One thing (among many) I really enjoy and admire about this blog is the way he goes “under the hood” of historical scholarship while still condensing complex topics into a blog post. We hear about primary sources, things we simply don’t or can’t know but can guess at, some of the state of the debate, etc. His writing gives you a sense of what a historian does in a way that many history books don’t.

Besides just being interesting in and of itself, I think it raises an important caution for laypeople. It’s easy to read a secondary source and take it as authoritative, while having no idea where that source falls in the wider conversation. Consider how high school students are taught very different things about the civil war depending on what state they happen to grow up in (not trying to raise a shitstorm, it’s an example). It’s hard to evaluate anything you read when you don’t know what you don’t know.