[sshwlcuj] History is a political field

History is a survivor game.  Whoever's narrative about a historical topic is most accepted when the last primary source dies or disappears or loses its provenance wins.  Any later challengers won't be supported by primary sources so are inherently weaker.

Note well that there is no incentive for the winning narrative to be true: selectively pick from primary sources to tell the story you want to see become accepted.  Truth is occasionally useful only to the extent that it helps you win, perhaps to defeat an opposing narrative that has an attackable portion that isn't true.

Of course, politics is the reason people are creating and supporting the narratives that they want to see win.  Procedurally, how does one win?  Of course there's the labor of researching and writing history, but there are also political skills needed to emerge as the last fighter standing.  What are those skills?  How can you learn those skills?

Inspired by anecdotes that the academic faculty hiring and promotion process in humanities and liberal arts is a highly political process.

Also inspired by the date of Christmas.  It is curious that the date of Jesus's death and resurrection (Easter) are marked essentially as fixed dates on the Jewish calendar (then converted to moving dates on Gregorian via computus), but his birth is a fixed date on Gregorian.  At some point there were primary sources for the date of his birth, but they are all long gone.  Whoever declared the December 25 date, perhaps supported by some historical evidence still available at the time, has won, with no way of historically challenging it.  One modern theory states that the date is completely bogus, a purely political choice by Romans needing a midwinter holiday to replace Saturnalia in their process of converting people away from worshipping Roman gods to Christianity.

Also, history is written by the victors.