Don't believe the history, it's written by winners. True or not? Discuss

modern historians in democratic countries vs medieval "historians"

Fuck I hate those shopping mall/pawn bullshit, it's 80% of the content and it has NOTHING to do with history, at least ancient aliens as retarded as it was had pydamids and shit

Fuck off.

History is not written by the victors. I sympathize with people saying that because it is an easily understandable way to convey the problematic nature of written evidence, but it has the effect of replacing one misleading, monolithic interpretation of history ("our sources are trustworthy") with another misleading, monolithic interpretation of history ("our sources are untrustworthy"). "One size fits all" models of historiography are never applicable for individual historians, who are after all complex and loaded with their own personal biases.

Take Tacitus' Agricola as an example. It would be hard to argue against the fact that the Romans "won" in Britain by the time he was writing, given that the titular governor had led his soldiers all the way up to the north of Scotland (this has been confirmed by archaeology, by the way). But Tacitus' sympathies are clearly with the British who he sees as fighting for their liberty against the morally degenerate tyranny of Rome. If you think that winners write the history books, you will think that, ok, the Romans won, and Tacitus is a Roman, he should be biased against the British so anything he says favorable to them can be take as accurate. Many writers have indeed taken this position, and it is absurd.

If you want one nice, "one size fits all" historiographic model that is a good starting point to examine the individual writer's bias, it is that history is not written by winners, but by writers. For most of history the writers came from a distinct social class, not necessarily at the economic and political top, but far from the bottom. They were also highly educated and thus concerned with the preoccupations of the highly educated in that particular society.

To give another illustrative example of this, the Chinese literati were very much against the Mongols despite the Mongols being some of the more impressive victors in all of history.

History channel has always been shit. At least today there's no pretense to be real history. Back in the day, their """documentaries""" were always inaccurate garbage that spread misinformation and did more damage to historical understanding in our society than basically anything else.

Elaborate please.

Is modern Marvels and engineering an empire still made or at least rerun? I haven't had cable since like 2010.

It's interesting, sometimes the very opposite is true. Often the losers have the advantage in terms of historiography. Because the defeated tend to "rally around the flag" so to speak: feeling under threat, they almost unanimously promote a historical interpretation favorable to them. While the winners feel confident enough, being the victors, to not be defensive about their actions and be more critical of themselves.

For example, after WWI the Germans were pretty well unanimous in rejecting the Treaty of Versailles' war guilt clause and saying they dindu nuffin, while the French and British were divided with many even coming to favour the German view, which in many ways is still the dominant popular view today (despite being rejected by most academic historians).

Another example: in Israel, there are the "New Historians" who reject Israel's national myths and side more with the Palestinians, while there are no equivalents on the Palestinian side.

A lot of the winners often couldn't write.
>And then our glorius army fought and died against the 6 gorilion barbarians. Not a single man retreated! The bravest soldiers this world has ever saw and the purest blood this soil ever drunk.

I don't know what more to say. The old historical documentaries the history channel used to put out were very inaccurate. They were very over-simplified, and promoted myths like "the Medieval period was a Dark Age" and "the Soviets only defeated the technologically superior Germans through human wave tactics". They were very sensationalist, always advertising some big discovery that CHANGE HISTORY FOREVER but just ended up being speculative nonsense.

Watch any History Channel program about a historical period you actually know a lot about, and you'll be able to see how inaccurate they are.

>as it was
it's returned now

>History was sritten by winners
Marko Polo wrote his story inside a prison after losing a battle.

>pawn bullshit
wtf say another thing against the ultimate pawn stars and my mom will fucking kill you!

No.