How can hundreds and even thousands of years of history, which includes entire civilizations, discoveries and characters, so confidently be explained? Not all of it could have happened the way it’s being taught to modern society, right?
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I teach medieval literature, and a lot of my work is history adjacent, though I am not myself a historian. One thing that you will quickly see the more you read history is that the confidence with which something is asserted is often inversely proportional to the expertise of the speaker and the audience. Pick up virtually any book by an academic historian whose target audience is other historians and you will quickly see that there are often multiple competing hypotheses around how to interpret historical events that will be discussed with consistent reference to primary historical sources and (in my field increasingly) archaeological finds. In early medieval history, the first chapter of many books begins with frank confessions of the paucity of evidence and the inherent uncertainty of what we do know, and historians often question whether we actually can know basic facts for sure. If the medieval writer Bede asserts that something happened one hundred years before he was writing, and he is the only source for that claim, can we be confident in knowing it? Historians will then look for competing claims, investigate how Bede’s historical position might have led to biases (conscious or unconscious), look for other kinds of support, etc.
In books aimed at popular audiences, there is often very little of this. Part of this is that these kinds of books will often focus on areas of broad agreement or point out interesting details. In terms of the history of the English language, books by Bill Bryson have probably been read more widely than most books by experts in the field (with the possible exception of David Crystal) because they are accessible and also pretty good. But I would never teach a class using one of Bryson’s books as a textbook because he just doesn’t give the kind of detail that I would want. Telling a good story is his first concern, and he does it very well.
But the other part of it is that writers of popular history often ignore the competing hypotheses and detailed work that is the life blood of historians. To judge by the popular press and number of copies sold, three of the most influential books of history would include Jared Diamond’s *Guns, Germs, and Steel*, Reza Aslan’s *Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth*, and Steven Pinker’s *The Better Angels of Our Nature*. All three authors have advanced graduate degrees, but also, their degrees are quite different than the topics of those books. Jared Diamond has advanced degrees in physiology, Reza Aslan in creative writing and sociology, and Steven Pinker in cognitive psychology. But these books, which have shaped how the public thinks about anthropology, religious history, and the history of violence, have had approximately zero impact within each of those fields, and arguably have had a negative impact because scholars have had to spend their time arguing against the misconceptions promoted by the books.
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