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Toucan's 1 step solution to being less wrong about the USSR or any other historical event.
Step 1. Don't read one single primary account and assume it is universally correct.
Step 1. Don't read one single primary account and assume it is universally correct.
If you say read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and assume it is 100% correct your really fucking wrong.
If you read only John Reeds Ten Days That Shook the World and assume it is 100% correct your very fucking wrong.
If you read only John Reeds Ten Days That Shook the World and assume it is 100% correct your very fucking wrong.
Peoples accounts of events are actually very useful in constructing a history, they often are more engaging then like secondary sources as they often are telling more of a story about a single person and are easier to follow
I often use them for details you won't find in a lot of secondary sources that I think help make things less boring, little stories, the weather and such.
"But Toucans Historians use Primary sources" that is true but they don't grab one and declare it to be correct with no further investigation there is a process of what information and as pointed out here what information you want for what kind if history.
If your using 1 primary source is not what ideally a quality historian is doing(though military historians kind of did this for the eastern front and just took like 3 nazi generals at their word and it resulted in really bad history)
and for amateur historians like me(and i think that's stretching historian a lot) I actually can't access all the evidence that exists to fully evaluate primary accounts and make my own histories. I am mostly going off the work of historians who have wrote great books.
I might be taking from several to tell a story they didn't tell and using their evidence. If maybe it is a story no historian has really focused on i might collect a dozen accounts, or take stories from other historians to enhance what someone else wrote and then condense to vid
