History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known can proper corrections be made.

That leads into instrumentalism, which is a good sign. But it’s a very weak version, “we are not spoonfed, what we can do?” And that’s in easy mode — in recent history those observers usually are known by more than just one text.

The medium is a part of the message, and metadata is data too. :]

L.N. Gumilev, for one, urged to extract information from failures and dishonesty of the narrators as well. Someone wrote the given pamphlet with obvious spin in favor of political formula X and/or against Y. We usually get only a very vague idea of the circumstances many centuries ago, but generally someone was interested in writing and copying this stuff, against someone else, and there was audience whom the author tried to convince or reassure, thus the choice of arguments is a mix of his bias and what he expected to fly with that crowd.

He did a good work on “Lay of Igor’s Campaign” himself. If not numerous anachronisms and oddities, Likhachev would not even ask Gumilev to analyze it in the first place.

MacArthur said he took the Philippines as a retirement job, to get out of the way of deserving younger officers. Maybe the thing to say for excellent general officers taking command?

‘Of the more than 10,000 people who eventually came to work at Los Alamos, Oppie knew several hundred intimately, by which I mean that he understood their relationships with one another, and what made them tick.’

Oppenheimer’s genius was for knowing everyone in science and getting along with everyone. Freeman Dyson thought his tragedy was that he got into administration when he could have been a great physicist. I’d bet thousands of excellent scientists in other fields thought that about Oppenheimer. He got along with Communists, and that was his undoing in the Cold War, but I don’t see how his genius for science politics could have existed otherwise.

This book is on my bloated To Read pile, and just moved up.

Thanks, Isegoria!