#jfc this is long akksldldld

[fitzrove]

Rant vaguely related to my previous rudolf post & academic history (delete later) (WAY too specific)

The way people talk about historical research fields and topics sometimes (online and irl) is honestly Really Stupid aihoådögltslhlgl. In designating "old white men history" (= political, military, macroeconomic...) and white men historical figures obsolete and unworthy of any further study, people are robbing themselves and others around them of greater understanding of phenomena that have real and ongoing consequences/effects upon the present day.

I told a former classmate I was studying abroad for a more varied perspective (instead of the boxed-in provincial narrative you get from just using sources, lit and theories from your home country) and that my new thesis was going to be about a ww2 topic. She made a disgusted face, glibly going "Ah, as if that hasn't been researched enough!". She wouldn't hear me out when I said that my topic actually has real life implications for politics, memory culture and international relations today lol.

To some people, just because a field has been researched a lot (and often with outdated methods, by white men in the 1950s etc), it becomes worthless and you should rather look at unexplored territory: people "forgotten by history", marginalised groups, new approaches, big emphasis on the social, cultural, personal, individual. But for a few reasons, claiming that studying "old white man history" in the 2020s is "useless" is very flawed lol. Because:

In a lot of cases, The Book on something (be it a specific aspect of a topic, an individual person, or just a topic as a whole like WW2 for instance) will have been written in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s... Research methods have evolved a LOT since then, and the demands on researchers to reflect on their biases are a lot stronger now. Historical research doesn't exist in a vacuum and is never completely objective - it's a self-correcting field, though, and new studies aspire to build on and improve upon previous ones. You wouldn't trust medical research from 50+ years ago to be the best possible knowledge on a given topic to be trusted forever and never re-examined, would you?? Why would you a history book, then?

Old white men are the ones who had power for vast lengths of time in history. In many countries old white men are still the ones in power. Political and military history, as well as macroeconomic history, are (in summary) about the study of power. You can't gain knowledge of how "the enemy" (or: those holding the power in society) operates only by studying the way their "victims" experienced their influence. You need to look into the people in power themselves. And someone needs to do this now, with modern research methods, so we have the best possible knowledge of the subject! Additionally, modern old white men often stan historical old white men and might make rhetorical references to them in speeches etc... It's important to know how they conceptualise the world and its history, because so far they're not going anywhere...

People are so dumb akgösphkpd like they will hear "political/military history" and not even know how much the fields have changed and evolved in the last 30 years 😭😭😭 Its based on this stock stereotype of what those fields are, when in reality the sharpest criticism of previous approaches comes from within the field - which seeks to self-correct. Again, you wouldn't assume that physics ended with Einstein...... why assume that historians can never improve their methods or reach new conclusions based on already-studied sources??

Putting pressure on women specifically to only study social/cultural/microhistory, and insinuating that they're betraying their gender if they don't, is just straight up sexist lmao. You don't expect this of Matt age 21 who loves tanks and literally just wants to study idk tank formations, why do you expect it of me?? Ditto for queer people and any other marginalised group you could think of.

As for Rudolf specifically? Yes he sneaked in again fkflld. It's worth it to point out his problematic relationships with women, yes, and SPECIFICALLY the historical agency and existence of those women outside of him lol. (Which is still a bit lacking.) But it's not smart or feminist or even morally right to avoid looking at where the Mayerling obsession as a whole comes from. The fact is:

1. Rudolf had very specific unpopular political opinions, and suffered from mental illness (a kind of disease poorly understood at the time but also still decades after the fact and even today)

2. These two factors led society to perceive him in a certain way, and influenced the way newspapers wrote about him after his death. Conservatives put huge emphasis on his womanizing ways - as part of his general depraved evilness, incl irreligiosity, liberal politics and lack of respect for traditional values - to influence their audience to believe that violence and insanity are what social liberalism leads to. They also used the events of Mayerling to say that the scandal is the only thing that ever mattered or ever will matter about Rudolf, that it tainted his person to such a degree that considering anything else is moot. This is the starting point for the most common Mayerling narrative that has literally barely changed for 135 years... it still crops up in media today!!

So um yeah anyway,,,, I guess I'm sorry for being specifically interested in war as a culmination of international political crisis & historical eras seen as formative to current political culture & 19th/20th century opposition to and manifestations of political nationalism & the way in which seemingly apolitical things are actually used to shape public discourse... instead of idk queer history or women's history or historical dress or microeconomic family history 😭😭 I just think there's enough people studying those latter ones and doing a much better job of it than I could - because they're genuinely passionate about them and hence have the right skills to actually study them well. I still believe that the way I'm studying and talking about the stuff I'm interested in has a lot of value, even if it's not contributing to Good Representation or aligned with my modern political views in any obvious sense. (Well, a constantly recurring theme is my distaste for overt forms or nationalism/(proto)fascism lol but we don't need to tell people that 😌 esp not the current Finnish government)

Also rudolf was irl bisexual did you even read eine orientreise (JOKING)