Professor Julian Goodare - Reality checking for historians

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HCA Professor Julian Goodare

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How do historians study people? They evaluate their evidence, obviously, but Professor Goodare argues that sometimes they perform a 'reality check' on this evidence, applying human insight to it. This is a small aspect of the way in which historians, like other humanities and social science scholars, study human beings from the inside. This interior view sometimes presents difficulties, but it also gives them advantages. If historians were Martians studying humans from the outside with no insight into human behaviour, they wouldn't have this advantage. What would happen?

 

Professor Goodare's staff profile