[UncleMeat]

> Everybody has the right to study history on their own, and I guess the world would be a much better place if many of us did.

I guess?

History is something that historians do, not study. There is a meaningful difference between an expert applying actual methods and an interested layperson reading primary sources for their own edification. Not to say that people should be prevented from doing that, but it does seem like a bait and switch to say "what about the historians" and then swap to "what about this entirely different set of people" when it becomes clear that historians aren't actually using ebay in the method you describe.

If you really care about laypeople having access to primary sources, a way bigger problem is the fact that most archives will not allow non-credentialed people to access their materials. There's way more "censorship" going on there than anything happening on ebay if that counts.

[fenderbluesjr]

Out of curiosity, what distinguishes studying history from doing history?

[UncleMeat]

Doing history is original analysis and narrative. The point here is to meaningfully explain the difference between what a history undergrad is doing and what a professional historian is doing.

Consider an algorithms class in undergrad. You can read about all sorts of algorithms. But learning the Nth algorithm won't transform your work into original algorithms research. You are only consuming information, not producing it. Similarly, just reading other history research can teach you things but isn't what historians are doing. A lot of "history buffs" fall into this category and love to read pop history and consider themselves experts.

Now consider somebody who wants to develop an original algorithm. But they've never learned any analysis methods and they've never critically engaged with the literature. They don't know how to prove an algorithm's correctness or behavior rigorously. There are a ton of these people online. They often gravitate to trying to solve P=NP. This would be comparable to somebody who never learned historiography (the method of doing history) reading primary sources and trying to replicate what historians are doing. Like any field, history has methods. It isn't just ad-hoc decision making from people who happen to have a title next to their name.

In CS this is largely harmless. But for many fields within history, accessing the archive also damages it because people are touching one-of-a-kind objects. So archives are selective in who they choose to allow to access their materials.