Same reasons they want me to know not actual history, but HISTORIANS WHO ARE MY CONTEMPORARIES in one subject.
I mean, I do NOT give a single flying F about historians. I study history because, yeah, you guessed it, HISTORY. NOT HISTORIANS.
What's the difference?
I had to take the history of historians course when I did the history major. "Historiography" was the generally given reason for it. They want you to understand the development of the discipline and the evolution of the field. It was equally frustrating and I felt much as you did when presented with it. Grin and bear it if it's your career choice.
If you don't know historiography, it's basically impossible to do good history.
Problem is, there's no "just the straight facts" for history. Even reporting history requires word choice, and word choice imparts perspective. The linguistic turn, a philosophical development of the last three or four decades, made it quite clear that objectivity is impossible. What you have, is a bunch of people's interpretations of data, and interpretations of other interpretations. What anything means depends on how you tell the story.
So in that context, what other historians are saying, and why they are saying it, is hugely important! It is, in fact, all there really is about history. All good academic history spends a huge amount of time on historiography; it's basically the primary function of graduate school to teach you how to do historiography and Why You Should Care.
I think that Serza's an undergraduate, which makes it kind of awesome that he has to do historiography right now. But it's also apparent that whoever is teaching him isn't doing a very good job of it, and it shows why a lot of undergraduate programs don't even bother trying to teach historiography: it's not an easy concept to wrap one's head around.
I'd have dropped the course and reported him to the department ombudsman (I once did write a scathing letter about a prof to the ombudsman which had the effect of achieving an apology from the prof so sometimes that avenue works). I assume this is an instructor? If it is that's pretty unprofessional.
Doesn't always work, depending on tenure position and whether the syllabus was approved and a whole host of other random political garbage. Academic departments are, in that way, not too dissimilar from a school cafeteria.
I once TAed for a professor in a Plato-to-NATO drive-by European history course who got a lot of basic facts wrong. He was an Americanist who apparently took a trip to Europe and took everything that the tour guides said at face value. But I couldn't really do anything about it and mostly just had to commiserate with my advisor at the bar after class.
They had Scythians, Germanic Tribes, and the Roman Empire at least... I imagine they had a few opportunities.
"Marry me."
"Mmm, okay I'll be back after lunchtime with loot."
It does make for a good story. Saurometai warrior-women are one of the cooler things about steppe peoples.
Unfortunately, all of those stories rely on Greco-Roman ethnography, which was basically a steaming fetid pile of crap. Greek and Roman historians, from Herodotos to Ammianvs Marcellinvs, did not get very much right about the lands beyond the frontier for a variety of reasons. Often, they didn't do the research, and relied on tall tales. They also suffered from ideological blinders, in that their worldview required that classical Mediterranean civilization be the apex of, well, "civilization", and thus they ascribed progressively more "barbarous" activities to the peoples further and further from the imperial core. Often, these traits are not borne out by archaeology, like the claim that the Fenni (purportedly inhabitants of modern Finland) were cannibals and used only bone tools because they hadn't figured out metalworking or stone.
Oh right. Your English is so perfect that I always forget you're on the other side of the world!
So, one might say that you were...Czechmated?
The coolest accent I heard from someone irl was a woman who grew up in Ireland and moved to Minnesota so she had a bit of the Minnesota accent blended in. It was AWESOME. I want that accent.
I grew up in Germany and spent a few summers in the US in New Orleans as a child. Imagine a German-Yat hybrid accent, and you've got me.
Unfortunately, I don't have a mic, and I'm super shy, so I can't join in all the vocaroo festivities.
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