Why Healthy Skepticism Is Essential to Historical Research

Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

When I started posting videos to TikTok six months ago, I really had no idea what I was doing or what I wanted to accomplish.  I was mostly driven by my own amusement at how messy history could be. I called my page Renaissance Tea and began to post memes poking fun at the sixteenth century’s biggest names. 

The format worked. An imaginary conversation between Niccolò Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia set to the lyrics from Sabrina Carpenter’s “Nobody’s Son” garnered over 8,000 views. Definitely not viral by anyone’s standards, but still impressive for a niche history account under three hundred followers.

As I posted more, I began to notice a pattern. People post very confidently online without necessarily verifying where their information comes from. For example, on the Machiavelli video someone stated, “Machiavelli hated the Borgias BTW.” This is a very strong statement. I replied that I felt that there was more nuance to that statement based on the primary sources, but I welcomed the commenter to share their source documents. The reply was Machiavelli’s personal letters. That’s it. No specific quotes, no peer-reviewed scholarship, just trust me bro.

After a few months, I began to pivot my content. I still enjoyed the snark, but now I saw the need for Renaissance Tea to push back against long-held beliefs that were commonly repeated but not backed up with reliable evidence. That’s how History Without the Myths came to be.

I recently created a video using the source article Leonardo’s Bones: Myth, History, and Evidence by Ross King. King (2016) critiques the method of a previous scholar who claimed to be certain of the final resting place of Leonardo da Vinci. I recorded and posted my video and uploaded my response article to my website. The video got a few hundred views and some likes. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Then, a comment was posted.  “he is in BELGIUM

IN A MONOSTARY NEAR BRUSSELS

WENT W/ PADRE RIVERA

PRIEST OF BABENHOUSEN GERMANY 2/5 FIELD ARTILLERY 1977”

Okay, that’s not the response I was expecting, so of course I explained that I believe in History Without the Myths and shared my source. I invited the commenter to provide their sources as well. Healthy debate is important and I am not above changing my viewpoint if the evidence persuades me.

The commenter accepted my challenge and responded:  “LA CAMBRE ABBEY

since 13th century

PADRE RIVERA.

TOOK US TO SHOW HIS RETIREMENT PLACE

BABENHOUSEN GERMANY CHAPEL

IMAGINE!!! FROM ITALY TO BELGIUM, TO HIDE A MAN”

Wow. Okay. I’m not going to spend much time proving this statement is incorrect other than to say it is well-documented when and where Leonardo da Vinci died. The inconsistency is over the location of his remains, not whether or not he was secretly smuggled out of the French court. 

Yes, the fact is wrong, but that is not what interested me the most. People make mistakes. I have made mistakes that have been pointed out online. I do my best to immediately correct the error and commit myself to better fact-checking in the future.  I think historians should try to have an open mind. None of us are infallible.  However, when reading comments such as these online, I am fascinated by the sheer amount of confidence. It is one thing to misspeak or repeat an inaccurate but often-told story. It is a whole different situation to be presented with conflicting scholarly evidence and simply double down. 

Confidence is not citation.

However, history is not a completely quantitative subject. Historians rely on oral histories, incomplete primary sources, and fading memories. How can we be sure that the story we are recording is accurate?

Myrdal (2016) explains this point well. Myrdal emphasizes two particularly important practices: returning to primary sources when closer investigation is needed and critically evaluating the secondary scholarship on which historical interpretations depend. Primary sources allow the historian to examine the underlying evidence directly rather than relying entirely on another scholar’s interpretation of it. The researcher must consider the extent to which the author has engaged with the primary evidence, whether relevant lesser-known scholarship has been overlooked, and whether the evidence presented actually supports the conclusions being drawn (Myrdal, 2016). 

Guiliano (2022) extends these questions into the digital environment, where historians increasingly encounter primary sources through digitized reproductions rather than original physical documents. She encourages history students to begin with established institutions with an interest in preserving and providing reliable access to historical materials. For example, she points to institutions such as the British Library and the Smithsonian Institution as established repositories offering access to digitized historical sources (Guiliano, 2022). Once the source has been located, the historian needs to answer basic questions including “who, what, when, why, and where” (Guiliano, 2022, p. 85). 

After these questions are answered, source criticism should be applied. The researcher must look at the source carefully. What biases are evident? What does the source have to gain? How subjective is the source? Why did they choose to digitize the source (Guiliano, 2022)? This information is especially important to someone like myself who relies extensively on accessing digital copies of primary sources.

Wertsch (2008) helps explain why these kinds of stories are so hard to kill. He describes two kinds of narratives. The first are “specific narratives [which] are organized around particular dates, settings, and actions…” (p.140)  Returning to my Leonardo video, an example of a specific narrative would be the travel diary of Antonio de Beatis, secretary to Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona. In 1517, Beatis describes a visit between the cardinal and Leonardo da Vinci that took place in France. He mentions specific details such as Leonardo’s appearance, the artist’s partial paralysis, and the paintings and manuscripts Leonardo shared with the cardinal. His account was based on firsthand observation during the journey rather than a story recalled decades later. We know the date, the people involved, and the place where the event happened. The diary therefore provides a contemporary primary source for the visit. 

Wertsch’s second type of narrative is what historians frequently encounter on the internet. “Schematic narrative templates are more generalized structures used to generate multiple specific narratives around the same basic plot” (2008, p. 140). Wertsch (2008) argues that narrative templates can shape the way people interpret history before they ever examine the specific evidence. Because these templates are broad and familiar, they can influence how people organize and interpret specific historical information. He also explains that these patterns can be so deeply rooted in collective memory that people may not even realize they are using them. In this way, the narrative itself can influence how people explain what they believe “really happened” (Wertsch, 2008, p. 142). 

That feels very relevant to what I was seeing online. Sometimes people are not starting with the evidence and building a conclusion from it. They are starting with a story they already believe and trying to make the evidence fit. That does not necessarily mean they are lying. In fact, I think most of the time they probably believe what they are saying. But belief and confidence do not make a claim historically accurate. I do not believe the commenter was trying to make an academic argument. They were simply excited to share what they considered a relevant anecdote. The problem isn’t that they were mistaken but rather that when faced with conflicting evidence, they continued to interpret the story through the same narrative template. 

Wertsch (2008) also explores the distinction between collective memory and formal history. Drawing on the work of Peter Novick, he explains that collective memory tends to simplify events, view them from a single committed perspective, and resist ambiguity. Historical thinking, on the other hand, requires the researcher to recognize complexity, consider different perspectives, and accept that motives and events may not fit neatly into one interpretation (Wertsch, 2008, p. 145). That may be the hardest part of doing history well. Sometimes the evidence is messy. Sometimes two sources conflict. Sometimes the most accurate answer is simply that we do not know.

That is really what History Without the Myths has become for me. I am not trying to prove that everything we have been taught is wrong. I am trying to slow down long enough to ask whether the evidence actually supports the story we are telling.

Confidence is not citation.

Further Reading

Guiliano, J. (2022). Digital source criticism. In A primer for teaching digital history: Ten design principles. Duke University Press.

Myrdal, J. (2016). On source criticism in world history. In A. Jarrick, J. Myrdal, & M. Wallenberg Bondesson (Eds.), Methods in world history: A critical approach. Kriterium.

Wertsch, J. V. (2008). Collective memory and narrative templates. Social Research, 75(1), 133–156.