About My Job: The Historian

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I am a historian, and I watch people get history wrong all the time. The thing I would emphasize most is that while people like to assert that in the old days it was like THIS, in fact human history is very diverse. There are almost no generalizations that apply to all human societies. Some people in the past were less materialistic than we are, but others just as much so. Some were less violent, some more violent. Some were relatively egalitarian, others...