History Written as It Should Be

Regular readers know that I'm a history buff. One of the themes in history that interests me is the rise and fall of empires. What causes a people to build empires? How do they arise? How and why do they fall?

This morning I've been reading some excellent accounts of three events that not only fall under that general theme, but, two of them, at least, are exemplary samples of how history should be written in that all the facts, not just those that support the author's biases, are examined and, they get into the mindset that prevailed at the time, judging the actions of the people by the standards that prevailed in their own era.

The first deals with the question of whether or not the word "genocide" should be applied to the American conquest of the original inhabitants of this continent. This is a field of inquiry that is littered with very bad history. In other words, there is little or no evidence the principles described in the previous paragraph were applied in the writing of this history and much of it is agenda driven. You can see an example of bad historiography here. Here is another one, only marginally better. Compare those to the one pertaining to the genocide question that I consider exemplary.

The other two deal with Islam's history vis a vis Europe and, via YouTube videos, oral histories about Arab treatment of indigenous Jews, a story not often told:









It has been estimated that up to 1,000,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries to Israel. We're not talking European Jews here. These are indigenous Jewish "Arabs" who had lived in North Africa and the Middle East for millennia, longer, in fact than the true ethnic Arabs.