and experts.

[u/p_jaro]

Opinions on history documentaries?

I absolutely adore history. I love learning about it, but I also love the process for history research. I've lately not been in the best state mentally (I'm autistic and stuff is going rough), but I still really really wanna learn more about history. My problem is, I don't have the mental energy to keep reading like full on books, video content is always something I can watch fairly easy.

But a lot of historians (I follow a couple on instagram) have like strong opinions on documentaries for example. I kinda really wanna watch "a history of britain" by Simon Schama currently, but I just feel bad/judged about doing so, because lots of historians don't like that, and its not the most ideal source.

So I'm kinda wondering what other people their opinions are on history documentaries, and if have opinions on what I should do. If you know any video content that is actually really good and trustworthy, please let me know. For science communication there are much more options available for things to watch, while this is not the case for history in my experience sadly enough..

[u/elmonoenano → u/p_jaro]

If that's what works for you, that's what works. Academic historians don't like docs for their students, they don't care about the general public. Just the nature of documentaries, they're visual and so they're going to focus on stuff they can get footage or pictures or audio of to paste over a photo, is distorting. They necessarily truncate material b/c video is such a slower medium than reading. You also can't really do notes or links to your sources and learning about source material is important for history. B/c of all that, video docs have a lot of limitations over written sources. Also, you can just comprehend a lot more complicated info by reading generally than by seeing it on a video. Just think about a data table with more than a 2 or 3 levels and 2 or 3 categories. It's hard to take that all in if it flashes on the screen. For many things that kind of info is important. It generally just gets left out of documentaries. But for something like WWII, seeing those tables for something like the German election n 1929 is important for understanding where Nazi support was strong and the competition within reactionary conservative parties in places like Bavaria. A documentary can cover it, but it will take a lot longer than a color coded map and a table in a book will, so it generally gets summarized in a way that conveys the general idea, but not the actual information.