Historians Are Journalists in Disguise
Academic historians are journalists. As such, one has to be skeptical of what academic historians produce.
First, the academic historian is a corrupted scholar. For most of human history, the historian profession was open to everybody. Historians just wrote down their observations with some speculations. In fact, the word "history" is derived from "witness" and "seeing."
Now you need to obtain a degree to be a recognized as a historian. Like for all academic fields, this fact corrupts what they produce, because truth has become less important than what's fashionable, and historians have an incentive to buttress conventional beliefs—even if false— to secure a job. Truth is sacrificed for publication and job advancement.
Here’s how mathematician Nassim Taleb illustrates how academic fields are prone to producing noise in his book Antifragile:
… if you want to be convinced of my point of how noisy science can be, take any elementary textbook you read in high school or college with interest then—in any discipline. Open it to a random chapter, and see if the idea is still relevant. Odds are that it may be boring, but still relevant. It could be the famous 1215 Magna Cart (British history), Caesar’s Gallic wars (Roman history), a historical presentation of the school of Stoics (philosophy), an introduction to quantum mechanics (physics), or the genetic trees of cats and dogs (biology).
Try to go the proceedings of a random conference about the subject matter concerned that took place five years ago. Odds are it will feel no different from a five-year-old newspaper, perhaps even less interesting. So attending breakthrough conferences might be, statistically speaking, as much a waste of time as buying a mediocre lottery ticket, one with a small payoff. The odds of the paper’s being relevant—and interesting—in five years is no better than one in ten thousand.
Historians also write what grabs your attention, which leads to misleading narratives. They emphasize conflicts (war, crime, battles, politics, etc.) and whatever sounds interesting. When you read their books, you get the feeling that the world is more chaotic than it is. Like you and me, people living in that era likely didn’t care as much as the historian writing about the conflict.
When the Holy Roman Empire, a thousand year old empire, collapsed on August 6, 1806, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commented that day that the guests staying in the same inn as him were far more interested in the argument between their coachman and the innkeeper than in its collapse.
The best way to approach the work of academic historians is to read works that are older and have survived the test of time.
Here’s Taleb again:
One of my students asked me for a rule on what to read. “As little as feasible from the last twenty years, except history books that are not about the last fifty years,” I blurted out …
The student took Taleb’s advice and cleaned his reading list of new books.
…after a while, the student developed a culture in original texts such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Hayek, texts he believes he will cite at the age of eighty. He told me after his detoxification, he realized that all his peers do is read timely material that becomes obsolete.