Mark Day (3)

I read this book in conjunction with a short course I took; it was a challenge to read and, in my opinion, not particularly well written. He kept telling the reader what he was going to write about and then saying he would have more to say in a later chapter and mentioning something that he wasn’t planning to discuss at all, or at least not until a later chapter — annoying style! In the introduction he said “[His] aim is to introduce these and other approaches in a way that requires no show more prior knowledge on the part of the reader, but which moves beyond an elementary level.” For me, he did not succeed. Despite all of that, and not following or understanding significant portions of it at all well, I think I learned some things and certainly pondered others: there is no single “right” way to pursue the study or the writing of history; always, as a student and as a historian, be skeptical and insist upon evidence to support facts, interpretations, opinions & conclusions; your reality may not be my reality but both may be true; my belief that a fact, by definition, is incontrovertible, and therefore that historical facts must be accepted is not necessarily true; we cannot, in many ways, ever really know “the truth” about the past. show less