First Actual Blog

Academic history demands much more focus on the truth than popular history. Of course, verified sources are massively important to academic history. The only way to obtain any true credibility is to base research on actual fact, and popular history is less likely to follow this requirement. The reasoning for this difference comes down to audience and the person writing the history. A non historian is more likely to use a less legitimate source and a popular audience is less likely to catch this. However, a historian’s works are more likely to be scrutinized by those in the know (their audience), so they spend more time verifying their sources. Furthermore, non historians are more likely to succumb to emotion and myth than true historians. Humans like to either see all the good or all the bad when looking back in time, so an untrained writer is likely to unintentionally bleed more of their biases into their writing than a historian. Don’t get me wrong, historians are definitely biased as well; however, they should be better at focusing on hard fact than a popular history writer. All of these differences come down to one key characteristic: academic history should be more reliable than popular history. All of the standards that have been mentioned are important because they make academic history, ideally, more accurate.