| The article focuses on the fact that nobody checks citations, but that isn't a problem specific to history. It's more like a general issue with academia. Science papers have the exact same problem. I found during COVID many papers being widely cited in the press as the consensus of experts which had bogus citations in them. But there are other issues that are actually specific to history. Some years ago I had fun writing a series of essays about these, through the framing of conspiracy theories about history. Part 1 looks at claims that key historical sources might have been forged during the Renaissance. https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-part-1-... Part 2 looks at problems with astronomical dating methodologies. https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-part-2-... Part 3 looks at methods like radiocarbon dating and tree ring counting. https://blog.plan99.net/meta-historical-conspiracies-part-3-... The goal here was to describe other people's claims about historical "replication problems" for entertainment purposes rather than try and discern the truth, so I wouldn't argue they're all real. But the trend towards presenting history as scientific doesn't gel well with the culture in the academic humanities. As dmvdoug writes, historians don't really care about even basic things like whether citations are accurate, let alone more debatable things like the accuracy of radiocarbon dating or whether sources have plausible chains of custody. And as the story of Henry Cort demonstrates, historians will happily make up narratives from whole cloth if it advances their ideological agenda, yet nobody within the academy seems to care. |