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Toucan& #39;s 1 step solution to being less wrong about the USSR or any other historical event.
Step 1. Don& #39;t read one single primary account and assume it is universally correct.
Step 1. Don& #39;t read one single primary account and assume it is universally correct.
If you say read Trotsky& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s stretching historian a lot) I actually can& #39;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& #39;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
